Korina

Hi all. I thought you might appreciate this; People for Bikes, the League of American Bicyclists, and Bicycle Colorado have gotten together to develop a simple course for folks new to e-bikes; it consists of some short videos with optional quizzes. Please check out E-bike Smart; what do you think? Good? Too simple? Did they miss something? I still ride cake-powered bikes, so my ignorance is vast; well, a little less vast now.

The California Highway Patrol has come up with their own safety course, which is probably good for some laughs and/or outrage. I'll go find it and post it here.

Wildwood 

Information and orientation are always a good idea.
Let's hope the participation is high and memory retention (when on the road) is good.

Effectiveness = don't expect humans to restrain their behaviors when excited and 'having fun'.

Rick_D

I think it's helpful especially WRT the cohort of folks who buy an e-bike having not ridden a bicycle since they were kids. i.e., the same ones you see careening around downtown on Jump/Lime bikes. Hoo-boy.

They did have one bad quiz question--from memory the "correct" answer being the preferred way to charge your battery is plugging directly into the wall socket. The heck? None of the choices applied to my particular bike.

Korina

Here's the CHP course; I haven't finished the whole thing, but it's not too bad. Longer, more reading, and more stern. Thoughts?

Rick_D

Didn't watch the videos but surveyed the entire thing. It's very thorough and more than half is bicycle education not specific to e-bikes. California residents will benefit from the state code applying to cycling and to ebikes, but that needn't turn away folks who live elsewhere, as the material is solid. Looks like the contracted with American Bicycling Education Association for the content.

Pop N Wood

Looks like good work. I'm old enough to prefer written text to videos, but there is no questions young people prefer the videos.

One side question, why do people feel it is important to define the various "classes" of ebikes? That is a California invention and not used in all states. If anything it is probably more important to distinguish between low power ebikes and electric motor vehicles. Something even people on this site appear capable of doing. Bikes with over 750 watts require a drivers license, insurance and automotive like safety equipment like horns/signals etc.

Rick_D

Seems to be an industry initiative that states (and presumably, nations) adopt to get some organization around the chaos of a relatively new consumer product. Bosch, for one, is advocating the 3-class designation system and notes it has been adopted by forty US states.
https://www.bosch-ebike.com/us/every...s-ebike-system

veganbikes

Well because some classes are actual bikes and some classes are throttled vehicles and in many places especially on MUPs and trails throttled vehicles are not allowed. Defining a bicycle properly is helpful all over and having class 1 and class 3 vehicles separate makes sense because they can achieve a different maximum top speed with a pedal assist

The 3 classes are pretty common in the U.S. all over and not just a "California thing". Maybe some jurisdictions don't use it but I have never thought of the classes as being from any particular state and similar classifications if not the same or close to it are used in Europe and potentially elsewhere.

Pop N Wood

I was trying to give feedback to the OP about the safety course. One of the first "quizzes" is seeing if the reader correctly knew the definition of the various classes. I was just wondering why that was important knowledge to ride a bike safely.

From what I have read 13 states don't recognize ebike classes. Of those that do, I would imagine there are differences in their definitions. I say a California thing because to the best of my knowledge they were the first to define the 3 classes while other states adopted the CA standard.

European countries have their own set of rules.

2old

You ought to know they take a dim view of individuals making dumb comments to achieve 10 posts.