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It’s not an electric bike craze. You’re looking at the future of transportation
- smoyer 3y agoFully agree with the article's content but the headline reminds me of the hype preceding the launch of It/Segway.
- AtlasBarfed 3y agoWhen ginger was released (you know, the segway) it was advertised it would transform urban environments. But the actual revolution is probably ebikes / escooters. The EV drivetrain is so easily scaled up and down and applied to so many form factors. You can shove the batteries in lots of different places, the actual drive motor is so cheap and small. It is so much easier than having to do driveshafts / exhaust / fuel tank / engine / oil for an ICE drivetrain. And battery tech will likely double or triple in power density in the next 10 years, and probably drop by 50-70% or more in cost.
- kirdiekirdie 3y agoI never understand those articles. I have been doing everything with a normal bike my whole life, including shopping and bringing the kids to school and kindergarden, and I see no reason to let my body atrophy by pointlessly buying an expensive bike with a motor. Then I probably need to spend even more money and time on a bike machine in a fitness studio and more money on doctors after suffering from weight related illnesses. Those articles always assume that car is the god given default state. It's great for the elderly and for my colleague who is suffering from long covid but everyone else I know is doing perfectly fine with a bike without motor including my grandpa until he got around 85 years old.
- dharmab 3y agohttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259019821930017X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259019821... > Physical activity gains from active travel are similar in e-bikers and cyclists. In my personal life I exert myself equally on both my pedal bike and ebike- but on the ebike I take longer trips or carry more stuff, like groceries.
- cozzyd 3y agoOne reason I usually take the train to work over biking, even when it's nice out, is that the train gets me to work a bit faster, and I'm not going to be sweaty if it's hot out. An e-bike would for the same level of effort, get me to work a lot faster, I imagine, so I'm considering getting one.
- lm28469 3y agoDon't forget the base line is fat people who walk under 5000 steps a day (average westerner)
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoI have never riden an e-bike and like you I add an additional 55kg to my bicycle with two kids school round, having said that you are being pedantic in your idea of 'proper' cycling. Here are a few examples where e-bikes make a lot of sense: - Terrain, try a cycling commute in San Francisco US or Granada Spain. E-bikes bring the Netherlands to everywhere else that is not pancake flat. - Range increase, a lot of people will not leap into a cycling commute because it may not be a reasonable cycling distance for an everyday commute. E-bikes extend what is reasonable. - Sweat free commute, cyclist love their gear but most people can't be assed to put on spandex to get to work. An e-bike means that you can be wearing office clothes because you are not going to be breaking a sweat.
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoI have never ever heard of someone cycling to work in spandex (as a Dutch person). Spandex and fancy bikes are the territory of wielrenners (lit. ‘wheel-runners’), the rest of us use simple city bikes, and you’re not really going to break a sweat on those.
- dharmab 3y agoAmerican cycling culture is very different from Dutch cycling culture. To the point where me and many of my friends do not consider ourselves cyclists, despite: - Owning bicycles - Using bicycles for recreation and practical uses - Repairing our own bicycles Because we do not wear spandex or own racing/mountain bikes. See Casually Explained's video about this: https://youtu.be/5EE8m8mmq1k https://youtu.be/5EE8m8mmq1k
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoIt’s unfortunate that English only has the one word meaning ‘cyclist’. It sounds like over here you would be an average fietser (as opposed to a wielrenner).
- aidenn0 3y agoEnd up sharing a lane with a car that wants to go 48kph and you'll break a sweat on a city bike really fast.
- blakesterz 3y agoFor me it's the only thing I'm able to ride. I have arthritis and having a bike with a motor lets me ride more than 10 minutes. I would imagine for many older folks it means the same.
- DuctTapeAI 3y agoA year ago I would have agreed with you, but these days I love my electric mountain bike for a number of reasons. Biggest reason is it let's me choose how much effort to put in. On easy days I can do the same loop as harder days and just use a little more battery. If I'm running errands in the heat I don't have to be sweaty. It was also really useful when a friend crashed in the woods, enabling them to ride several miles back to the car (albeit slowly) without pedalling/walking.
