It's a nice idea but not really appropriate to have people jet up trails at 1000W for minutes while having none of the handling skills to go with it. Stuff is designed for human abilities, keep the motorcycles out of it. If the things were limited to something sane like 250W, sure, but with the wild-west in the US it's hopeless.
This was the "don't ride like a jackwagon" part. My bike has a solid kW output, at least when the battery is full, but I don't zip down the trail at 26 mph all the time.
Sure, occasionally I pull a max-speed segment for hoots, but I don't do it anywhere near anyone who might be scared or injured if I mess up. My trail empties out pretty nicely once you're about 5 miles from "downtown" (of the city along the trail where I enter) so it's easy to find long open stretches to hoon around if you want without endangering anyone but yourself and others on your ride.
I have just under 1000 miles of riding on this particular ebike, and about 2500 miles total, so I'm definitely not an expert rider, but I have _some_ handling skills.
Personally I like the relatively unregulated hardware. I don't need my bike to decide on a safe top speed or power. That's up to me. If I am on the trail around people, I keep it below 15 mph as a rule of thumb. If I'm doing a segment on a road trying to dodge a half-awake car driver, I very much want to be able to pull up to 30 mph fast so I can GTFO from a bad situation.
If you don't like jackwagons riding on the trail, regulate that behavior, not their hardware. Just my 2ยข, opinions may vary.
All road restrictions are modeled around power. Crashes occur reliably when you mix vehicles with disparate power.
There is simply no reason electric bikes should have the continuous power of two world class pro cyclists in one. It's nice to appeal to people acting sensibly, but of course that doesn't work - not least because the majority of people riding these don't even realize it is not normal to go up 10% grades at 15mph and more
If the story here is we want people to ride that otherwise can't - 250W continuous reliably puts you in the 90th percentile. That is an all out effort for a good half of the population.
