CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 16years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
One last Panorama post before I sleep on it.There is actually a huge story here. I told the producer when I emailed.
The wall of misinformation the press has put up around ebikes has had a profound economic effect. It has seen insurers stop covering many bike shops. No insurance, no shop.
https://bsky.app/profile/marksuttonbike.bsky.social/post/3lf47o4j7gs2s
I am so glad I did nit watch that. Adrian Chiles emotes a certain blokiness I dont like.
The media construct a story that for simplicity they wish to pin on a bicycle rather than on wider ills of society.
In this instance it also suits the oil industry.
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At CES 2025 in Las Vegas, Bosch will present Battery Lock: a unique function that ensures that the e-bike battery can no longer be used if it is stolen, making it worthless to thieves.
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I think It's well worth reading Mark Sutton's full article about the programme here.
In an area which is, and has been for far too long, rife with misinformation and misunderstanding, the Panorama programme seems to have done precisely nothing to make things clearer for the general public, just picked something designed to appeal to a demographic of clickbait-driven viewers. It's as if they found a rickety bandwagon that wasn't going much of anywhere and decided to give it a good shove to see if it could be got moving.
The Bicycle Association has sent a formal complaint to the BBC about recent coverage of e-bikes and illegal e-motorbikes on the Panorama programme.
@neddie Thanks for that link. A very concise response from Peter Eland. Think they should remove it from iPlayer but BBC seems to do as it likes now and will no doubt 'double down'.
Many individuals that work for organisation of course cycle and they even have Anna Holligan with her cargo bike broadcast unit in The Hague. But much better to focus on 'who owns the streets' or whatever it was called.
I also object to the BBC doing all the pieces-to-camera-while-driving. Common on shows like Strictly. Just shows a blatant disregard to the seriousness required when driving, and to the safety of others. If they treated it as seriously as they do the "training room issues", we wouldn't be here...
Might send the BBC a complaint about that too.
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Is it the UK’s seemingly incessant rain? A poor design? Or maybe the way they are being ridden or cleaned? Why are so many owners of electric bicycles complaining that their motors need to be replaced so often?
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So if you were to ask a bearing manufacturer about lubricating a bearing operating at one tenth of its load capacity and one sixtieth of its speed limit, he would tell you merely to put a small dab of grease on once in a while. If however you told him the bearings were on a bicycle, he would probably deny all responsibility for his products, due to the special circumstances.This is because the problems that cycle bearings face are not so much a lack of lubrication as 'an excess of environment'. Water causes the polished surfaces to corrode. And dirt causes abrasive wear and fatigue of the hardened steel surface, as it creates small points of ultra-high pressure.
Mike Burrows wasn't talking about the UK particularly, but the UK does seem to have an excess of water. The UK's climate being moisture-rich is also known to be a factor in the motorcycle industry, with certain component failures being an order of magnitude more common in UK bikes than USAnian bike (and yes, I'm being very broad with the specificity of "USA"). But if I'm honest, almost every e-bike I see around Edinburgh, both the personal and those under tenure of Deliverooblers, is far from spotless: they are grimy and hard-worked utility transport tools. And if the motors are wearing out prematurely too, then that is a combination of environmental conditions and under-specified design parameters. We can specify heavier duty seals and gears, use steels in place of plastics, increase motor wiring gauges and magnet sizes and controller heat management, but these add drag and/or weight and/or cost.
Is it down to car-drivers-cum-e-bike-owners uber-excessive jet washing, treating the bike like their pride and joy car, that “must be” washed spotless every Sunday?
There is guy in my street who really does power wash his car every week, and sometimes more often than that.
“Is it down to car-drivers-cum-e-bike-owners uber-excessive jet washing“
Came across this the other day -
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Power wash resistant up to 3,000 psi
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Bold claim(?)
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Bicycles
LanoShield protects against rust and corrosion and is jet wash resistant to 3000psi. It means you can still wash your bike without losing protection. It is also a great lubricant so we recommend also applying it to the chain
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Well it works for sheep
Hmmm, pretty disappointing from the Guardian. Full of tropes, anecdotal "evidence", and manufactured controversy. Ticked everything on the bingo card.
You could switch the word "Lime" for "Cars" in the article, and all of it would still be true.
"don't hit me" (as if people are being hit all the time)
"I'm a driver ma sel"
"men who smell nice" - the implication being that non-Lime cyclists smell bad
"I’m in favour of cycling, but..."
"won't someone think of the prams and wheelchairs"
"Sometimes they’re quite aggressive"
"people on their phones" (the horror!)
"speedy"
"I fell off once and now I always wear my HELMET!"
"shoots through red lights"
"wrong way down a one-way street"
"going at 20mph, on the pavement"
"ebikes a disease"
"streets are cluttered with clunky ebikes"
"standards of courteous behaviour"
"Amsterdam, Paris"
"low-traffic neighbourhoods... 20mph limits... low-emission zones... make enemies"
"tribe identities"
The BBC doubling down on their attack on e-bikes:
https://road.cc/content/news/bbc-says-panorama-episode-e-bikes-was-fair-and-impartial-312251
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On 6 February, the Department for Business and Trade and the Department for International Trade posted a public notice by the Secretary of State concerning anti-dumping measures on e-bikes from China.
