“Get off your phones and meet people your age in real life!” “Wait not like that!”
Feels like kids can’t win these days.
Can’t wait for the e-bike gang wars of '26.
Waaaaaarriors! Come out to playay!
They can’t because people are irrational and stupid with regards to protecting children.
It’s definitely on purpose
Teens especially, since that law was catered more towards children. These days, teens are being disregarded and grouped in with children, even if they are vastly different.
The essential distinguishing factor.between who.is and who isn’t given adult rights isn’t developmental psychology, it’s weather you cam get away with denying them rights
You let them leave the house and meet up with friends, next thing you know they are riding around on bikes! Where will it end?
“Why aren’t the kids going outside anymore?” “Why are there kids outside?!”
Let teens exist in public spaces for fuck’s sake.
They’re not allowed to have any sort of freedom anywhere, online or off. That’s the point of all these evil laws and that’s why we must resist
Just gotta keep making the world as hostile as possible to teenagers.
Because the school to prison pipeline can only do so much
This is such a gross oversimplification, it’s insane. They could also join the military.
Prison and military are US things. The bloke up above got it…tradie, FIFO and indebted to a home loan.
Hey, a couple might be really good at football.
Wrong country mate.
Here’s it’s school to tradie/lifelong indebted homeowner.
It’s fucking disgusting. I have every part of this abusive shit. We have to fight back
We’re trying very hard to make the world a hostile place, but climate change won’t really kick in until the next generation.
“We really recognise the tremendous opportunity that ebikes can offer for getting anyone, including younger people, from A to B, independently,” McLean said. “[It] is a really, really positive thing that connects them to education, to work, to social things and communities as well.
“There’s lots of benefits that go along with them, but when we have really high powered ebikes and people driving them dangerously and without helmets, then they certainly pose a significant risk.”
Seems like a pretty balanced take honestly.
If it goes faster than 28 mph, has a motor more powerful than 1000w, or lacks usable pedals, it’s not an e-bike at all. People riding these things get people who ride actual electric bicycles fucked over though, which is unfortunate because electric assisted bicycles open up a lot of opportunities for people who are elderly or have other physical disabilities (or if you don’t want to arrive at work all sweaty).
I am all for making e-moto and e-bikes legally distinct but punishing cyclists because of e-moto bullshit is a stupid decision. Also, parents who buy their kids motorcycles with no training, safety gear, or evaluation of their child’s judgement should be held accountable instead of the people who are just trying to get to work on an e-bike.
Yeah I completely agree. This exact issue kind of triggers me, and I did draft a longer diatribe complaining about exactly this, which I didn’t post.
I have an assortment of bikes including e-bikes, all of which I love equally. They’re truly amazing machines.
If you purchase a $200 k-mart commuter, and a $400 wheel hub motor and battery from temu, then perch a 12 year old precariously in the saddle that’s not an e-bike it’s an unregistered unregulated electric motorbike. This type of set up can easily achieve 50km/h with the majority more like 60km/h and some exceeding 80km/h.
The bikes just aren’t built for this kind of stress, and the people riding them don’t have a reasonable understanding of the risks. They scream around on bike paths weaving around kids and babies in strollers.
The current rules here in west aus (as I understand them) merely allow pedal assist up to 25 km/h. Critically, that means the bike can allow you to switch between modes providing more or less assistance, but no throttle. Additionally a lot of the temu bikes require you to move the pedals but do not require you to provide any effort - the pedals moving is more like a switch that allows the motor to engage.
The basic problem is that existing legislation just isn’t sufficient. Guilting parents isn’t enough. There needs to be better laws, and they need to be actively policed.
parents who
How dare you blame the parents!?
/sWith ease! Parent your kids everyone!
If the media won’t generate the click bait lemmy’s demand, they’ll create it themselves.
you expect other people commenting to actually read the article?
I mean banning teens seems a pretty good policy.
How do you know their age?
You cut them in half and count the rings.
It mentions it in the article.
Weird self report but okay
I think what they were asking, is how the government is going to verify their age.
I can’t work out any other interpretation. What does Donebrach think it said?
Wonder what you think about often.
I dunno, can’t parents just keep their kids in a box till they’re 18 and can become productive, compliant wage slaves, like everyone else.
/s
Australia, a prison state created for inmates, and perpetuated as such by their descendants. As a foreigner looking in, I think that Aussies would be best served by ditching the colonial prison mindset. You and the kids are allowed to have fun, if you ignore the specter of the Crown that created your nation.
…TLDR;
I recently left an Aussie company whose shot caller was someone who was massively in favour of the social media ban and kept close tabs on her teenage kids’ phones. Ran the company like that, and it’s going under.
