A powered vehicle can do damage. The solution is to only permit responsible people access to powered machines and then hold them accountable for any damage they do. We already do this.
It's called a Driver's License. We already understand this, and we understand why. The only change needed is to require a Driver's License for any user of a powered vehicle (apart from the already-defined and already-regulated use of disability scooters). And then enforce the existing framework for licensed drivers.
We permit people to modify their petrol vehicles, and so we already have the laws and frameworks to deal with DIY electric vehicles. There is no objection there if you notice this and if we stop attempting to twist ourselves into permitting children (who by legal definition are not responsible) access to powered vehicles, then we have no problem with "modifications" or "DIY".
There is no sensible argument to be made for contorting ourselves into odd new schemes for approaching this. Powered vehicle requires responsible operator, a Driver's License specifically is about granting permission to a responsible operator, and we need only correct our laxities in current enforcement to make this work. It's already exactly what we want and need.
I don't see why supposedly intelligent adults continue to insist that children should be given powered vehicles. Children can't be relied on to behave properly so don't put them in situations where that is life and death, either for them or for others. Children also need to use their bodies to grow properly. Why is this even a question? For the same reasons we don't permit children to drive cars, we don't give them other powered vehicles until they are not children.
The only change needed then is to improve enforcement of adult drivers of any sort. If you want a class of DIY bikes permitted, get off your ass and get involved in putting through the laws and you'll get what you want that way, instead of twisting yourself around in weird ways to inexplicably insist that children should be permitted access to powered vechicles and insisting that everything should be changed so that they can and you should nevertheless have no restrictions on what you can do.
This is stupid..
Edit:
People don't like being told their choices are stupid, whether they are or are not. In this case, I wrote about the various sideways efforts to permit children actions which they are not ready to bear the consequences of, and the weird sideways efforts to somehow blame this on the technology while simultaneously attempting to also give carte blanc to adults do do as they wish under the same approach. Those efforts, to me, seem obviously contradictory so insisting on them simultaneously rather than addressing responsibility and who can be considered responsible does seem directly stupid to me.
Nothing about requiring a Driver's License in Public spaces prevents, say, permitting your children to use quad bikes to herd the sheep on your private ranch.
You’re a real full on Karen, I bet you love the helmets rules that decreased cycling rates 40% virtually overnight, mostly women worried about ending up with helmet hair, which ended up being worst for their fitness, even though stats in Europe show that a cyclist riding an upright commuter bike with a mirror on the bars meaning they can see traffic all round them, is actually safer than a rider with a helmet on a dropbar bike with their bum way up in the air & their head staring at they front tyre running over cracks on the road
btw to a large degree bicycle helmets just give a false sense of security. 1st polies think ’now we have a helmet law that problems done’ so they now have an excuse not to build proper bike lanes & instead just paint facsimiles of them on the side of the road with the doors of parked cars constzntly get in the way. So really helmet laws just exist so we can’t have proper bike safety, like in the Flanders, the Netherlands, Lower Saxony & Denmark where there are proper bike paths everywhere & people can instantly tell the Australian tourists as they’re the only ones wearing helmets. 2, bicycle helmets simply aren’t engineered to protect a cyclist who’s bowled over at high speed by a car, or even protect a cyclist that loses control from getting death wobbles going down a hill at speed. They’re only effective at relatively low speeds when a cyclist falls into a bush or something. Do note that both accident rates & hospitalisations have gone up in the professional racing Peloton since helmets were made compulsory in 2003 with a very noticeable statistical correlation even injust the decades before & after that date, again false sense of security.
I really wish Karens like you would simply mind your own business & stopped pushing your safety obsessions onto society. From the day bicycles were invented till the late 80’s cyclists all over the planet coped fine without helmets, to the extent that I bet the percentage of cyclists reaching retirement age is virtually indistinguishable from the percentage of non cyclists reaching retirement age & in reality is probably totally indistinguishable.
Sure wear a helmet if you want but stop forcing the rest of society to go along with your safety obsesion. I’ve been riding bicycles every day since I was riding them to school in the 70’s & am now in my 60’s & still don’t wear a helmet, yet no head injury from cycling. I don’t have to worry about the helmet laws as I’m on a drug trial of a particular medication which is considered community service, so as a incentive or something I can get up to $500 in fines canceled each month, simply by dropping in the fines to the front office of the hospital department doing the trial. Funny thing is it’s due to to a head injury damaging my pituitary gland giving me panhypopituitarism, which mean also hypoadrenalism, hypothyroidism, hypoganadism, hyposomatropism, etc ( the pituitary switches on most of the other hormone producing glands so lots of secondaries). I was assaulted & hit over the head with an iron bar a dozen times in what the police said was a case of mistaken identity. so are we going to make everyone that lives in iffy neighbourhoods wear helmets so when walking into their backyard from the back lane they don’t get mugged by someone that thinks their robbing the pot dealer next door or the Ice dealer behind me because all our back gates join the lane a nearly the same spot.
