I also ride motorcycles, but the bicycle I can ride int the lobby and take up the lift to the office - it's quicker door-to-door (over 8km) than the motorcycle, which I sometimes get to park close by but if I don't come in early I end up parking a few blocks away (or _gasp_ paying for parking).
I;m with you on the dangers of people who don't have good situational awareness zooming around on electric bikes - but I think I'm pretty good there, you don't survive 25 years as a motorcyclist doing 15-20k miles a year without being pretty good at knowing what's going on around you and riding accordingly...
Another point, I know a lot of commuter bicycle riders, and some of _them_ think the skinny-wheeled-carbon-frame crowd doing 30+kmh in bike lanes should GTFO as well... (And I've got motorcycle friends who reckon the lycra-crowd should stay off the country backroads doing 50kmh when they want to zoom past at twice the speed limit... People, huh?)
(Also, my cheater bike is _way_ cheaper than a scooter, it's a $50 eBay mountain bike with ~$130 worth of Chinese hubmotor/controller/stuff, and a $70 battery. And crucially, I can ride the cheater bike home from the pub after a few beers... )
It was a pretty complex and sophisticated process.
First you need to get borderline drunk and start browsing AliExpress late one night, then forget all about it by morning. A few months later a bike wheel with a hub motor and controller unexpectedly show up by courier at work. This reminds you why you bought that lipo battery months back thats way too big for any of your quadcopters. Then you spend an hour or two the next Saturday afternoon bolting the wheel and ziptieing the wiring and controller onto the $50 eBay mountain bike you bought a few years back when you decided it was "time to get fit" - which had been sitting in the garage ever since after having been ridden only once or twice. You then notice the battery is an _almost_perfect fit into the drink holder, and you can make it into a perfect fit but putting the battery into a stubby holder! Win! A bit of work with the soldering iron having robbed connectors and heatshrink from the quadcopter parts bin, and it's ready to go. You then hop onto the bike and cruise up all the nearby hills grinning like a loon and laughing out loud.
Im pretty sure that covers all the important steps. If you need me to check my notes about exactly what you should be drinking to get the right sort of AliExpress ordering buzz going, let me know - it was _probably_ bourbon ;-)
Yeah - technically it's true here as well. Practically, short of mowing down a pedestrian in front of a cop (or some other spectacularly provocative bad behaviour), the odds of getting breath tested while riding a bicycle are close enough to zero to make no difference. (Having said that, I once worked with a guy who lost his driving license after getting caught while riding a horse home from the pub - he was the kind of angry mouthy guy who was gonna end up like that somehow anyway, I suspect he worked quite vigorously at getting the cop worked up and angry enough to bother doing it...)
If you are caught drunk (over the legal limit) on a bicycle, they will remove your _car_ driving license ( if you have one) and you either the let the bike there and call a cab or you have to walk with the bike home. Of course, next day you need to pay them a visit to pick the driving license :).
It's not so much a comment on their situational awareness, it's that they're riding one vehicle with the style of another. It's behavior that would probably be harmless if they were going half the speed.
If you drive a car as though it is a motorcycle, you're also disrupting traffic and creating danger.
I;m with you on the dangers of people who don't have good situational awareness zooming around on electric bikes - but I think I'm pretty good there, you don't survive 25 years as a motorcyclist doing 15-20k miles a year without being pretty good at knowing what's going on around you and riding accordingly...
Another point, I know a lot of commuter bicycle riders, and some of _them_ think the skinny-wheeled-carbon-frame crowd doing 30+kmh in bike lanes should GTFO as well... (And I've got motorcycle friends who reckon the lycra-crowd should stay off the country backroads doing 50kmh when they want to zoom past at twice the speed limit... People, huh?)
(Also, my cheater bike is _way_ cheaper than a scooter, it's a $50 eBay mountain bike with ~$130 worth of Chinese hubmotor/controller/stuff, and a $70 battery. And crucially, I can ride the cheater bike home from the pub after a few beers... )