Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life
October 22, 2022 5:03 AM   Subscribe

In which Craig Mod reflects on on eighteen months of electric bike ownership. Author, essayist and walking man Craig Mod (previously, previously) reflects on the magic and the charm of electric bicycles. "Into the shadow mountains we go, up, pushed by the hand of that giant, always present, always ready to help. It is a ridiculous thing. A thing of peace and magic. An owl hoots. The smile has never left my face."
posted by lewiseason (89 comments total) 35 users marked this as a favorite
 
I do like my eMTB. It opens up the countryside for me, which locally is very hilly and beyond my knackered body to take on under my own power. Plus I can get to work without sweating like a pig (only 3.2 miles but the last km goes up 100m).

When the X3 & S3 came out I was pretty envious but it was within a year of me buying mine so I couldn't justify it, my colleague got one though and then had exactly the same issues as the writer, shipped back to the Netherlands twice and just got a refund the second time. Disappointing.
posted by biffa at 5:21 AM on October 22, 2022


I get it, but it's not for me. Still, the more bicycles, the better!
posted by chavenet at 5:25 AM on October 22, 2022 [5 favorites]


Similar reasons here biffa, I've had my Cube e-bike (this one) since ~2018, and for similar reasons (commuting machine/'sploring machine).

It hasn't seen as many km as I expected when I bought it since I've been working from home for around half of that time, so even though I've had it for a while, it's hard to justify replacing. Especially since I've not had any mechanical/electrical issues. I did struggle to find a replacement part a couple of years ago, but I think that will be an issue with virtually any manufacturer until they're a bit more ubiquitous.
posted by lewiseason at 5:30 AM on October 22, 2022


I bought a Gazelle class 3 e-bike last year (I believe it's referred to as a speed pedelec in Europe), and it has allowed my wife and I to live as a one-car couple for half a year now. I love it.
posted by TheKaijuCommuter at 6:07 AM on October 22, 2022 [7 favorites]


I would love to get an ebike for the last 1.5mi of my commute, from the train station to my home, which has a 400ft elevation gain.

But I'd have to leave it chained up in a public place all day. I was sad enough when my few-hundred-dollar regular bike was stolen. I don't want to lose something worth thousands.

Maybe our town will get some more secure bike parking. There is certainly lots of space devoted to car parking in the town center around the station.
posted by hovey at 6:36 AM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]


This post is beautiful writing and PERFECT timing. I jumped on that Rad Power sale a couple weeks ago - maybe you heard about it, maybe not - Rad Power sold out their remaining RadMission stock at a ridiculous discount. The RadMission is their entry level city bike - always a budget bike with the compromises that come along with that, usually going for $900-$1100. They were selling them for $500.

I have been wanting an electric bike for a while now. I have bike commuted to work for more than 15 years, the shortest one-way distance around 7 miles and longest around 11. But as I get older and car drivers get crazier, I've longed for a little boost my legs can no longer give me to navigate around sketchy situations and get through intersections more quickly. Or to get me those last few miles home at the end of a long day when Chicago headwinds decide to do their worst. Spent hours researching the best bike for my needs, budget, and size (I'm very short, many bikes don't fit me). Couldn't make a decision but started saving. Hoped for a tax credit in the infrastructure bill only to be disappointed; fucking stupid move by Congress to drop that from the bill.

Then I saw a post on Twitter about an e-bike for $500 from a reputable company and just impulsively took the plunge. It arrived Tuesday; I assembled it Thursday and took it for a spin around the block. On Level 2 pedal assist (it goes up to level 4) it felt like I traveled an entire city block on 3 pedal strokes. Said "holy shit" out loud with the biggest smile on my face as the assist kicked in.

This morning I'm going to take it for its first real ride and I can't wait.

I'm sure I'll outgrow this budget bike quickly and want something better, but for now it'll be a great entry point, and when I do upgrade I can sell it or give it away and kickstart someone else's new love of e-bikes.

If you ever question the transformative power of e-bikes, just read the reviews of any decent brand/model. Half the reviews on the RadMission were like "I never drive my car anymore" and "I'm 68 years old and the assist up hills keeps me riding." Absolutely life-changing, and could be city-changing if we would just incentivize them with tax credits and safe cycling infrastructure. Too bad there isn't a bike lobby like the car lobby.
posted by misskaz at 6:37 AM on October 22, 2022 [31 favorites]


I really, really want one. Two big things holding me back are money and temperature.

I live in Chicago, and I store my bike in an unheated, unattached garage. It gets really cold here, and it gets really hot here. Neither are good for batteries. I could store it in my home, but the hassle of going up stairs, through doors, then down more stairs (then reverse that to take it out) means I would simply not use it as much. Not to mention getting dirt on my floors, accidentally bumping my walls, etc. As it is, I cruise into my keypad-locked big garage door, dump my bike and go inside my home. I can't do that with an e-bike if I want the battery to last.

Money-wise it's a two-fold thing. After doing some research, I know I'd want at least a $1500 model or better. I would not want to cheap out on something like this and have more frequent failures. Also: these things are theft-magnets. My current bike is not one that thieves would be salivating over. It gets the job done. I lock it up for hours and hours outside around town and I never worry about theft. An e-bike is catnip for thieves.

Maybe some day. I have ridden a few of these and they are beyond fun. This article is wonderfully poetic, but I had those same spine-tingles the first few times I rode an e-bike. Try one out if you can... it's magical. Seriously.
posted by SoberHighland at 6:40 AM on October 22, 2022


SoberHighland, with many (most?) e-bikes you can remove the battery to bring it inside. My new one you just unlock the battery with a key and slide it off.

It is heavy af, though. I have an access door to our basement where we keep all our bikes, but it's up/down 6 very steep steps and it's hard for me to get it up those steps. Down isn't quite so bad, but is awkward.

The parking/security is a real issue. I'll be comfortable using it for my current commute only because I have a secure bike room inside my office building (key fob access only, security cameras, etc.) Haven't decided if I'll ever feel comfortable riding it elsewhere and if I do I'll need to seriously upgrade my lock(s).
posted by misskaz at 6:44 AM on October 22, 2022 [4 favorites]


I just wish we'd stop calling them bicycles and start calling them mopeds or motorcycles. I'm thrilled if they are replacing a car; that's a beautiful thing. But it doesn't make them bicycles.
posted by cccorlew at 6:54 AM on October 22, 2022 [13 favorites]


there are SO MANY different types of e-bike - and e-skateboards and e-unicycles and everything.

Is there a website that compares all the mobility options against each other, and talks about the price vs features for new and used e-bikes?

All the "reviews" I've seen get into the MICRO DIFFERENCES using tech terms i don't understand, from bike shops that are contractually obligated to sell only one single brand of bike. Not helpful.

I'm moving to portland soon and we ARE BUYING E-BIKES. But, not sure which ones yet.
posted by rebent at 7:01 AM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]


cccorlew: They''re electric bikes, or power assisted bicycles. The vast majority of them are nowhere near the power or speed or noise or size of a moped or a motorcycle. Sure, there may be a tiny percentage of outliers that are super-charged powerful beasts. But calling e-bikes "motorcycles" or "mopeds" is not a helpful description.

