Fuck Cars
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
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There's also the privacy angle. There should be legal ways to get around without being tracked by license plate readers.
There should also be legal ways to hold motorized vehicles accountable if they plow through crowded sidewalks or drive on roadways while disobeying traffic laws.
Right, but you're talking past their point. You both have good points but yours does not faithfully address theirs.
There are currently ways to get around without plate readers. Regular cycling, walking, and most transit can all be taken anonymously, as can most taxis. Once something is motorized there is inherently more risk both to the user and people around them, especially if the user operates it while impaired.
Our arguments are related because there has to be a middle ground between anonymity and accountability. OPs comment could even extend to cars if someone wanted to push it that far.
An ebike doesn't pose nearly the risk to the public as a car does, it's much closer to being as dangerous as a non-powered bicycle, which is not very. If people fall for the argument that ebikes need plates, plates for normal bikes probably aren't too far off. I don't think it's ever going to be the case that overall public safety is meaningfully worse because cops can't easily track down rogue cyclists as easily as cars, but it's easy to imagine cops having a real time map of cyclist locations being a threat to civil liberties.
A better way of doing it could be classifying them as motorcycles if they are built to go very far above the maximum speed possible on your own power, incentivizing most that are sold to be slow enough that the safety considerations are more or less equivalent. That would remove any small decrease in safety without building up more surveillance infrastructure.