The problem is the slippery slope. It’s too hard to distinguish between a class I e-bike and an electric motorcycle. In fact, some e-bikes can become above class III with a flick of a switch (eg motor power increase from 750 to 1500W).
It hasn’t happened yet, but in 5 years I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re hearing frequently about excessively eroded trails and crashes involving souped up electric bikes.
Yes - the solution will be local trail systems banning e-Bikes - or having a better way to limit access to acceptable e-bikes (eg legit class I).
In my area, the regional park trails specify “no motorized vehicle” which one would assume to mean any vehicle with a motor even if the vehicle is legally classified as a bicycle.
That said, there is little to no enforcement. And many e-mtbs can be hard to distinguish between a regular mtb.
I recently spoke with a ranger while he was out working on a local trail system. He is an avid mountain biker as is his wife. He said the younger ebike crowd is cutting trails to make the lines faster for koms. The evidence is widespread and the preserve had signs made and posted in the middle of the new cuts; they are trying to block new cuts with debris like logs etc…all for a segment. Sad.
14 second segments are dumb anyway. I once KOMd a short segment like that which was on a road parallel to me. Wasn’t even on the segment. They just aren’t accurate enough.
Perhaps…however, I’m huge into personnel responsibility. Drive your car while drunk and kill someone it’s not the car companies fault. Rather than punish strava I wish those who feel like destroying/altering/littering state and national land for their own singular personnel reasons would get caught and slapped with a fine. $ seems like the only thing self absorbed a$$holes respond to. The older I get the harder it is to watch city folk literally and figuratively trash the outdoors for their personnel pleasure…JMO
Sure, BUT Strava owns all this brain power and got $40M in VC money but can’t deploy some simple algorithms that look for Strava tracks done in vehicles or e-bikes. I can usually spot tons of them by eye. I’m sure some basic software could spot 90% of them - more advanced software 99%.
A couple of months ago they announced they were doing this but I’ve seen no evidence. I nabbed a KOM the other day because my bike was on top of my car. Strava didn’t auto flag it even though it was pretty obvious. Of course, I cropped by ride later.
This is sadly not surprising and incredibly selfish. This isn’t restricted to the e-bike crowd, of course. A favorite mtb route of mine back in the Santa Monica mountains was cut up by bmx’ers for their short jumps.
E-bikes have their own leaderboards in Strava. The guy probably doesn’t know that there’s a e-bike-activity type. So I would probably comment his activity and make him aware of it. If he doesn’t change it I’d flag the activity.
Not black and white. Thinking more like these articles. Overall, my belief is using state, national land is not a right but, a privilege. https://durangoherald.com/articles/214352
Fun with Strava and short segments! They attempt to map gps datapoints from your bike computer with the segment. Unfortunately they sometimes drop datapoints and artificially create a higher mph! I’ve done some math for anyone interested.
If you have a Garmin turn on smart recording (instead of 1-sec) and increase your chances that Strava gives you bonus mph!
True, although I think any device that had smart recording as an option automatically logged at 1 sec when paired to a power meter. May be mistaken but I thought that was the case way back with the edge 500 or so.
