[dohdhdaa]

I am a decently experienced NYC cyclist. Not Terry Barentsen or anything, but pretty decent at biking both in fitness terms and in practical urban NYC riding.

The biggest problem with e-bikers, and general e-thing riders, as a population, is that they haven’t built the bike skills equivalent to the speed that they can go at. I can ride 20mph if I want to, but it took a long time for me to be able to do that. I had to ride a lot. In doing so, I got a lot of practice.

E-bikes allow you to do that with basically no practice. The resulting behavior is not good. They ride erratically. They ride with AirPods. They salmon. They salmon at night with no lights. They salmon on roads that aren’t even one way! They shoal at every intersection.

So this thing will make them double wide as they salmon… I don’t want to be opposed to e-bikes but the practical effects on cycling, for those of us that were already doing it, since the pandemic explosion, haven’t been great.

[stevenwoo]

There was a recent case that made me think it was just inexperience with speed on an ebike, some of the canyons in southern California are pretty scary even if you are used to racing due to having to worry about a car in the wrong lane on every blind corner or cars pulling out from driveways no matter what a cyclist is doing. The company's defense is no one under the age of 18 is suppose to use these.

https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Family/parents-file-lawsuit-bike-...

[UncleOxidant]

What does 'salmon' mean here? The first time I read it above, I thought you meant 'slalom' but then you repeated 'salmon' several times so it seems deliberate.

[dohdhdaa]

Salmoning is going the wrong way. It’s ridiculous in NYC, especially on streets, a street going the other way is almost always one short block away.

Shoaling is cutting in line at lights. Inexperienced cyclists/e-whatever riders are notorious for this. It’s not dangerous but is very poor etiquette if you are not going to absolutely blow away the people you cut when the light goes green.

So, if you cut someone on a Citibike (local terrible heavy bike share bike) on your Specialized Tarmac SL7 in full kit, then, like, whatever. Not that bad. The Citibiker probably doesn’t even realize it’s rude.

But if you cut in front of kitted up people on road bikes on a Citibike, you better have some monster legs.

Anyways I notice this a lot with e-bikes recently. But the thing is that I am actually faster than them, despite riding a “regular” bike. So it’s very annoying.

And half the time they’re wearing AirPods and are just completely oblivious as they do this. Honestly the median Citibiker is not much better, but at least they only go like 8mph.

[BoorishBears]

Go the wrong way up a one way street. Dangerous because people are generally not expecting things to come from the wrong way.

(Technically going on the wrong side of the road is also salmoning, but in NYC it was almost always wrong way on a one-way

[bityard]

I want to know what it means to "shoal" on a bike. There are just too many marine references here.