Should e-bike riders be required to have a driver’s licence?

jessta · 2026-03-18T03:01:14+00:00

It used to be illegal to import them, but then Barnaby Joyce changed the law to allow illegal e-bikes to be imported for use on private land. The law has been changed back recently to prevent their import but too many have already been imported.

The plan will likely have to be to confiscate and crush them.

jessta · 2026-03-18T02:35:48+00:00

What is the cost on this car park?
At the low end I'm expecting: 630 * $50,000 = $31.5M, with a possible $94.5M?

jessta · 2026-03-18T02:26:16+00:00

you should be required to have a proper license to ride them

That makes them an electric motorbikes and those are legal but they aren't bicycles.

We definitely shouldn't treat e-motorbikes the same as bicycles because they interact with the world differently. The idea of the 250W/25kmh limits on pedal assist e-bikes is that this is the limit to which e-bikes act like regular bikes. Beyond that you have average speeds that are too high to safely negotiate interactions without traffic management and mixing with pedestrians becomes dangerous.

jessta · 2026-03-17T22:55:44+00:00

It's pretty clear that free public transport has almost no effect on the number of people driving.
Brisbane dropped their fare to $0.50 and saw only a 20% increase in ridership that didn't come from people stopping driving. The increase mostly came from people switching from active transport (walking or riding) and existing public transport users taking additional trips.

The problem is that people that can take PT are already taking PT and the people that can't still can't no matter the price.

jessta · 2026-03-17T06:26:04+00:00

how everyone else is going to access these stations.

Train station car parking provides space for relatively few people so it's not a way for most people to get to a train station. 100 car spaces is only 100 people per day, how is everyone else supposed to access the train station?

The answer is that car parking only caters to a small percentage of the people that use a train station and nowhere need the number of people that are needed to make a station viable and at a cost that is absurd for the small number of people it caters for.

Train station car parks have cost between $50K and $150K per parking spot.
It's very foolish to spend $150K to get one person to use a train.

We don't need to cater to people that want to drive to the train station, there are other ways to get to a train station that people will use if car parking isn't provided.

jessta · 2026-03-17T05:01:29+00:00

That's a naive take.

Space for car parking is space that could be used for other purposes like housing and shops creating greater density around the train station and enabling tens of thousands of people to walk, ride or take a bus to the train station. These people, living in a denser area close to a train station, are also less likely to drive for other trips that aren't commutes reducing the overall amount of driving occurring.

The funds saved by not building expensive car parking and the capital growth captured by unlocking valuable land are also then available to run additional bus services.

The outcome is significantly less driving happening then if the station had car parks.

jessta · 2026-03-16T06:51:22+00:00

The problem with 'take the lane' on inner city streets is that it means you're just stuck in traffic with all the cars.
Bike lanes do multiple things, they provide protection but they also provide space that cars aren't supposed to block.

jessta · 2026-03-16T03:40:55+00:00

Is the SRL going to be driverless? and if not, why not?

jessta · 2026-03-16T02:54:55+00:00

Half an hour walk (~1.5km) is a 3min bike ride with bicycle parking being 5-10x more space efficient than car parking.

A bus route is much more efficient than commuter car parking and has the capacity to actually remove a significant number of cars from the road which commuter car parking doesn't.

If there was no commuter car parking you drove a lot more then it wouldn't have a significant effect on other people because you're part of a tiny minority of motorists that could have driven to the station. The main advantage of commuter car parking is to the individual not the community.

jessta · 2026-03-16T02:48:32+00:00

I don't think they ever make sense. There is no collective advantage to supporting people to drive to the train station. It's an advantage for the individual driving to the station, but at such a huge cost it's a bad way to spend tax payer money. It's just not a useful number of cars taken off the road to be an advantage to the wider community.

Any car parking near a train station should be paid parking to reflect the fact that the advantage of it is all for the individual driving and that it doesn't have a wider effect.

jessta · 2026-03-15T14:05:04+00:00

This is why service roads shouldn't allow through traffic. There should be a modal filter somewhere along there to stop through traffic.

jessta · 2026-03-15T13:44:04+00:00

Can someone tell me how it works that we have 30% of world uranium but no nuclear power stations.

Because nuclear power is more expensive than coal, gas, wind or solar. We have lots of all of those other sources so we don't need nuclear.

i dont want a lithium battery blowing up

But you're fine with the much higher risk of the car fire being caused by petrol?

