sburns
Well-known member
Seems they should start to license them.
E bikes rampaging Toronto streets
- Thread starter Murphy
- Start date
Probably but that is likely instant death for the whole program. Anything government touches has high costs. There is a proliferation of ebikes because they are unlicensed and uninsured. It's not impossible but I think they'd screw it up. Licensing and not forcing insurance may open the government up to more liability than they have now.
It does open up some interesting possibilities though. Make the owner of the ebike complete a written test similar to G1/M1. Include questions about age requirements (eg you can't let your prick kid ride it), laws (eg no sidewalks ever), etc. Make them register the make/model which allows government to quickly flag and enforce a model that is found to be out of compliance (eg bike sold as 500 watt but it is common knowledge that clipping a wire increases power so that whole model is now prohibited. If government wanted to be proactive, give the whole brand a 60 day timeout where every Emmo in the province gets tickets for 60 days because Emmo was playing fast and loose with the rules.).
ALPR and mail tickets to the registered owner. Minimal human time required to provide thousands of reinforcement opportunities.
Perhaps the answer to the vehicle licensing question is make them part of the off road vehicle registration program, maybe better known as green plates. There's no renewals and I don't believe there's an insurance requirement for the registration, but it does represent some responsibility on the part of the vehicle owner/operator as they can be identified.
Unfortunately, the chance of this happening is close to zero. Governments (of all stripes) jump on any opportunity to create bureaucracies that can absorb friends and hangers-on in "important" roles and create some level of employment.
