Who Rides a Moped?

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Who Rides a Moped?

I thought about getting a bike, but the bike lanes here are horrible.

What bike lanes? Sure there is the one coming down University Avenue...really a death trap as motorists try to take the University on-ramps going Makai and having to cross over a bike path.

Or how about the one along Kalanianaole Highway going Kokohead? You know the illegal right hand passing lane for impatient motorists? Then there's the bike lane going Ewa on Kalanianaole Highway that abruptly ends at Kalani High School and you have to figure out a way to either straddle the curb and allow motorists to keep at least 3-feet away from you or hop repeated curbs while riding on the sidewalk (legal on Kalanianaole Highway betweet Kalani Highschool and Ainakoa Avenue because it's zoned residential).

There's no safe bike route from downtown Honolulu to Hawaii Kai and back. Oh and there's no safe route in/out of Manoa valley too.

Which brings me back to mopeds...if they are licensed as bicycles can they still be used in bike lanes/paths despite being motorized?

[MadAzza]

Re: Who Rides a Moped?

IA moped also goes fast enough to make falling off of one a critical or even fatal injury unlike a bicycle where falling off isn't so typically tragic.

This is a typical misconception. The speed at which one is traveling isn't what hurts; it's the four-foot fall your head makes to the pavement, regardless of speed. (On a bicycle, the height is even greater, making it more dangerous, not less.) The main way the vehicle's speed makes any difference is if you directly contact another solid object between leaving the vehicle and hitting the ground. (The other way is through road rash as you slide along the ground and your clothing shreds.)

You can get a serious head injury if you are sitting on a bicycle and fall over, hitting your head on the ground. As serious as if you are on a motorcycle traveling 50 mph and fall and hit your head on the ground, which of course can't happen, because something has to act upon a vehicle in forward motion to make it "fall over." But for the sake of discussion ...

My boyfriend in college was sitting on a parked motorcycle, fell over, hit his head on the pavement and spent a couple of weeks in a coma. True story. He always, always, always wore a helmet. But he was parked, so he took it off while he was sitting and talking with his buddies. He raced motorcycles professionally (still does, in his forties) and occasionally crashed on the track at speeds in excess of 100 mph, got up and walked away. Why? Because on a track, you are wearing full safety gear, you are falling only four feet and there is nothing to hit as you safely slide to a stop. No other vehicles coming the opposite direction, no light poles, no guardrails, no carelessly tossed beer bottles. Speed doesn't kill.

Mopeds aren't inherently dangerous, any more than motorcycles or cars or walking down the sidewalk. It's the other drivers and one's own skill level, not at simply handling the vehicle but at situational awareness, gauging distances, anticipation and other factors that make the difference between a moped rider and a good moped rider. Or motorcycle rider, or driver ...

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: Who Rides a Moped?

This is a typical misconception. The speed at which one is traveling isn't what hurts; it's the four-foot fall your head makes to the pavement, regardless of speed. (On a bicycle, the height is even greater, making it more dangerous, not less.) The main way the vehicle's speed makes any difference is if you directly contact another solid object between leaving the vehicle and hitting the ground. (The other way is through road rash as you slide along the ground and your clothing shreds.)

Uh oh. You've unleashed my inner physics geek.

The force of the impact when you fall off a bicycle, or a moped, or a motorcycle, or even when thrown from a car for that matter, depends on both your horizontal speed and your vertical speed, and also on what it is that you end up hitting.

Maddie is right that if you fall and hit the ground, then your horizontal speed doesn't make a big difference because hitting the ground won't suddenly bring your horizontal speed to zero. Your horizontal speed will slowly decrease as you slide and tumble across the asphalt. But if something vertical blocks your path -- like, say, a tree, or a wall, or a sign post, or a building, or another vehicle -- then your horizontal speed will suddenly be reduced to zero in a fraction of a second. That will hurt. If you're going fast, that will really hurt.

Your vertical speed when you fall down is the same regardless of how fast your horizontal speed is, because your vertical speed depends only by how high you are when you fall, and you're at basically the same height above the ground whether you're on a bicycle or a moped or a motorcycle. Say your head is five feet above the ground, and you fall down. Doing the math, anything that falls from a height of five feet will have a vertical speed of 12.2 miles per hour when it hits the ground. It doesn't matter if you fall down from a standstill while stopped at a traffic light, or if you fall down while zipping along at top speed. Your 12.2 mph vertical speed will be the same because you're falling from the same height.

For a bicyclist, who's typically moving horizontally at 10 mph or so, falling and hitting the ground at 12.2 mph will hurt about as much as if he plowed into a wall at full speed. But mopeds and motorcycles can go a lot faster than 12.2 mph. It's not falling off the cycle that's the dangerous part -- running into a wall at 50 mph, that's the dangerous part.

[haole_pupule]

Re: Who Rides a Moped?

How did you come up with 12.2? Remember that the downward acceleration of your head is going to be and r dot F product based on your height and some sort of integral of the weight of your body throwing your head downward.

Also, I am thinking that as you fall from the scooter some component of the speed at which you were travelling is going to be directed downward by the force of you body being torqued over the handle bars. I don't think that the motion can be considered a linear up and down motion. It is going to be circular with your head starting at 12 o'clock and ending up at about 4 or 5 o'clock.

Either way, that is one heck of a road rash.

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: Who Rides a Moped?

High school physics only. I calculated the speed of an object that is dropped from a height of five feet. So you have two simultaneous equations: (distance) = (1/2) x (acceleration) x (time)^2, and (speed) = (acceleration) x (time). (Acceleration) = 32 feet/sec^2, and (distance) = 5 feet. Combine the two equations and you get (speed) = 17.9 feet/sec. Convert the units and you get 12.2 miles/hour. I know it's simplified, but it's in the right ballpark.

