Commuter bike for 6’1 14 stone man

[Northmale]

Budget £1500 new via cycle to work. £800 cash second hand

My wife bought me a secondhand Eplus Commute for Christmas with a mind to commuting to work via train and bike.

I can’t see the point in that as the train is so expensive and love riding bikes but hate arriving at work sweaty as there are no showers.

Having just done a test drive on the route to work the motor barely kicked in as I was constantly over 15mph as 95% of the route is flat and follows a river. The final 5% is stop start hills in a city.

I want a bike I can derestrict when
I’m in the countryside as the lone rider on ex colliery wagonways, then switch to legal as I hit the suburbs.

Decent on hills would help but I’m fit and can do a lot of the work.
Throttle not essential.
I have zero sense of style so looks not important at all.

 

[flecc]

Mindboggling! So a London based 4x4 can belch out fumes and then drive to the countryside to a hunt or grouse shoot, press a button on private land and go into off-road mode, but it’s illegal to do the same on an e-bike?

it’s almost like the rules are made by people detached from reality.

It's not about speed alone, it's about whether one is tested for proficiency or not. Car drivers are, cyclists are not, so any cyclist motorised is restricted to a typical cycling speed for safety reasons.
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[flecc]

I can't help thinking that having a class of pedelecs with a max speed of , say , 25 mph would allow more people to use them for commuting, even if they needed registration and insurance

We can, the S class speed pedelecs allowed 500 watt rating and 45kph (28mph) are authorised for EU wide use including the UK still. But not completely freely, since each country still decides whether to accept them and the conditions attached. Germany, France and Denmark do accept them, subject to being registered with a mini number plate and third party insurance.

Nanny state UK and the rest of the EU require full registration etc as an L1e B moped with all those motor cycle conditions.

I don't see anything wrong is this, why should a 45 kph (28mph) powered bicycle be treated any differently from a same performance moped?
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[Peter.Bridge]

We can, the S class speed pedelecs allowed 500 watt rating and 45kph (28mph) are authorised for EU wide use including the UK still. But not completely freely, since each country still decides whether to accept them and the conditions attached. Germany, France and Denmark do accept them, subject to being registered with a mini number plate and third party insurance.

Nanny state UK and the rest of the EU require full registration etc as an L1e B moped with all those motor cycle conditions.

I don't see anything wrong is this, why should a 45 kph (28mph) powered bicycle be treated any differently from a same performance moped?
.

I wonder if we followed the 'lighter touch' of Germany, France and Denmark whether it would encourage companies to offer speed pedelecs (maybe with insurance bundled in). I don't think this is a big market in the UK at the minute ? I think it would encourage take-up if you could basically do a longer commute in a shorter time and reduce the amount of congestion in rush hour city centres

 

[saneagle]

I don't see anything wrong is this, why should a 45 kph (28mph) powered bicycle be treated any differently from a same performance moped?

It is treated differently because it's more or less impossible to get insurance, and even if you could, the cost of the insurance and bike combined would be a lot more than the same for a 50ccc restricted motorcycle or scooter, which is why nobody does it.

 

[flecc]

I wonder if we followed the 'lighter touch' of Germany, France and Denmark whether it would encourage companies to offer speed pedelecs (maybe with insurance bundled in). I don't think this is a big market in the UK at the minute ? I think it would encourage take-up if you could basically do a longer commute in a shorter time and reduce the amount of congestion in rush hour city centres

I agree, but we've tried to get it and failed. Members of the trade tried to get the DfT to look at it, accepting it in principle, but after consideration they refused to, so I doubt they would even look again.

The fundamental problem we have is that we have one of the world's best road safety records and our governments are so proud of it that they are scared to change anything that might jeopardise it. And they have history on their side.

Eager to encourage two wheels to get drivers out of cars, long ago they decided that since mopeds were fairly slow and car drivers were already safety tested, they could be trusted on one. So they added a Group P for 30 mph mopeds automatically to all car driving licences.

The result was that a lot more mopeds appeared on the roads but the accidents shot up, so they put a stop to that on 1st February 2001. The existing drivers kept that group P but from that date on anyone taking a car test no longer got the bonus group P.

You can see why they are nervous about any easing of the rules, once bitten, twice shy.
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