I get what you are saying... they are motorized bikes, or motorized pedal-assisted bikes which is where the terms motorcycle and moped come from. But lumping all those things into one word is kind of ridiculous.
posted by SoberHighland at 7:05 AM on October 22, 2022 [36 favorites]


Please let's not turn this thread into an extremely tired and played out argument over what constitutes a bike vs a moped vs a motorcycle vs a scooter and the laws in NYC vs everywhere else's blah blah blah. Please?
posted by flamk at 7:10 AM on October 22, 2022 [22 favorites]


But it doesn't make them bicycles.

What about Class 3/Pedelecs? You have to pedal, and you get that gentle aerobic exercise that's really good for you. None of that says 'moped' to me.

On preview, yes, what SoberHighland said. It (mine, certainly) feels exactly like riding a normal bike, except I've got Lance Armstrong's legs on.

---

I'm moving to portland soon and we ARE BUYING E-BIKES. But, not sure which ones yet.

rebent, I don't know of a tool (except painstaking spreadsheeting), but my one tip would be to buy one from a company who already know how to make 'analog' bikes, rather than one who have never built a bike before, and have a shiny website.
posted by lewiseason at 7:10 AM on October 22, 2022 [2 favorites]


My class 3 ebike is the fastest way to cross Boston at rush hour, short of a helicopter. You can go 25mph in the roads and bike speed in the bike lanes, whichever is faster and safer. The magical part for me is being able to cross the city, choked with cars and busted subways as it is, rather than just being stuck if transit isn't working today. And while 25mph sounds dangerous, it feels safer than biking the same narrow Boston roads, because it's fast enough that the cars don't try to squeeze by.

I think let people call things whatever they want, but the substance of this thing is absolutely a weird innovation to deal with -- especially the class 3 bikes like mine with clunky acceleration curves, that can very much behave like slow mopeds depending on the settings. I don't think "moped" would help with intuitions about what to make of them. The actual thing to try to make sense of is something that is a crappy bicycle on level zero assist, that can turn with a touch of a button into a crappy moped on level five assist, and that gets used in both modes to go even a short distance. It's great, but it needs different things from the rider (more patience! you have less to lose from slowing down), the bike design (heavy might be good actually?), and other people in the space.
posted by john hadron collider at 7:14 AM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]


Gah, wish I knew about the RadPower sale before they ran out of their $500 bikes. I had the original RadCity bike when they came out but had to sell it when I moved to a 4th floor flat (lugging 60 lbs up 4 flights sucks!). Now I'm in Florida on an extended trip without regular access to a car where rentals are absolutely obscene right now so having a cheap motorized way to get about would be awesome right now. It's flat as a pancake here so something without a lot of power would be just fine.

Anybody got any suggestions for something semi quality but cheap?
posted by flamk at 7:16 AM on October 22, 2022


My experience has been similar to the author's. My e-bike still puts a smile on my face most times that I ride it. Our car sits in the driveway for days at a time now.

It was purchased in the fall of 2020, as winter approached and this household realized that our one car life wasn't terribly compatible with a pandemic. Carpooling and taking transit just weren't as appealing as they had been. The bike was meant to be a secondary means of getting around, but quickly became a first choice for many short local trips.

Least winter my 15 minute commute to the ski resort where I work was done on the bike every single time (it became a goal about half way through when I realized that I had not driven to work yet...). I have a ski rack on it, and it's a fat tired bike.

We are lucky to live in a place where winter trails are maintained, and I can avoid the busier roads, but it gives me hope to see how many people are choosing e-bikes over cars for the short trips. I feel like it it's a 90% solution, and much more attainable than electric cars for a large part of the population.

As for logistics, SoberHighland, mine lives outside year round in a place where we get down to -20° C a few nights a year. Battery comes inside to get charged. Only trouble is in the spring when the bike gets wet on the way home and freezes up the chain drive over night.

While they aren't $500, I have had good experience with the Voltbike brand, as have many people in my circles. Slightly higher quality parts than many competitors at the same price points. Mostly generic/interchangeable as well
posted by snoboy at 7:30 AM on October 22, 2022 [2 favorites]


I just wish we'd stop calling them bicycles and start calling them mopeds or motorcycles.

I picked one up recently for a bit of vehicular variety on the 20-mile work commute I often use coming home as a change from the train-ride in.   Given the sheer numbers of techies with too much money here in Seattle, I've taken to jokingly calling mine my 'bro-ped.'  His name is "Brocephalus," of course.

The electric is a lot of fun, though I still prefer my acoustic bikes for most riding.   Now that the autumn rain's finally started here in Seattle, I can finally put it to test for the real reason I bought it—allowing me to ride in rain gear up our hilly terrain without turning myself into a mini-sauna.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 7:32 AM on October 22, 2022 [8 favorites]


The term "acoustic bike" is cracking me up! Love it. Def covet one of these but it would absolutely be stolen where I commute. For now I rely on citibike, which works out decently.
posted by Wretch729 at 8:05 AM on October 22, 2022 [4 favorites]


I'm still a bit of an acoustic bike diehard, but I can easily see going electric at some point in the future when otherwise I'd have to give up on any hill steeper than a very modest incline.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:15 AM on October 22, 2022


I've loved bikes all my life, I don't ride mine often enough. About 10 years ago I bought a used, big heavy e-bike with a lead-acid battery pack. I tried commuting with it (16 km/10 miles one way) for a bit, but it was an ugly bike and miserable without power. When the batteries died, I got rid of it.

But the new e-bikes, with better design and components, and lighter Li batteries.... I'm considering one again. The goal is to have something that my wife or I will grab for short trips and errands, and as something that will allow my wife (who has a knee issue) to accompany me on my longer bike-rides.

I just wish we'd stop calling them bicycles and start calling them mopeds or motorcycles.

There's definitely confusion. Everything from converted bikes to Vespa-shaped units with vestigial pedals are being called e-bikes, and this is a problem. I think that the term "e-bike" (and the rights to the bike paths and rules) should be restricted to units that look and reasonably function like bicycles, and with power and speed limits. There should maybe be a new category for electric scooters and motorcycles, but restrict them to roads.

I too loved the term acoustic bike :-) , except that I have a hate for noisy bikes (rusty chains, creaks, squealing brakes, etc.) I work hard to keep ours quiet.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:15 AM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]


acoustic bikes
I love the transformative transportation potential of ebikes (I have a big fat cargo ebike and it's great), but anyone regularly using the above term, even ironically, is my enemy.
posted by 3j0hn at 8:24 AM on October 22, 2022 [2 favorites]


So there were reports of cheating in races with electric motors. Ok all wrong, but except.. someone built a tiny electric assist that is invisible. One thing I'd like and from several comments here not alone, is a small helper on some hills and a bit of boost that is not heavy or especially obvious. Not sure how to search for that it it really exists.
posted by sammyo at 8:42 AM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]


I just wish we'd stop calling them bicycles and start calling them mopeds or motorcycles.

I just got back from my first real ride on my new e-bike and all I can say is this is gatekeep-y, ableist nonsense. I've been a cyclist for 20 years, commuting year-round in Chicago, riding centuries, co-founded an all-women/non-binary cyclist fixed gear bike club, and rode a season of cyclocross, so I've got the "real cyclist" bona fides to say fuck this sentiment entirely. An e-bike is an e-bike, not a moped or motorcycle, and this kind of BS can lead to e-assist bikes, scooters, etc being banned from multi-use paths and bike lanes -- which endangers people and hinders those very car-replacement trips you claim to want.

