Originally Posted by
cooker
They have determined that only electric assist bikes can be allowed there, so you actually have to be pedalling part of the time, to be in a bike lane or on a trail, and your bike has to be under 40 kg (about 88 lb.) Just the fact that your scooter has crappy, not-really functional, pedals sticking out somewhere at an odd angle, does not qualify you to motor along on a park path or even a bike lane. Nevertheless, you see a lot of people doing it. Also you are supposed to drive below 20 km/h (about 13 mph) on park trails, and a lot of motorized folk (and some non-motorized yahoos) ignore that.
Once upon a time, I thought there would be convergence between cars and bicycles as a result of technological progress and efficiency. So I thought passenger cars would essentially be motorized velomobiles at some future point, but I wasn't thinking in terms of bicycles evolving away from the 100% human-powered paradigm, except insofar as some people would ride ebikes for the sake of speed or because they didn't want to pedal for some reason.
Now it seems there are a number of regulatory and other cultural hurdles to cars evolving smaller and lighter, but I still see motorized bicycles as super-efficient automobiles, similar to the way I see bicycles as super-efficient human-powered automobiles, i.e. because they facilitate autonomous mobility - but that is different than thinking of them in terms of the normative assumptions about what cars are like.
Originally Posted by
elocs
Looking down on...yes, you can read more than a little bit of that on these forums with a sense of elitism if you don't ride far and fast and climb, if you don't ride it traffic and take the lane and engage with motor vehicles, or if you're not out on the hills stump jumping and otherwise devoting yourself to bike riding. But these are the "Bike Forums" where nobody has the right to look down on anyone else regarding how or how often they ride their bikes so if you pedal, no matter how you pedal, then you are a "cyclist". So those who ride motorized bikes are cyclists as well as those who only ride their bikes once in awhile and in the biking society with no cast system we all get to be...cyclists. At least that's how it should be.
I respect anyone who puts any effort into pedaling, but I don't think it's really a question of elitism to favor non-motorized bikes over motorized or motor-assist bikes. The reason I say this is that, as Stadjer sometimes notes, bicycling has always been just walking/running with a mechanical advantage. 'Velocipede' literally means "speed walker" so pedaling is really the essence of the bicycle, imo, though you could argue that essences are imaginary and every machine really just boils down to a certain configuration of component mechanisms.