Obviously Amazon is only interested in these as an opportunity to inflict further cruelty and exploitation upon their workers while flaunting regulations, but even beyond that there is a bigger issue here regarding the absence of space for something between bikes and cars.

The thing about electric bikes is that they are a wonderfully deep well of loophole nonsense, this cuts both ways TBH. Right now, the American road is just too generalized, with not enough separation of regulation, infrastructure and spaces to accommodate different niches. Instead everything is forced to exist in a single framework, which is built to match large, highway capable, trucks and cars. It is a cataclysm of needless gigantism that wastes energy, space, and lives.

Having a separate category of smaller, lighter vehicles that are less dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists, with lower energy usage, looser licensing and smaller footprints is needed. But you can’t have them operating alongside normal cars/trucks, or regulated in the same framework. The carveouts around powered pedal assist vehichles, and the growing network of bike infrastructure, created space for these kinds of middle vehicles to start coming in to existence, but there is a very real risk that they’ll push out light vehicles like bikes( including those with reasonable powered pedal assist) for the same reason they’re not practical alongside trucks and cars. They will get people killed, both other people in bike lanes with them, and their own operators. There will have to be regulation, and that regulation will ether push this deeply needed middle ground vehicle out of existence, or kill the growth of bicycles.

I think the real solution here is to formalize a regulatory standard for these kinds of middle vehicles, kick them out of bike lanes and off of side walks, and heavily restrict highway capable cars/trucks from dense areas like urban cores to give the middle vehicles somewhere safe to operate.

“Oh but if I can’t drive my suburban assault vehicle straight in to the middle of the city, my hundred mile a day commute would be very inconvenient” drive to a park and ride and take the metro(DC area in this context) in, for the areas where that’s not practical yet, we should build more light and commuter rail.