Does “people who live in glass houses shouldnt throw stones” translate into American? Half of the rest of the world wakes up every day wondering if your leader has started WW3 over a twitter beef.
But no, you have fun.
Just because America is in a crappy state, is no excuse for Australians or anyone else on a given patch of dirt to allow their nation be enshittified. You should consider America as a warning, of what can happen if your politics become rotten.
The sheer ego in that statement.
Even Americans who are wholeheartedly opposed to whats happening cant stop condescending to everyone else like “If it could happen to the greatest nation on earth it could happen to you”
We know, we have always known. We’re no better than the Germans, the Italians or any other nation that slid into authoritarianism or facism. America believed it couldnt happen to them because they are just so exceptional, which is why it worked so god damn well.
As an Australian the problem is largely what you imagine.
An unregulated industry brought in bikes that were closer to motorbikes than pushbikes and parents didnt do their due diligence on it. The same industry also brought in a huge amount of bikes that were perfectly sane when stock but were literally childs play to turn into something closer to a motorbike. Now the vast majority of kids went out and did kid shit and they were slightly annoying, a not insignificant number of them got hurt, but there was no real outcry.
The govt as governments are want to do reacted way too fucking slowly in putting sane limitations on what could and couldnt be sold and hold manufacturers and importers accountable. In their defence partly because 90% of them are coming out of china and the govt arent idiots in that they know how easy it would be for an importer to find a new frontman and the Chinese manufacturer to rebrand and force them to play whackamole and partly because they are very popular among adults and people who arent riding them like dickheads AND they didnt want to look anti-green by discouraging people to find car alternatives.
But Here come the fuckwits like takeovers are to “legitimate” street racing on quiet backroads, kids started doing wheelies through shopping centers while filming it for the gram, deciding it would be funny to absolutely destroy the grass and surfacing on local sporting fields and swerving in and out of traffic in 80 zones.
Its not that the cops dont care, the cops know what the reality is that if they start trying to catch them, the kids will run and eventually someones “good boy who never hurt anyone and loved to laugh” is going “to be chased to his death over a modified E-bike and the police are the reason for his death” regardless of what prompted them to chase him in the first place.
All in all its a 3 layer shit sandwich.
and parents didnt do their due diligence on it.
Pretty much sums up a lot.
Parents these days…In all seriousness its not exactly the most simple thing for a layman.
I speak petrolhead, so when you tell me something has a 2000W motor (Light bulbs and plug in heaters are measured in Watts. I honestly believe they do that on purpose to confuse the issue) I immediately do the conversion to 2kw, which is 2.6 hp on an e-bike that weighs 50kg. A 50cc Vespa makes 3.1hp and weighs 100kg. Now you throw a 50kg rider on there and you have a better power to weight ratio on the E-Bike, and shitloads more torque.
Same thing here in the Netherlands: cheap, poorly made Chinese fatbikes that were incredibly easy to unlock flooded the market. The result: teens are riding around at 40kph and stunting on a bike that has no brakes. Because those wear down rapidly if you overclock the motor, and nobody does maintenance on those shitty bikes.
So now they’re trying to regulate it, much too late. When honestly, they should just ban the fucking things for anyone under 25 without a disability…
I met one of these teens on a train he showed me a few news clips he was in with like 100 other teens on ebikes and scooters lol
I know exactly how to solve this “problem” … Convert the golf courses into bike tracks.
Let me rephrase: Australians concerned about children on vehicles that can go 25mph with no requirement for a license or training.
The issue is more that they sell 500-1000W ebikes that are not specced for road usage, only for riding on private ground - and then hand them to teenagers. As so often, the parents are the issue, not the teens. As so often, everyone will pay the price for it through stricter regulation.
Honestly 1000 W would be nice for going up steep hills. My 500 W one struggles on the one on my commute
Wrong.
we have two issues
One is crusted old cumstains losing their shit about the presence of Visible Teenagers after the social media ban. They can go fuck 'emselves
The other issue is teens on illegal wattage ebikes that are souped up to 50/90kmph and ridden in areas not designed to have things at that speed tearing through them. Because of pedestrians, kids, horses, etc.
25 kph, not mph. Which isn’t very fast.
25kph is the legal speed limit for ebikes. It does not magically prevent them from going faster.
and it’s not hard to get up to 40kph just using your legs and a hill without a motor. we’ve got a great hill that’s steep enough to get up to 50kph, but i’m not quite brave enough for that.
No doubt, but that’s not what is happening. Kids are doing 40 on the flat on their “ebike” and they don’t look or indicate and they can’t do 40km/h uphill so they slow down a lot unexpectedly.
There needs to be some kind of training and regulation.
They’re not going 40 on the flat. Ebikes are heavy.