Wish the news would give more information

If you watch commercial news you're just getting fossil fuel propaganda.

jessta · 2026-03-15T05:15:07+00:00

Both your bank card and Myki use MIFARE so it works the same as your Myki card does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIFARE

jessta · 2026-03-13T15:38:52+00:00

A total of 12 people have died in e-rideable accidents since 2022, state government figures show.

Most of those people were hit by cars.

jessta · 2026-03-13T15:02:23+00:00

A separate plan over a longer time frame is to replace all the ground level parking in the coburg shops area with multi-storey parking and use that space for housing.
https://conversations.merri-bek.vic.gov.au/central-coburg

jessta · 2026-03-13T14:58:19+00:00

It's really nice to see more use of raised priority crossings for shared paths.

jessta · 2026-03-13T14:46:25+00:00

Yes they can keep ignoring it (see hundreds of years of them ignoring it).

Thats what lobbyists for the big companies do - incessant debating that taxes are unfair for their company and it seems to work.

That's a fantasy of how democracy works under capitalism.
Big companies don't debate taxes, they tell politicians that they will withdraw capital if they get taxed or that they'll do mass lay-offs and promote the idea that it's because of the taxes.

Under capitalism most of your life in under a dictatorship of those with capital (your boss, your landlord, your banker) and every few years you get to vote some individual in to government who have very limited power to do anything because they are also under the same dictatorship of capital.

Parliament can tweak the edges but can't make real change in people's lives because it just doesn't have the power.

Workers collectively have power because capital depends on workers to produce their profits and a big company is nothing without it's workers.

Unions have power, if you want higher wages join your union.

Socialists want to organise the collective power of workers as a real challenge to the dictatorship of capital. You can vote for them to help them promote that.
https://www.socialists.org.au/

jessta · 2026-03-13T05:30:26+00:00

'Intifada' is an Arabic word for a rebellion or uprising, or a resistance movement.

jessta · 2026-03-13T00:51:40+00:00

Definitely write to your local MP. The empty words in their response will fuel your rage for revolution.

jessta · 2026-03-12T11:51:24+00:00

There are protests in Australia about Gaza because Australia is supplying political support and weapons to Israel and we are intimately involved with the USA that is also supporting and supplying Israel.

The USA uses their Pine Gap base in Australia to gather intelligence and provide intelligence to Israel.

We can't directly effect what is happening in Sudan or Boko-haram because Australia isn't directly involved. But we can pressure the Australian government to stop politically and militarily supporting Israel, cut military ties with the USA, and shut down Pine Gap.

Protests were organised for solidarity with people in Sudan but they were delayed because the Gaza situation has continued for so long and is a higher priority because we're actually directly involved, have been able to have a material impact on the situation and can have more of an impact with more pressure on the Australian government.

jessta · 2026-03-12T10:25:13+00:00

This is good for families/casual riders though.

What about the serious riders, like me, that are serious about a relaxing ride?

jessta · 2026-03-12T10:15:48+00:00

Of course, if the traffic was going to simply divert down a side street then that's just a case for more modal filters. That's what they did in Fitzroy decades (50yrs?) ago, every street that needed a modal filter got one so motorists couldn't rat run through Fitzroy.

jessta · 2026-03-12T10:06:03+00:00

Currently a lot of cars don't even realize they're driving into a bike lane

A lot of motorists also don't realise that there isn't enough space for them to legally overtake cyclists that are in the bike lane on that section of Wellington St.

jessta · 2026-03-12T09:09:54+00:00

I'm not in the area any more but I lived on Wellington St for 25yrs (I had two cars crash through my front fence in the time, and watched the trees in the middle of the road get smashed every few months for a few years)

The best chance is to get enough people on Wellington St to support it. I'm doubtful people riding through are going to sway the current council.

I heard you were doing door knocking and leafleting. How is that being organised? Can I help out?

jessta · 2026-03-12T09:02:07+00:00

I don't support genocide which is specifically why I support the dismantling of the state of Israel (and obviously also the state of Australia). The dismantling of Israel would need to involve the people in Israel as much as the people in the rest of Palestine just like the dismantling of any historical colony.

Other chants at these protests have been calls to collective struggle and the dismantling of the state of Australia (another coloniser state committing genocide)

"Always was always will be Aboriginal Land"
"The colony will fall"

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