My ride this morning was about 1/3 city streets (with faded painted bike lanes at best) and 2/3 multi-use path. You know where I had the biggest grin? On the streets! Because with a flick of the throttle I was through a 4-way stop intersection before a driver could even get mad that I was too slow and in his way. With a turn of the pedals I could get in front of a car to get around the jackass parked in the bike lane with plenty of time to get back in the bike lane before the other car had a chance to close-pass me. The e-assist of the RadMission feels SO much safer than riding my regular bike. Yet the assist is speed-limited to 20mph so no it's NOT a moped or a motorcycle or any of those things.
posted by misskaz at 8:45 AM on October 22, 2022 [59 favorites]


I've got a Class 1 Propella 7-speed which I bought a little more than a year ago. It's entry level and won't be my forever bike, but it's super fun to ride. I've used it way, way more than I was ever using my other bikes. In fact, I traded in a gorgeous Specialized Roubaix to get the Propella. No regrets. The Propella has about 1,600 km on it already, and the Roubaix had less than 500 km in 3 years of ownership. It was too fussy. The Roubaix was like owning a Porsche, and the Propella is like owning a Toyota, in a good way.

The cycling world is classist, ableist, and has more than a wee bit o' toxic masculinity in it. I've had plenty of cyclist dudes - almost always dudes - share their disdain with me about my e-bike. Fuck 'em. Riding the Propella is a joy. I just wish I could find a local cycling group that was into e-bikes and made up of real humans. I imagine those will emerge soon enough. Going for a 20-30 mile tour with some cool like-minded people would be awesome.
posted by sockshaveholes at 9:06 AM on October 22, 2022 [14 favorites]


... I don't see it as a negative to call something a motorcycle. To me, a motorcycle is a powerful transportation tool that allows me to do great things on the road. To be honest I saw it as a compliment.
posted by Too-Ticky at 9:08 AM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]


I don't think it's so much a negative as it is needlessly confusing. If you meet up with friends to "ride motorcycles" and they show up on Harleys and you show up on an $800 battery powered e-bike that tops out with pedal-assist at 20MPH, the day is going to get weird.

If "motorcycle for sale" can mean a $35,000 crotch-rocket or an entry level $500 e-bike, that's just... absurdity.

I agree this arguing about the nomenclature is a de-rail and I'm personally done with it for the day. Edit: E-bikes are extremely fun. Way more fun than I ever expected before I tried one. If you are able to ride one some time... Do it!
posted by SoberHighland at 9:19 AM on October 22, 2022 [8 favorites]


If "motorcycle for sale" can mean a $35,000 crotch-rocket or an entry level $500 e-bike, that's just... absurdity.
Sur-Ron has entered the chat
posted by 3j0hn at 9:26 AM on October 22, 2022 [2 favorites]


…share their disdain with me about my e-bike.

I had a hipster sneer some comment or another about mine as I turned onto the West Seattle bridge and all I could do was roll my eyes and think, "You twat, I've crossed the continent on my regular bike.  Corner-to-corner.  Solo.  Unsupported.   I have nothing I need prove to the likes of you."   I'm too old to care, and I've no more fucks to give about what people like him think of me and my choices of transportation.   My fucks have runneth dry.

[acoustic bikes]
…but anyone regularly using the above term, even ironically, is my enemy.

Sweet!   I've never had anyone arch me before, much less over the playful use of language.  I feel as if I've arrived in the big leagues!  Though to be fair, I do recognize it as an inherently goofy turn of phrase.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 9:34 AM on October 22, 2022 [18 favorites]


I lucked into a lightly used Trek ebike (it's absolutely not a scooter or a motorcycle, just a 10-speed bike with a motor) right before the pandemic, and this thing has changed my commute, my habits, and my relationship with the city. I've had a lot of regular bikes, and I loved to ride them all, but I live at the bottom of a steep hill that always made it way too easy to decide to get in the car instead. But now that obstacle is eliminated. I almost always want to ride; I feel wistful when the weather or my schedule prevents it. It's so damn fun!

I'm currently half-shopping for an upgrade, and I've found the reviews and forums at Electric Bike Review helpful in cutting through the clutter to figure out what's best for me. There are a lot of options out there, and quality can vary a lot between brands.
posted by Tuba Toothpaste at 9:40 AM on October 22, 2022 [2 favorites]


So there were reports of cheating in races with electric motors. Ok all wrong, but except.. someone built a tiny electric assist that is invisible.
Electric motors and batteries have gotten pretty small but not really small enough to give you the magical experience of ebiking while remaining mostly hidden. The Vivax-style hidden electric motors were still as expensive as bigger more obvious systems, while providing much less of a boost (100W-200W vs. 500W-1000W iirc). Which is probably why they never caught on for non-cheating purposes -- but even very small performance boosts are enough to give an edge in a race (in fact non-small boosts will be too obvious).
posted by 3j0hn at 9:46 AM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]


Moving to Denver, it has been a trip to have both functional transit and ebike rebates. Because of the first I haven't really needed the second yet but being spoiled for choice is wonderful. (Also my tiny apartment would make storage difficult).

Back in Texas, though, I could see ebikes being a game changer. There's definitely commutes I had there that might have been doable.

And listen, I have memories of riding my sister's sputtering, farting, smelly moped; not the same thing at all.
posted by emjaybee at 9:47 AM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]


I have a longer and more positive comment I'm working on about ebikes, but first I want to talk about the nomenclature deraill, because it's important.

I beg anyone and everyone to please refrain from trying to label all ebikes as motorcycles or mopeds.

This is important for legal and cultural reasons because pro-car, pro-oil and anti-cycling contingents are using this language to try to restrict ebike access in many ways from legal power levels to access to bicycle infrastructure and they are already enemies of cycling and cycling culture. Please do not fall for this trap and gatekeeping.

Yes, there are many "ebikes" that are technically better classed as motorcycles, scooters or mopeds. Yes, it's a safety issue. Yes, an x-class ebike or e-moto like a Sur Ron is absolutely capable of being dangerous in the wrong hands whether it's on public dirt or paved trails or the streets.

Yes, there are also many heavy fat tire comfort-utility ebikes that blur the line between a moped and a bicycle that aren't even close to the kind of e-moto that is a Sur Ron.

Like cars, any bicycle can be dangerous in the wrong hands. It's less about the power, shape or look of the ebike than it is about if the person riding it is an asshole or not.

There are also a whole new class of ebikes called eMTBs that are basically just modern full suspension mountain bikes that are not emotos because they have smaller, lighter motors and batteries that are intended to be pedal assists for getting up to the top of a trail system so you can bomb some downhill trails without power and it tries to mimic the ride and features of a full suspension mountain bike that's a bit heavier than a regular MTB.

But most ebikes are nowhere near the class of a motorcycle, moped or scooter.

While we may need new words to describe this diverse range of ebikes, please, please resist gatekeeping and legal minefield or trap that's inherently about being anti-bicycle and bicycle infrastructure. It's very important.

I also fell into this trap the first time I saw a Sur Ron or other e-moto on my local bike trails and I remember being really salty and pissed off about it and not wanting to see them on my local bike trails.