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Who Rides a Moped?

Yep vertical speed is irrelavent however it's the horizontal speed in relation to mass that will kill ya...I think in motorcycle terms it's called road rash from laying down a bike? Falling forward going 20-MPH on a bicycle is far less horrific than falling forward going 40-MPH on a moped...deadly at speeds of over 60-MPH on a motorcycle.

The faster you go, the more painful when you kiss the asphalt. Bicycles go much slower thus is far safer than a moped.

[haole_pupule]

Re: Who Rides a Moped?

Since we are dealing with collisions you need to look at the mass times velocity to get the momentum travelling around a vertical circle with your head at 12 o'clock and ending at the ground which is going to end up at anywhere between 3 and 5 depending on the trajectory. Therefore, it is a much stronger force acted upon your noggin.

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: Who Rides a Moped?

Ehhh. You go ahead and do the math.

[haole_pupule]

Re: Who Rides a Moped?

Weekend Homework for you: 700 lb Motorcycle with 350 lbs worth of passengers slams into a 3300 lb parked car head-on pushing the vehicle 30 feet with the transmission in Park. How fast was the motorcycle travelling at time of impact.

(5/18, Hawaii Kai Dr...no helmets)

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Who Rides a Moped?

ummm....way too fast?

But you forget one other factor...the type of tires on that car. If it was really cheapo tires then the car is more forgiving. But put on a set of Pirelli P-zeros and oh boy that's some brick wall ya just hit.

And to defend Maddie, I think in that case in Hawaii Kai, helmets wouldn't have done anything to protect that noggin.

One of the most horrific things I ever saw was when I had to do a search and recovery operation on a downed F-111 Fighter/Bomber at our base in Mtn. Home Idaho. We formed a chain and walked the entire 7-miles from the point of impact to the final resting point of that downed jet looking for debris and body parts. Basically the jet was travelling at close to 600-MPH at a classified altitude (less than a 20-story building) in the desert when it deviated with a -1 degree pitch. It took less than a second for that jet to impact the ground at that speed/height and it spread the wreckage about 7-miles.

At about the 4th mile I picked up one of the crew's helmets (Pilot and Weapons System Officer or WSO) and found parts of his head still inside. Yeah in this case the helmet didn't do a damned thing to save his life but it did allow us to identify him because the teeth were firmly embedded somewhere in it.

[MadAzza]

Re: Who Rides a Moped?

The faster you go, the more painful when you kiss the asphalt. Bicycles go much slower thus is far safer than a moped.

<huge sigh>

Here, try this crowbar.

Besides, if you think it's safer to be going 20 mph slower than average city traffic speed, then I am going to have to bow out of this discussion.

(When will I learn not to read/post before my morning coffee?)

[haole_pupule]

Re: Who Rides a Moped?

I had the unfortunate experience of being in the back of a taxi cab with a foreign driver who thought that he could cut off a bicycle in the bike lane because he was in a car and has the right of way. He almost killed the bicyclist missing him by about 6 inches. The bicyclist came up to the driver said of the car and justifiably went off on the driver. The driver just ignored him and then proceeded to tell me that the bicyclist had some nerve thinking that he had the right of way over a car.

I couldn't believe it. This has actually kept me from buying a bike here.

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Who Rides a Moped?

<huge sigh>

Here, try this crowbar.

Besides, if you think it's safer to be going 20 mph slower than average city traffic speed, then I am going to have to bow out of this discussion.

(When will I learn not to read/post before my morning coffee?)

That is why I gave up biking to work. Too slow to compete with the morning rush. Slower is safer but when compounded with faster traffic, suddenly slower is dangerous. Problem with mopeds is that they also don't go as fast as cars so they stay in the shoulders where travelling can be a deathsport in itself. But they go fast enough to make for a very hard landing, much harder than on a bike.

And Maddie...one day you too will learn that yes it is important to wake up that noggin before cruzin into HT in the morning Coffee is what I brush my teeth with first thing in the morning

[Palolo Joe]

Re: Who Rides a Moped?

Problem with mopeds is that they also don't go as fast as cars so they stay in the shoulders where travelling can be a deathsport in itself.

You keep saying mopeds don't go as fast as cars... that may be true for some older models, but the newer ones (and those that get souped up by their owners) can go 35 mph, easy.

The last moped I bought cruised in traffic on Kapiolani and S. King with no problem.

As with cars, the dangerous thing about a moped is the person driving it.

Too many idiots on the road...

[craigwatanabe]

Re: Who Rides a Moped?

As you stated, the problem then lies when motorist go faster than 35-mph (Kalanianaole Highway) and your new moped becomes the slower vehicle again. But this time at 35-MPH you become an obstical in the path of some jerk intent on making you roadkill.

Mopeds and cars/trucks/buses don't mix very well and odds are the bigger vehicle will win. Whether it's a moped or a bicycle, driving/riding one in Honolulu's metro streets is risking your life. The roads are too narrow to allow the three foot minimum passing distance and the curbs are too dangerous to ride on because of the debris. When I rode to work along Kapiolani Blvd on my bicycle, whenever traffic was bearing down on me I would hop onto the sidewalk and risk a ticket rather than death.

But it was when one of HPD's finest turned right into a side street off of Waialae Avenue and didn't see me and caused me to fall off my bike and he didn't stop to render aid is when I realized that when even cops don't care anymore, it's time to use the bike for recreation and drive my car to work instead. Don't get me talking about the bus again. That's another headache story.