The Government has accepted the Trade Remedies recommendation to vary the anti-dumping duty so it applies to folding e-bikes only.
In short, this means, despite the recent five-year extension on anti-dumping and countervailing measures on electric bicycles from China, this now only applies to folding e-bikes. This change applies until 18 January 2029.
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https://bikebiz.com/uk-removes-anti-dumping-duty-on-non-folding-e-bikes-from-china/amp/
Madison (Shimano distributor UK)
It’s bad news for exporters to the EU. We will need to produce e-bikes in China for the UK to be competitive but these bikes will be subject to ADD in the EU so not viable. But equally for many brands there won’t be enough volume to produce one set of bikes for the UK and one set for the EU from different countries of origin. Another nail in the coffin for exporting from the UK into the EU. Also bad news for UK manufacturing or any potential UK manufacturing.
eg: Companies manufacturing in Edinburgh like IntraDrive don't need this. What we really need is back into EU.
Brompton will have lobbied on folding bike tax for Chinese goods.
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Furthermore, I’ll go as far to say that the more I’m e-biking, well, the more I’m e-biking. The effect is compounding with each ride’s enjoyment. Before I fell into the e-bike sphere I was not cycling for every day journeys nearly half as much as I do now. Again, that’s down to the quality of the product. I am a creature of convenience and the Cowboy flagged for me that a threshold of convenience has been crossed with bikes just like this one, a threshold that has made this the natural, first choice mode of transport for 90% of journeys.
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Didn't even have to open the article to know which twerp of a weathervane is the titular "Edinburgh MP".
Didn't even have to open the article to know which twerp of a weathervane is the titular "Edinburgh MP".
Eh, I don't think I'd've been surprised by any of them saying this.
The tories have been solidly on this issue for weeks. I just saw this as him trying to get in on the furore.
The damage to the parks is full on vandalism - and presumably quite scary.
It's the reporting and coverage that is problematic. The police doubtless know who it is, and what illegal bikes they're on, but they have to use generic language, which ends up branding everyone with the same brush (or whatever the metaphor ought to be).
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Murray demands action on e-scooters and e-bikes
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https://theedinburghreporter.co.uk/2025/04/five-things-you-need-to-know-today-1889/
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What if I said to you that focusing on peak power is a very misdirected point of discussion?
Let’s take this back to the fundamentals, starting with what we already know:
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https://bikebiz.com/e-bikes-and-peak-power-weve-got-this-all-wrong/amp/
Requiring cadence before the motor kicks in would ruin one of the main benefits of pedelecs. Namely the ability to have assist from a standing start. Either accelerating in traffic or up a hill. If, as the author suggests, you force pedelecs to be ridden in the same way as a traditional bike then you exclude the same people that traditional bikes do.
EAPCs have wheel rotation/speed sensors as well as cadence sensors so it shouldn't be impossible for the firmware to recognise when no/low cadence is due to low speed.
That said, personally I'm not in favour of cadence sensing being used to leverage a gateway to higher power EAPCs. If the maximum assistance speed remains the same then there doesn't seem much point in having more power, unless perhaps it's needed for heavier vehicles e.g. cargo bikes. Arguments for higher power limits often seem to conceal (or sometimes not) a desire for higher maximum assistance speeds. Certainly most of the chat I've seen online about fitting non-EAPC compliant kits and/or hacking bikes sold in an EAPC-compliant state seem to have been focused on obtaining higher assistance speeds. And I'm not personally convinced by the "keeping up with traffic" argument either; it feels to me to be based on an assumption of a significantly higher general level of competence amongst both drivers and riders. I'd much rather have proper segregated cycling infrastructure on, or as a sensible alternative to, busy roads than try to duke it out for the same piece of tarmac with massed concentrations of distracted, careless, mobile-phone-fiddling-with drivers.
Anything fitted with a 1300W peak output motor (equivalent to the assistance of about three Chris Hoys) cannot really be described as a 'bike'. Rather, it is an invitation to regulators to take another look at e-bikes. There is no guarantee that would end well.
Similarly, using minimum cadence before assistance kicks in removes one of the main selling points of an e-bike (immediate assistance to move off). This would be a particular issue for older and disabled e-bike users.
What is it about the bike industry that it seems to disdain many of its customers and fail to understand how regulation or politics works.
Don't want to sidetrack an excellent post but surely Chris Hoy had a higher peak output than ~400W? I'd've guessed it was actually over 1300W.
In think Sir Chris' 1 second power was about double that figure. However even with a 150kg load on a cargo bike 1300watts seems like a lot of power.
Google AI suggests Chris Hoy could peak at 2.3-2.7kW* for brief periods during a sprint race. But then that was all about speed. It also mentions a power-to-weight ratio of 27W/kg. (For comparison purposes: Google says that of a 4 ton Tesla Model 3 Dual Motor is 93W/kg.)
* ≅3.1-3.6hp
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