And while this is anecdotal and just my own personal experience, I realized that I don't see very many of these x-class e-motos on my trails, and they were generally just people cruising around at normal bicycling speeds. They weren't tearing up the trails. Their bikes are just as quiet as my bike or ebike. And then I realized it doesn't really matter and I was gatekeeping.

And that my opinions and reactions were getting in the way of this revolution happening with Personal Electric Vehicles and I would much rather see people riding e-motos than ICE powered motorcycles.
posted by loquacious at 9:51 AM on October 22, 2022 [34 favorites]


While we may need new words to describe this diverse range of ebikes, please, please resist gatekeeping and legal minefield or trap that's inherently about being anti-bicycle and bicycle infrastructure. It's very important.

I also fell into this trap the first time I saw a Sur Ron or other e-moto on my local bike trails and I remember being really salty and pissed off about it and not wanting to see them on my local bike trails.


The problem is that current bike infrastructure is primarily designed for something the size, weight and speeds of conventional bicycles. And consider the off-street recreational paths, where the path is shared with pedestrians, strollers, mobility assist scooters, and sometimes horses. We bar regular ICE motorbikes and scooters from these routes because they are too big and too fast (as well as being noisy and polluting). The size and speed of electric motorbikes is still a problem on such paths. And something like a Sur Ron is a motocross bike, electric or not, and they will tear up and damage mtn bike trails, not to mention being far faster than mountain bikes.

We have to have a reasonable limit on the size and speed of ebikes allowed to share bicycling infrastructure. E-motorcycles and e-scooters - vehicles with the size and speed of their ICE counterparts - are also great transportation options, but should be restricted to conventional roads.
posted by Artful Codger at 10:44 AM on October 22, 2022 [5 favorites]


I have a motorcycle license, and a regular bicycle, and an e-bike. My e-bike is a class 1 (no throttle, pedal assist only) with a 250W mid-drive motor and a torque sensor (which means the motor power is controlled by how hard you pedal).

This particular e-bike is nothing like a motorcycle. It operates and feels almost exactly like a regular bike. I can use it in all the ways I use my other bicycle, but in almost none of the ways I can use a motorbike.

There are also electric bikes that are essentially electric motorcycles with pedals added. (And those are great too.) And many e-bikes are somewhere in between.
We have to have a reasonable limit on the ebikes allowed to share bicycling infrastructure.
In most of the US, only class 1 and 2 ebikes (which can only use the motor up to 20 mph, and have at most 750W of power) are allowed on trails. In Europe the limitations are stricter (25 km/h and 250W). But enforcement is a problem everywhere.
posted by mbrubeck at 10:58 AM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]


Here in the Netherlands, trails are not really the area where problems arise. I don't think e-bikes are really a thing here for trail riding. We have problems with older people, who go faster than they're used to (since they're used to normal bikes), and when things get hairy, they don't have the reflexes to deal with that speed. Accidents happen and they can be severe.

In the cities, bicycle paths are often crowded, especially during rush hour, and adding faster vehicles to the mix gets... interesting.

I do think that e-bikes, especially when they replace cars or give people with limited muscle power more or better options, are generally a force for good.
On the other hand, here they often replace normal bicycles, so people can ride the same distance while getting less exercise... and at the same time, using electricity where they'd be using muscle power before. In such cases, there are clearly also disadvantages.

Personally I do not have an e-bike, because I mainly ride for exercise and I would need to ride longer/more often to get the same amount of exercise. I also ride to get my shopping and I can manage that just fine under my own power. But I've sometimes been laughed at or mocked for riding a non-e-bike!
posted by Too-Ticky at 11:16 AM on October 22, 2022 [4 favorites]


Fuck yeah, ebikes!

I'm a life long die-hard cyclist who has never owned a car and am aiming to never, ever own a car. I love bicycles and I don't even really like getting in cars as a passenger - though it happens about once a month or so. If I ride as a passenger in a car I justify it as carpooling because someone was going that way anyway, and we're probably running errands to the same places.

I have a long and very personal history and relationship with bicycling from a very young child through to today, and it is definitely a direct reaction to growing up immersed in toxic car culture in Los Angeles.

I have put in my dues and then some. I have received all of the abusive bullshit from getting made fun of by coworkers for wanting to cycle to work to people shouting abuse at me to having things thrown at me and people actively trying to murder me with their stupid death machines.

And I have always wanted an ebike. I've wanted a good ebike for decades now. I knew they would be amazing to be able to have some power assist on a bicycle that was silent and far less polluting than anything gas powered.

I've been watching the development of ebikes from super niche, kludgy hacks involving DIY motors and heavy lead acid batteries to where we are today with modern batteries and brushless motors.

Today I'm about to hit 4000 miles on my DIY x-class ebike and I love it. I'm getting old and my knees are sore and tired. it extends my range, flattens hills, let's me carry more cargo and weight, makes getting groceries easier.

I also have long covid and ME/CFS symptoms and issues I'm dealing with after getting my ebike, so it's been really useful for keeping me mobile.

And riding my bike is pretty much the only thing I actively enjoy doing any more, post pandemic. It's good for my mind, body and soul.

I also ride even more than ever. I love being able to just take off and go for joy rides. It's amazing to be able to not have to think about vertical gains and geography and just go exploring place I wouldn't have gone normally on a regular bike because of how ebikes simply erase hills. Yesterday it finally rained after a long, hot dry summer and put on my rain suit, packed up my panniers with my camp stove, some food and water and extra layers and I rode off into the woods to enjoy some hot miso soup and a nice sandwich under some dripping cedars.

This technology is revolutionary. Bicycles were already one of the most efficient forms of transportation ever invented. Adding an efficient electric motor and battery to a bicycle may be one of the most revolutionary developments in transportation since the advent of the wheel, the bicycle itself as well as the whole concept of powered transportation.

At local electricity prices my ebike battery costs somewhere between 5 and 10 cents to charge fully, and I can get somewhere between 30-80 miles out of my battery per charge depending on how much I pedal, how much cargo I'm carrying and how many hills I have to climb. That price per mile is so ridiculously cheap it's practically a rounding error. It's probably even cheaper than the cost of food and calories to ride an unpowered acoustic bike the same kind of miles or terrain.

My DIY mid-drive conversion ebike is a very nice bicycle first, and an ebike second. I could convert it back to an acoustic bike in about an hour. All I would have to do is put a normal bottom bracket and crank back on it and it's just a nice touring/adventure kind of bicycle.

And my ebike is technically not legal or is quasi legal even in the US - and this is lame and I want to talk about it.

So, I have a Bafang BBSHD mid drive system with ta 52V battery that's about 1200 watts nominal and over 2000 watts peak. That's something like 2-4 horsepower at the crank. The stock 48V BBSHD puts out like 160 nm of torque and it's one of the most powerful DIY mid-drive systems you can get. It makes Bosch/Trek or Shimano Steps mid drives look/feel like underpowered toys even though it's a fraction of the price.

And this on a steel touring bike frame with skinny 700x35c touring tires and no suspension. It also has a throttle. It can easily hit 30 MPH on a smooth dirt or gravel trail without pedaling. A couple of times I've had it up to about 45+ on a nice, smooth road and a downhill - which isn't the fastest I've gone downhill on an acoustic bike.

