UniChris

Safer than they would be in bike lanes with designed in conflict at intersections. That's the whole premise of vehicular cycling.

And again, if you actually watch them on streets without infrastructure, it becomes obvious that most of the risk is from their own behavior of being unwilling to actually integrate as part of traffic. Not all of it of course - you can do everything right and still get hit, but the weaving and unpredictable moves greatly magnify the risk.

Parking protected on-street urban bike infrastructure is in contrast designed for slow, timid cyclists afraid of being hit in between intersections, and in order to reduce that risk greatly increases the risk at intersections with a fundamentally improper design where straight and turning traffic are suddenly on the wrong sides of one another after the bikes being shielded from driver's view by a wall of parked cars. That's not safe to use at high speed on the bike side, regardless if the power source is legs or a motor.

To take an even bigger look at it, how could it possibly be good public policy for both bikes and delivery motorcycles to be crammed into narrow little lanes anyway? Putting the faster two wheeled vehicles into orderly traffic flows in the ordinary lanes is a key step in starting to transition that huge expanse of real estate to more appropriate usage. Let pedal assist and slower pedaling stay in the bike lane, put throttles motorcycles mandatorily in traffic and restore the traffic lanes as a legal option for those pedal cyclists fast and experienced enough to fit there.

Getting drivers used to seeing a fit bicyclist or lightweight (vs highway) motorcycle holding a lane as an ordinary part of urban traffic is the really key step to improving safety, and when those vehicles are already demonstrating an ability to go faster than the traffic, not a stretch at all.

Specifically if you look at the opening post it was about an observation of delivery vehicles, which (either in the knowledge of the first poster or not) are locally classed as illegal unregistered motorcycles.

The reason they use illegal models is that the legal ones aren't fast enough.

There actually aren't large numbers of legal pedal assist e-bikes and those that do exist aren't anywhere near as noticeable - this thread isn't about those, as they are not what was observed.