fact is life has never been either fair or safe & never will be, ontop of which it’s not even desirable to live in a world that’s fair & safe as it can only come with a full on nanny state of control. Hangon, anyone seen the new ASIO laws where any Australian can be picked up without any reason given, then locked up, barring any contact with lawyers or family so they don’t even know what happened to you & forcibly questioned without any right to silence; or the new NSW police phone laws where they can now take the phone of anyone they want without a warrant or giving a reason & it’s a crime to refuse to unlock the phones for them. All these things come due to the whole Nanny state Karens keep pushing for as they expect govts to solve all their problems. Traditionally in our species that what families were for. Even when a victim of theft or violence, up to a few hundred years ago, like before the industrial revolution, the normal procedure was ones extended family challenging the perp’s family for a resolution & if they have significantly higher status in the community, one would have to request one’s lord to help them in some traditional ways. It’s crazy the way people look to the govt to do things for them & go reporting to the police over some pathetic nothing someone else did. Anyone who goes bringing the govt or the police involved in ones homelife is crazy. Every single person I know that’s gotten police involved in what was just a pathetic petty neighbourhood or domestic dispute or due to some virtually harmless agro at work or at a pub has without failure regretted it due to legal costs, days off work going to court & other complications, even just as a witness. Sure help someone out when something happens in you vicinity, but always piss off when police turn up, police & govt just isn’t worth the aggregation & when Karens like you demand constantly more govt interference we just end up with the nanny state we have. Ending up with a govt that gives our gas away at literally 1/30 of the price both Qatar & Norway get, so all our resource ministers for the last 40 years can instantly get highly paid consultancy jobs in the resources or mining sectors when they retire from politics, when we could have guranteed our car industry simply by banning any cars from being sold here unless they were LPG compatible. The same trick that worked for Brazil when any cars not e85 comptible were banned from their market. The same crooked toad polies of the establishment parties here also sanctioned the fuk out of Russia even though they've done everything possible to make sure they’ve been less civilian deaths in the Ukrainian war than any other multiyear war over the last 85 years or something across the entire planet. Gez the US, with our gutless toad polies getting Australia involved, killed more civilians in the 1st month of each of both their 2 wars with Iraq than the number of civilians that died in Ukraine over the whole of 22. Which is none of our business, yet the gutless polies of the west make sure that Ukraine gets stuck longer than otherwise in a war they can’t win by doing all they can to drag out the war as long as possible, all while the ignorant masses of the west are conned by a mainstream media propaganda narrative that would make Goebbels proud. Yet our politicians refuse to sanction Israel even though their genocidal campaign has killed more children than all the other wars & violent conflicts of the 21st century, combined (ironically including Ukraine), plus in just a couple of years they’ve kill more journos than died due to both WWI & WWII, combined & these are the politicians you want to drag more ‘n more into our lives with your demands for more ‘n more nannystatism as legislation accumulates at greater rates every year. I read somewhere that together the federal govt, the states & territories all together had 40 books of statutes for most of the 20th century, but since the late 70’s the’ve been snowballing out of control to nearly a 1000 now. I really believe instead Australia & virtually everyone inside it, well except lawyers, would’ve been better off if somewhere between 1975 & 1980 we had a constitutional referendum bringing in a US style Bill of Rights & limit of no more parliamentary legislation unless the new legislation replaced old legislation.
Sorry for the rant folks but it really peaved me that none of these Karens understand that trying to drag more govt interference in our lives in their obsessions about fairness & safety is definitely far from desirable due to the continued consequences of giving our stupid toad polies more avenues to destroy our lives. Look how the annual increase in booze taxes & regulatory fees has totally killed our pub culture & turned out pubs purely into poker machine shooting galleries for poker machine addicts, when back in the 80’s even people on the dole could afford to have a few beers the pub every day & in the 60’s draught beer at the pub was cheaper than bottle beer to go. Yet istead our polies give our gas away at literally 1/30 the price that both Qatar & Norway get. Mainstream polies saying we can’t change stakeholder contracts unilaterally is BS. All the federal govt needs to do is bring in a federal export tariff on gas & no contracts need changing. In fact before income taxes became a thing internationally around WWII export tariffs were nearly as common as import taxes internationally. Of course that’s because targeted smart taxes always make more sense than dumb income taxes
Also the annual rate of children dying on ebikes these days is no higher than it has traditionally been for children dying on bicycles in Oz for many years at just under 50 a year. Quite acceptable on a continent with nearly 30 million for a species in which childhood deaths were completely normal for virtually all our natural history.
www.cyclingelectric.com