Is having a throttle dangerous, lazy, or cheating? No, not really. Having a throttle is actually incredibly useful as a tool. It's really handy for navigating sketchy terrain like a slippery road or path where there's sand or loose gravel, or even snow, because I can focus on negotiating that terrain without pedaling at the same time. It also affords more safety when riding in traffic with cars and getting out of harms way. I mainly only use the throttle when I need or want it for these things, or an extra boost climbing a hill.

Since my bike is an bicycle first it's designed to be pedaled, riding a bicycle without pedaling can actually be really uncomfortable and not ergonomic. On a nice, well fitted bicycle there's an ergonomic balance between your feet on the pedals, your weight on your sit bones in the saddle and your handlebars, and that balance gets weird if you're just holding still and hanging on.

Is this kind of speed and power risky? Yep. So is driving a car. Or a motorcycle. Should I be wearing a full face helmet and some armor? Probably, but I don't have a habit of crashing, and to be honest I'm not taking any risks that I wouldn't take on an acoustic bike. I've gone faster on a regular bike just bombing steep roads and falling like a brick because I've always been heavy.

Would I recommend my particular diy ebike to someone who isn't as experienced with riding a bicycle? Oh, hell no. I've been riding dirt, commuting and doing silly, risky things on bicycles my entire life. My particular bike is like the ebike version of something between a rally racing car or an SUV. It's spicy and has no chill. It has enough power that if you set it to max power in a low gear that it can easily pop a wheelie if you hammer the throttle and give the handlebars a bit of a tug. You have to lean forward into the acceleration a bit, not unlike a motorcycle.

In practice I don't often go that fast, and on trails I use the lowest power settings and often even have my speed limiter set to 15-20 just to keep it chill. When I'm riding on mixed use trails I'm not zooming past people. In practice I pass people even slower than I did on acoustic bikes because I care a lot less about conserving speed and momentum and it doesn't cost me anything at all to slow down, pass safely and zoom off again when the path is clear.

In practice I mainly use all of that power and torque for hauling groceries and cargo up and down hills.

While I'm definitely bragging about my particular ebike, I'm bringing all of this up to make a point that many ebike regulations are ridiculous, especially the EU limitations of 250 W ebikes and banning throttles.

We don't put these kinds of power restrictions on cars and trucks. Almost every car or truck you can buy today has way more power than it needs and can easily exceed speed limits by vast amounts. Fans of cars and car culture would lose their minds if their cars were limited to 50-100 horsepower or had mandatory built in speed limiters or worse, acceleration limiters.

If you're in favor of these extremely restrictive power limits for ebikes, why aren't you concerned about it with cars or trucks that kill and main way, way more people and cause so much more environmental and cultural damage?

Would you accept a car that couldn't accelerates fast enough to merge with highway traffic? Or that had its speed reduced by as much as half or more just because you had a few days worth of groceries in the trunk? Would you accept a car that was physically incapable of exceeding 45-65 MPH at any time even if you never broke the speed limit?

Most people rightfully would not, because it would be it's own form of unsafe even if you were an absolutely perfect driver who never broke any traffic laws. You wouldn't be able to accelerate out of danger. Passing would become much less safe for everyone on the road.

Further, people come in different sizes and weights, weight carrying needs and levels of ability, and this is true of everything from regular bikes to massive cargo trucks.

EU restrictions like demanding a pedal assist only, 250 watt, 25 k/ph hard limit is, frankly, ridiculous.

250 watts would barely make a difference with my size and weight and cargo needs on the hills around here. And exceeding 15 MPH on normal bikes is really common anyway, on road or off or on mixed use or trails.

And I'm totally ranting and losing my plot because I love bicycles and ebikes.

What else can I say?

I have also not experienced very much static about cheating or whatever. It might help that my bike is a normal bike, first. It might also be that I look and ride like a normal cyclist. Another part may be that my bike is often carrying cargo and panniers. Part of it might also be that I'm just physically large and people tend to refrain from giving me a piece of their mind and think twice about it.

Also, in the past few years the ratio of ebikes to regular bikes on my local trails has exploded. I would guess that it's gone from something like 1 ebike out of 50+ acoustic bikes to more than 50% of the bikes being ebikes in the space of 3 years or so.

I also go on semi-regular group rides where most of the bikes are analog/acoustic and there may be one or two other ebikes in a group of as much as 40 people, and it's been just fine. A lot of the times I even turn my power off completely and ride in hard mode just for the exercise and camaraderie. With the power off it's even more work than a regular bike because I'm pedaling through the motor and feels like I'm riding into a headwind or up a decent hill.

I can use my cargo carrying capacity to carry extra food and water to share with people, or more bike tools to deal with mechanical issues and more. Even when I'm riding solo my bike is practically a rolling bike shop because I think in terms of self-sufficiency like a bike tourist.

On these group rides if anything it's been an asset to have an ebike because I can do things like zoom up to the front of the pack to ask them to hold up for someone with a flat, or being able to stay and help someone with a mechanical issue and then catching up to the pack to communicate and other useful things.

Ebikes are absolutely revolutionary and they are here to stay and we need more bike infrastructure in a hurry to keep up with this revolution.
posted by loquacious at 11:27 AM on October 22, 2022 [33 favorites]


In hilly places like Seattle where I live, ebikes truly are a game changer. I don't see many class 3 or faster ebikes here, mostly class 1's and 2's, but flattening out hills with electric assist is game changing even for someone who is able bodied and considers a bicycle their primary transport like me. I used to plan my days and outings around the big hill climbs. With the electric assist, I just turn up the assist and downshift.

My road bike languishes mostly unused these days, but that's because I'm hauling two kids plus their stuff and groceries on a Tern GSD. Amusingly *no one* gatekeeps that, not MAMMILs or hipsters on fixies, but what's more encouraging is people who otherwise are taking their kids around the neighborhood in a car who see me skipping school drop-off lines and not searching for parking and want to know about it.
posted by madhadron at 11:30 AM on October 22, 2022 [8 favorites]


loquacious: We don't put these kinds of power restrictions on cars and trucks.

That's right. And I think we should.
posted by Too-Ticky at 11:31 AM on October 22, 2022 [8 favorites]


what's more encouraging is people who otherwise are taking their kids around the neighborhood in a car who see me skipping school drop-off lines and not searching for parking and want to know about it.
Yeah, I’ve had multiple people per week stop and ask me questions about my e-bike while I’m locking it up or walking it on the sidewalk. There seems to be a huge amount of latent demand. As the bikes get better and more affordable and people learn more about them, I expect them to keep spreading rapidly for quite a while.
posted by mbrubeck at 11:40 AM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]


We don't put these kinds of power restrictions on cars and trucks.
...
That's right. And I think we should.


Agreed! Meanwhile there's a question on the green part of this very site right now about buying a Tesla purely for the acceleration because the asker has the "zoomies." People are buying cars with the not just the ability to go 0-60 in 4s but as the full-on REASON to buy them -- and with the intent to do so on public roads where that kind of weight, speed, and acceleration can and will kill people.