That’s pretty close to my average speed and I’m just a commuter on a 30lb hardtail MTB with shitty infrastructure. I’d wager anyone who can ride a bike can easily go faster than that on a flat, even if they weren’t a regular rider.
The article doesn’t mention any “miles per hour”. Do people in Australia use mph?
In December, the NSW premier, Chris Minns, announced a plan to halve ebikes’ power – and therefore reduce their top speeds – to 250 watts…
No we use metric
No. It’s kph. Ebikes are restricted to 25 kph.
These are not ebikes.
They are 1000w twist throttle bikes they buy on eBay and AliExpress.
You can go 25mph and faster on a bicycle no problem, I reject the argument that e-bikes (not e-moto) are a significant danger. That’s mostly cabrain propaganda that people who chose to stop thinking accept.
Not unless you are are really gunning it and on a fitted road bike.
There is a pretty big psychological aspect to it in that without putting in the work, you can become disconnected in how fast you are accelerating/moving. With bicycles you tend to work up the speed as you start to understand and get comfortable with what you are riding; a process that isn’t really present with e-bikes.
Fitted road bike? I do it regularly on a 3x7 hardtail MTB loaded down with pannier bags and a frame bag. That’s not downhill, that’s on a flat. I am just an ordinary bike commuter too, not an athlete and I have a low end steel Trek meant for single track MTB riding. It weighs at least 30 lbs with all my stuff on it.
I think you are overestimating how hard it is to go fast with little to no training and the right gear, even someone who doesn’t ride regularly could probably hit 20 on a flat if they tried. Downhill you can hit 35mph+ even if you aren’t in shape and barely know how to ride.
It’s 25 KILOMETERS an hour. I often end up cycling faster than my ebike motor can keep up with.
A dude got up to 90mph on a bike just off his own steam before
I remember all the adverts when I was a kid telling me that if I got hit by a car at 30mph there was a 90% chance I’d live (this was the happy path of the advert). This is also cars ostensibly driven by licensed people.
E-bikes with a 25mph limiter are not a risk if we allow cars in the same space as pedestrians
Yeah sure, but we’re not going to create laws just for Lance fucking Armstrong.
90 on a bike? That’s nuts, do you have a link to that? I’d like to see what kind of a machine that is
Honestly I remember someone telling me and I’ve never seen it myself so I went looking
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cycling_records
Turns out there’s even faster now
25 kmph, that’s about 15 mph.
So you can’t talk online and you can’t go out on a bike to meet your friends.
Just sounds like they want kids to be miserable.
The answer is simple: ban teens
That’s pretty much it. Ban them from congregating in parking lots. Ban them from malls. But if your kid has friends over and one sneaks beer and has a wreck, you’re getting sued. But don’t discipline your kids or that’s abuse. Also, if you kid has a vape at school, they are getting a criminal charge. Whatever you do, don’t allow kids to exist, especially with other kids outside of your house, but also, don’t let them be entertained when they’re bored either.
My point is, maybe it’s all too complicated and there should be a different approach.
Maybe if we started treating people as human beings regardless of age? Or is that too radical?
Radical, yet reasonable.
if you ban them from dancing, there are going to be a lot of rebellious movies that get made.
To quote somebody famous: “Teenagers scare the living shit out of me”
if you don’t institute battle royal, you’ll pretty soon end up with mad max.
Seems like a pretty big logical leep to link the two things.
Just wait until all those teen grow up and figure out that old farts on social media are responsible.
Unfortunately the old farts on social media were once the teens being treated like criminals for existing. It’s a cycle. Yesterday’s rebels become tomorrow’s pearl clutchers.
Define old fart? To me a old fart is in their late 60 early 70’s. This is the boomers. They were the first true generation of plenty. They were promised a good life and they had one unless they were foolish with the opportunity. Let me assure you they have been against any ones freedom except their own from the start.
I know plenty of older Gen X who’ve turned into pearl clutching, curmudgeonly hypocrites and even a few younger folks who’ve developed early onset “get off my lawn” syndrome. While I’ll certainly grant that it seems to be far more common among older folks it’s a mindset we all can fall into if we’re not self aware enough.
Hell I know more than a few joyless Gen Z’s who already have fallen into the habit of being utterly scandalized whenever they see someone enjoying life a bit too much. Not all by a longshot yet, but a concerning amount for ones so young.
Boomers are defined by those traits whereas GenX is largely less likely to judge. We don’t make a lot of noise for those very reasons.
Well, as a Gen Xer, WHY THE FUCK ARE THOSE FUCKING KIDS ON MY FUCKING LAWN? THERE IS NO REASON FOR THEM TO BE ON MY LAWN! WHY WHY WHY!!!
Statistically kids these days are better behaved
Yeah, they can wipe thier own ass when they are in a care home!