- nonameiguess 3y agoEh, we'll see. I'd really like to see some quantification of this "skyrocketing." I supposed it depends on where you are. I've seen e-scooters reappear in my city, but not bikes so far, and these were popular 5-7 years ago before disappearing and they didn't stay popular that first time. The claim that they can go faster than regular bikes is not true. Six states already require a driver's license to operate them no matter what, and states that do not typically predicate that on a rule that anything capped at 20 MPH doesn't count as a motor vehicle that requires registration or a driver's license. A non-electronic bicyclist who has any reasonable level of aerobic fitness and isn't a hundred pounds overweight can pretty easily go faster than that. I get the appeal. I didn't own a car when I was in college 20 years ago and got everywhere in my city by bicycle. It was more enough given my personal tranportation needs. But a car offers a lot more than just "not having to exert physical effort" for the people who use them. Protection from the elements. Space for passengers. Space for cargo. They're legal to operate on highways. People using these things need to stay off the sidewalks, too. That's going to cause a crackdown at some point.
- DoingIsLearning 3y ago> Throttle enabled e-bikes are even easier to use as they don’t even require pedaling – they can basically be used as 20 mph (32 km/h) mopeds. At that speed, they’re fast enough for people to cruise through a city easily yet don’t come with the same power and speed concerns that have traditionally turned most commuters away from motorcycles. Hard disagree. In my opinion throttle enabled bicycles should be classed (and taxed) as mopeds with license plates and all. At 32 Km/h you are already hauling ass to be a danger for other cyclists and pedestrians. Throttle enabled e-bikes are very much part of the problem in the reputation around e-bikes. The fact that you have to put human effort into accelerating in a pedal assist e-bike absolutely curbs your behaviour, reduces your average speed, and makes you much less reckless.
- duxup 3y agoAgreed. Have a friend who remembers going for a walk on a walking path. Woke up in the hospital. Nobody reported seeing the incident but police believe based on some debris left behind at the scene that someone on an electric bike hit them at a very high rate of speed. They are home now and generally functional, but it's been a couple months and they're in for a long road to recovery. I'm all for electric bikes but some are amazingly fast and equally dangerous.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoPedal assisted e-bikes are a more complex design that leads to more cost. This is fine in the west where everyone is rich, yet they are rare in the developing world (especially china where cheap e-bikes are popular) where people are less rich. Putting so many restrictions on a cheaper to produce product could be seen as anti-poor.
- duxup 3y agoArguably you could say the same for many costly safety features...
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoHave you lived this before? In a city like Beijing there are tens of thousands of people commuting via cheap e-bikes, they are slightly faster bikes, that’s it. Just speed limit them if anything and be done with it (and really, how fast do you think a 2000 kuai e-bike can go anyways?).
- Simulacra 3y agoI still kind of think of them as Segways. Neat and all but eventually people will go back to what is easier.
- falcolas 3y agoWhat is easier than an ebike? For a regular bike, I could get "less complicated", "less expensive", and potentially even "more fulfilling". But "easier"? Not really.
- georgepk 3y agoYeah, that's why we're changing cities so that nice things like bicycles are the easy thing.
- Kon-Peki 3y agoI had a positive impression of this article all the way until I came to the quote "Studies have shown that a mere 10% shift from car drivers to bike riders has resulted in a 40% reduction in traffic congestion" which links to another article on the same website(!) - which has a quote "In one such study, a shift of just 10% of commuters from cars to motorcycles resulted in a 40% reduction in traffic congestion", which has a link to some other blog post that has the quote "if 10% of all private cars were replaced by motorcycles, it would reduce traffic congestion by 40%" but no link at all to any study. Doing some searching I found a link to the study, but couldn't read it because about half a second after loading it uses some Javascript or something to completely blank the page. But I did find a page that does link to the study (that you can't read) and has this quote "The results came from a case study for a stretch of highway between Leuven and Brussels in Belgium and may not translate directly to other road scenarios, as the report states quite clearly that the effects of a modal shift are dependent on the local traffic situation." So basically this study has no applicability to bikes, was done on the only kind of road you wouldn't ride a bike on, and the authors cautioned that you shouldn't extrapolate to other kinds of roads. Man, what a disappointment.
- throw310822 3y ago> the quote ... which links to another article on the same website(!) ... which has a link to some other blog post that has the quote ... This is the norm everywhere nowadays, including the most respected newspapers. I think it deserves a name- maybe something like "pretend citation" or "Chinese links". I think its popularity is due to the impression it gives of factual accuracy coupled with nonchalant confidence; someone who simply turns a sentence into a blue link has done his homework and dares you to doubt him. In fact usually the links point to other articles- often from the same publications and author- wherein one can find, buried somewhere, a similar but different statement, which in turn can be either totally unsupported or again link somewhere else, to even more remotely related factoids.