Arguing about the definitions of e-bike vs moped vs whatever and where they are allowed is just mucking around in the margins, meanwhile the actual dangerous vehicles, electric and otherwise, get billions in subsidized infrastructure. I know everyone in this conversation knows this but I just have to say it.
posted by misskaz at 11:46 AM on October 22, 2022 [16 favorites]


My knees fucking love e-bikes.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 12:02 PM on October 22, 2022 [4 favorites]


The problem is that current bike infrastructure is primarily designed for something the size, weight and speeds of conventional bicycles.

My counter argument to this is, well, me. Even on a regular bike with a load of groceries or a bike touring load my total curb weight can be in the ballpark of pounds. I'm heavy, I ride heavy bikes, and I've had 50 to nearly 100 pounds of camping gear, food and water on a bike.

Excess speed is a problem, too, but on my local mixed use trails and roads there's some hills where you could hit 30-40 MPH on child-sized push scooter just by letting go of the brakes and sending it.

The problem isn't the technology, it's the behavior. I'm all for regulating unsafe behavior.

And consider the off-street recreational paths, where the path is shared with pedestrians, strollers, mobility assist scooters, and sometimes horses.

And yet we think it's perfectly normal to put sidewalks (or none at all) along roads and then have endless tons of metal flying past people at 50+ MPH or making them walk across crosswalks of eight lane four way traffic.

Anyway, yep, that's my local trails. I regularly encounter all of the above, including horses. Horses scare the shit out of me and I will never pass one without stopping to ask permission to pass because frankly getting kicked in the face while zooming by sounds like a bad time for everyone including the horse.

While this is me and my anecdotal history and experience - I have always been a safe, polite cyclist. I ask to pass horses. I am very careful and concerned about the safety of others and recognize hazards like children running amok all over the trail and being kids, off leash dogs and pedestrians or joggers wearing headphones and unresponsive to bells.

Bicycles are instruments of joy for me and I wouldn't be able to live with my bike or my riding hurting anyone else, and I never have and hope I never will.

And while I have always observed trail rules and have always slowed to safe passing speeds, in practice with my ebike I even slow down way more when passing. Like walking speeds or slower. I recognize that my ebike is heavier, is more dangerous and there are extra hazards, such as accidentally hitting the throttle or pedal assist in a crash

And frankly? I love being able to operate it safely like this and is it's own kind of joy. With power assist it makes it much more pleasant and less, well, irritating to lose momentum or effort to slow down. With power assist it's all cruise mode at any speed.

We bar regular ICE motorbikes and scooters from these routes because they are too big and too fast (as well as being noisy and polluting). The size and speed of electric motorbikes is still a problem on such paths.

Sure, no arguments about the noise and pollution, but again on a grocery run I probably weigh more than someone lighter on a Sur Ron without cargo and have a significant fraction of the watts of a Sur Ron.

And to be honest I'd say yes to twice the watts I have right now on the same or similar bike. It wouldn't really change my riding habits or top end speed or mindfulness. It would just mean I had more hill/cargo capacity and more range.

And something like a Sur Ron is a motocross bike, electric or not, and they will tear up and damage mtn bike trails, not to mention being far faster than mountain bikes.

True, but unpowered MTBs can also tear up trails especially when practicing bad trail etiquette like skidding or riiding in mud, and go just as fast as a Sur Ron down hill.

I'm not really advocating for emotos and scooters to be given access to mixed use trails, here.

Yeah, I don't like how they look on bike trails, either. I even have a beat up old e-scooter that someone gave me compete with plastic fairings, a big old cushy scooter seat and scooter handlebars and vestigial pedals. The battery is mostly dead so it's less than useless, but I would never ride it on the local trails even though it's technically more legal than my DIY BBSHD simply because it looks like a big dumb scooter and as a life long cyclist it just feels gross and transgressive to me.

This scooter has less than half the power of my ebike. In the US my DIY ebike is technically x-class, but just a bit over class 3 or so.

My counterpoint is that it's the watts/power limits that are ridiculous and short-sighted. I get it, it is/was new technology and we don't have an easy way to try to classify ebikes.

This should be about behavior.

And in particular it should really be about the lack of bicycle infrastructure, and the fact that the only way we can get these kinds of mixed used trails built at all is an uneasy truce and coalition between cyclists, equestrians and pedestrians that shouldn't necessarily be sharing the same paths in the first place because even with unpowered bikes it's unsafe and irritating for everyone.

And this is because cars dominate transportation.

We have to have a reasonable limit on the size and speed of ebikes allowed to share bicycling infrastructure. E-motorcycles and e-scooters - vehicles with the size and speed of their ICE counterparts - are also great transportation options, but should be restricted to conventional roads.

Conventional roads are the problem here. Even on an ICE motorcycle they're incredibly dangerous, due to cars and how people drive them and how in the US in particular our car-centric transportation is really what's causing these issues.

If you or anyone is concerned about bicycle safety or traffic safety in general we need to look less at ebike regulation and a lot more at the lack of cycling infrastructure and how cars absolutely dominate the landscape and have a real deep, clear look at this double standard.


Another thing I want to acknowledge is the safety issue around how many people are riding ebikes that don't really have much experience with either cycling and/or riding motorcycles. This is definitely an issue, and it has bothered me on multiple levels, like basic trail etiquette or knowing how to not blind other people with headlights that aren't adjusted well.

But that's also a major issues with cars, motorcycles or basically any self-piloted transportation.

There's also a related issue with people that are older riding beyond their skills or being less likely to recover from a crash, and I know this is a thing - but it's also kind of ageist and I'm not sure how to approach this? If anything younger children I think are more at risk, and in reality on the trails out here I'm definitely not seeing lots of old people having crashes or zooming around very fast on ebikes.

They're mostly riding slow, stable comfort bikes at less than 15 miles an hour and doing enjoying riding a bike around again.
posted by loquacious at 12:25 PM on October 22, 2022 [12 favorites]


e-bikes amusingly deceive me about myself, like painkillers after surgery.

Cycling up a hill I set the assist to "low" so it's a fair amount of work on my part, but I'm fairly pleased with myself because I'm doing pretty well considering I'm only getting minimal assist. So I switch off the assist entirely and OH NO! I WAS CONTRIBUTING NOTHING! THE BIKE WAS DOING EVERYTHING!
(After surgery whenever I start thinking "I'm definitely getting better, this is healing quite quickly", NOPE, that's my cue that painkillers are easing in.)

You would think I would learn
posted by Cusp at 1:09 PM on October 22, 2022 [8 favorites]


And this is because cars dominate transportation.

Which is bad, but has a back-handed good feature. When we can figure out how to grade or route separate the people who just want to, you know, transport, from people with the zoomies, all the zoomies people will choose car and leave the rest of us alone. Already being a car commuter I wish there were separate roads for "selfish people in a big rush" and "planned adequate time to relax and just drive the speed limit and be courteous to other drivers"

What I'm afraid of, is we're just recreating the car/pedestrian conflict at a lower speed. If this gets too popular, are we then going to need even more infrastructure modification for three modes, so pedestrians can still walk without wading into a impatient e-bike rider jungle? Because it isn't about the propulsion method, it's about being a selfish dick. But that's a long-away hypothetical.

Personally I'm on team "solve the theft problem and I'm fully on board". Maybe there's a business opportunity for secure check-in/check-out ebike parking garages.
posted by ctmf at 1:11 PM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]


I live in Tokyo. E-bicycles are very common here, but not really the mountain bike style, though I'm seeing more of those these days. The vast majority of people who use them are parents with kids, as the electric mamachari is totally ubiquitous, and has been for about 15 or so years. Most people in the city don't have a car, (or they have a car but literally only drive on the weekends) so these bikes make a lot of sense. Taking the kids to school and grocery shopping are mainly what they're used for. Tokyo can be quite hilly, so the power assist is a must.
posted by zardoz at 1:23 PM on October 22, 2022 [4 favorites]


I keep thinking about an ebike and almost jumped on that Rad Power Bike sale (which I kind of hope they repeat for actual Black Friday but have no idea if they will).

The reason I didn't? A few reasons: I don't have the equipment to build a bike, have no idea if my local bike shops will build it for me, and the only local option Rad Power recommends on their site involves paying one-third the price of the bike over again for a truck to come over and build it on the spot (which admittedly is very convenient). But the biggest reason by far is that I don't want to pay that amount of money and put in all that effort just to have my bike stolen in a month. Toronto is not as bad for bike thefts as it was when Igor Kenk was still roaming the streets, but I don't think it's exactly GOOD.

Which is kind of why I want an escooter as well, except that escooters are still not quite at the level where you can comfortably carry them with you wherever you go indoors. I think until we get something that I can essentially keep on my person at all times, it's going to be hard to justify paying for an ebike/escooter.
posted by chrominance at 1:26 PM on October 22, 2022 [1 favorite]



I've ridden a bike since I was seven. I ride like I'm 12 - into, over, through parking structures, empty office plazas and school campuses, for the most part on the sidewalk, always yielding to pedestrians and staying away from cars.

The idea of a significant portion of commuters using E-Bikes for work makes me happy.

People whizzing about on E-Bikes simply to avoid pedaling seems like the precursor to the floating couches in WAll-E.

Here in SoCal I regularly see groups of 12-15 yo kids with E-Bikes, I joke that they are "Electric Bike Gangs"

If I was that age, I'd be in one.
posted by mmrtnt at 2:33 PM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]


My city is flat and has temperate weather, and although it has been developed in a car-dominated way since the 1960s, about 10 years ago it began a big investment programme in cycleways.

Something that gives me great joy these days is seeing couples and groups and singleton elderly folk, grey and wrinkly and generally grinning, trundling around on the cycleways during the day. I am damn sure none of these people were riding a bike 10 years ago. I'm also sure that most of them would have opposed building them. And almost all of them are riding e-bikes.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 2:51 PM on October 22, 2022 [9 favorites]


What I'm afraid of, is we're just recreating the car/pedestrian conflict at a lower speed. If this gets too popular, are we then going to need even more infrastructure modification for three modes, so pedestrians can still walk without wading into an impatient e-bike rider jungle?
This is a valid concern but I think we already had it: the most aggressive riders I see are still the spandex bros (also the cause of the only pedestrian injury I’ve seen bike commuting since the late 2000s). E-bikes are changing that only by expanding the number of people riding regularly, and that starts to suggest the solution: cars get >90% of the public space in most of the United States and as people shift modes you could massively increase space for low-pollution vehicles by taking a single lane or telling drivers to pay for car storage.

The spatial inefficiencies are just staggering - here in DC I’ll be on a protected bike lane noticing that the adjacent 4 lanes of honking mess have fewer people than either the bike lane or sidewalk, or half of a bus. Making off-street parking the norm allows so much public space to be reclaimed to serve an order of magnitude more people, and it saves a ton of money and improves congestion, too.
posted by adamsc at 3:21 PM on October 22, 2022 [2 favorites]


I feel I should add, as far as I can tell ebikes are very common here now, but I don't see them causing any particular problems. E-scooters seem to be more dangerous to me, partly because of the form factor and poor brakes, partly because many riders seem to not have the same defensive instincts as cyclists.

Ebikes here are legally limited to 250W max output and 45kmh top speed. That could be part of the difference.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 3:34 PM on October 22, 2022


I'm in Denver, land of ebike rebates, which are a wonderful thing.Until this happened, they were always a someday when I can afford it item, and I got the best cheap ebike I could find. I live at the top of this hill that has given me grief for as long as I've ridden bikes in Denver (about 30 years). I can now get up to the top without worrying I might have an asthma attack.My bike is most definitely a bike and not a moped or more, I'm still one of the slowest cyclists on the road, on my white cruiser ebike. I don't ride it to be Lance Lightening. I'm sure people are laughing at me but fuck em, I'm not here to impress anyone. I mostly like my bike, but It's slightly to big for me, and I keep thinking about stripping it and putting the motor & bits on my acoustic bike, which is perfectly fit for me.
posted by evilDoug at 4:57 PM on October 22, 2022 [5 favorites]


What I'm afraid of, is we're just recreating the car/pedestrian conflict at a lower speed.
This seems fine? The problem with cars is speed, in particular 𝐩 = 𝑚𝐯 and the relationship between mortality and speed in collisions. E-bikes are slower and lighter than cars so the conflict might be annoying but it’s unlikely to be fatal.
posted by migurski at 5:43 PM on October 22, 2022 [4 favorites]


I agree, it's much better. But it's also a reason to think ahead and take 'motorized bike' real estate from cars, not from pedestrians. The pedestrian/bike conflict doesn't have to exist. It only does because the two are left to squabble over the remains after cars get everything they want.
posted by ctmf at 6:23 PM on October 22, 2022 [11 favorites]


If an electric bike is replacing a car, fine. Otherwise ebikes introduce inefficiency and e-waste to one of the most efficient machines ever designed.

And not to yuck anyone's yum but where I live there's almost no situation where it's a great idea to go faster on a bicycle than I can under my own power. I guess it's just not for me.
posted by aspersioncast at 7:35 PM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]


The cycling world is classist, ableist, and has more than a wee bit o' toxic masculinity in it. I've had plenty of cyclist dudes - almost always dudes - share their disdain with me about my e-bike. Fuck 'em.

Wee anecdote about that whole mentality.

Last time I was buying, I wanted advice about bike seats that don't affect my manly parts in a certain unpleasant way. So, to have an adult conversation about this, I went to my region's one woman-owned store. Want a bike seat that won't crush your balls? Talk to a feminist.
posted by ocschwar at 7:45 PM on October 22, 2022 [6 favorites]


I wish ebike owners who complain that all us cyclists are "snobs" and "gatekeepers" would acknowledge that ebikes are fundamentally different machines from bicycles. "Ped-elecs" or "pedal assist" ebikes are very very clever pieces of electronics that are super magical in making it feel almost exactly like you a pedaling a bike when in fact you are getting an incredible mechanized assist (even on "low" assist). So that now a couch potato on an ebike is now suddenly faster than a serious athlete on a bicycle. Even speed limited ebikes in North America are capped at a relatively blazing 20mph -- you will not find too many cyclists riding along that fast unless they are training.

Bicycles are used for transportation, leisure, and sport:

For transportation, the differences of ebikes are 100% positive, I loved my ebike for schlepping my kids to school for 6 years before they started riding that on their own bikes. E-bikes also make long distance commuting without of a car a lot more viable, and make even small distance travel more accessible in places with a lot of hills. I want to see millions of ebikes out on the roads to force our city planners put accommodations for non-automobile traffic everywhere.

For leisure riding, I want to see more places that people can safely ride their ebikes without me having to rely on their good judgement to not ride as fast as possible, but the ease of getting up to speed on them definitely mean a lot of people have had bad interactions with people on ebikes on "non-motorized" paths and trails. The ebike categories in the US with speeds of 20mph and 28mph were definitely driven by the manufacturer, without a lot of regard to this -- the EU limit of 25kph is a lot more reasonable.

As for sport, you just need to recognize that ebiking is not the same sport cycling. Some people cycling for sport are going to be open to having ebikes on their group rides, and some aren't, ask first before you show up.
posted by 3j0hn at 8:00 PM on October 22, 2022 [2 favorites]


I have many thoughts about e-bikes (I own and ride one myself!) But I come with some advice: if you buy a DTC (direct to consumer) e-bike, PLEASE have it assembled or tuned up by a local bicycle mechanic.

I see all kinds of build and assembly problems on DTC bikes that a bike tech could solve in a few minutes. Most are ride-quality issues but some are safety issues as well.

So please, budget some additional money to get your new bike tuned/inspected by a local mechanic. It's worth the money.
posted by workerant at 8:21 PM on October 22, 2022 [3 favorites]


And not to yuck anyone's yum but where I live there's almost no situation where it's a great idea to go faster on a bicycle than I can under my own power. I guess it's just not for me.

People don’t just use e-bikes to go fast. I have an injury that means I can’t ride more than a mile or two on an acoustic bike (heh) without pain, but I can do the 14 mile round trip commute on my e-bike (pedal assist) just fine. It’s been life changing for me.

And I actually go slower in some cases than regular bikes - I often get overtaken on downhills by ordinary people on ordinary bikes, because my speed is capped at 20 mph.
posted by sizeable beetle at 8:37 PM on October 22, 2022 [8 favorites]


Yeah, according to my computer I’m averaging 12 mph (19 km/h) on my ebike rides, which is considerably slower than I could go under my own power. But the ebike lets me do things like carry cargo up and down Seattle hills without working myself to the limit just for a run to the store.
posted by mbrubeck at 9:35 PM on October 22, 2022 [5 favorites]


Where I live ebikes are pretty common, but the people going too fast on paths and busting through pedestrians and generally being inconsiderate are almost always middle aged dudes in lycra on road bikes.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:28 PM on October 22, 2022 [9 favorites]


I’ve never ridden an ebike, and it’s been quite a while since I rode my acoustic bikes, but one of the things I loved about riding around in Seattle in the winter is that I never got cold.

I could ride in a cold, driving December rain for hours soaked to skin and not feel it at all; I was standing outside a store under the eaves next to the bike rack letting myself drip off a little because it’s embarrassing to look back down an aisle and realize you’ve left a glittering trail, and some kid said to me as he was going in 'do you realize you’re actually steaming?'

And the one time in my life I actually got frostbite despite playing in the snow for hours on freezing and even subzero days as a kid, and lots of snow camping in high mountains during the winter in college, was coasting down a long not at all steep hill after sunset on a very rare 15° F Seattle evening. I was so clueless my partner had to tell me why the right side of my face was painful to the touch when we got up the next morning.

I don’t think I could have tolerated those cold wet days on an ebike.
posted by jamjam at 11:49 PM on October 22, 2022


I am confident that if solar e-assist technology had been available in the early car era, we wouldn't have cars today. They'd be a niche hobby for a handful of people.

I've quoted this before, but I think it's appropriate for this conversation:
The principle is simple: If the cargo weighs more than the vehicle itself - as in a person riding a bicycle - then you are approaching true efficiency. The trick is to have a vehicle/cargo ratio of LESS THAN 1.

Person riding a bicycle: 30 lb. bike / 150 lb. person = .20 YES

Truck Trike: 250 lb. vehicle / 750 lb. cargo plus driver = .33 YES

Automobile carrying 2 passengers: 3000 lb. vehicle weight / 300 lb. passengers = 10 NO
When I lived in Portland, getting downtown was always a problem. I could do it, but coming back was hard on my knees. I didn't even think it was that hilly, so it took me a while to connect the dots. I bus/MAX commuted to my downtown job mainly for that reason. I'd rather be biking.

Last year, my partner practically forced a class 1 solar e-bike on me. He was worried (reasonably) about my knees. My most favorite thing about e-bikes is getting through infinitesimally short lights at absurdly-huge intersections before the light turns red when I'm like 1/4 of the way through the intersection. The ability to go up and down hills at the same speed, and to keep pace with all the normal people who bike without e-assist is fun. It has increased my radius, which also makes it easier to live in a car-centric society. I am less afraid of the terrifying car-centered roads (that kill people! I lived in Portland, and every. single. road. that I was afraid to ride on had someone die on it while I lived there), which is nice because I don't use planes, trains, buses, or cars, and the terrifying roads are frequently the only option.

Get rid of the cars and you've made most of my personal use cases for the e-assist obsolete. Except my knees. My knees fucking love e-bikes. I want that on a bumper sticker.
posted by aniola at 1:00 AM on October 23, 2022 [6 favorites]


Want a bike seat that won't crush your balls? Talk to a feminist.

I know of a feminist bike shop that has a saddle library and while I'm glad they're filling a need, I just want to shout it from the rooftops: RECUMBENT BICYCLES. Upright bikes are engineered to be simple mechanical works of beauty. Recumbent bicycles are designed to serve the ergonomic interests of the human riding them.

Oh, and win all the races, which is why they were banned from the UCI bike races like a hundred years ago. I will admit that I don't have any personal experience with balls, but I can tell you that most people who ride recumbents are older men, or so I was informed when I was like 20.

An aside, on gender and bikes: Perceived gender is actually a trait that gets counted in the Portland bike counts (pdf) (they know they're wrong, but I think they do it because they're working off research publications that assume a gender binary, I still think they should just add a third "everyone else/uncertain" column or at the very least experiment with it and see what happens), and it's because gender balance is an indicator of the perceived safety of the biking infrastructure.

I parked bikes in downtown Portland for several years. E-bikes were most common as an assistive device ("this trip would not be possible without this e-bike") and to haul children. Bicyclists have kids, and instead of trading their bikes in for cars, they trade their bikes in for e-bikes.

I don’t think I could have tolerated those cold wet days on an ebike.
The #1 down side to recumbents is that my cables or cable housing or something lasts like five minutes before my shifters start getting so sticky they require serious wrenching, which is a serious problem when it's so cold out my hands can't force the shifters to change gears. I've resolved this by moving somewhere warmer, but there's got to be a better answer! I just don't know what it is. There's this really cool weight-based automatic shifting system I saw on a wheel once, but it was ancient technology and seemed impractical.


Oh! I saw recently a solar e-bike with motorcycle turning lights. The rider said it made him feel safer making turns on car-heavy roads after dark.

Yeah, I’ve had multiple people per week stop and ask me questions about my e-bike while I’m locking it up or walking it on the sidewalk.

I ride a solar e-recumbent with a dog side-basket. I literally cannot exist a grocery store car parking lot without multiple people stopping me. I hope to live on a planet (not to be confused with a bubble) where unusual bikes are so boringly everyday anywhere cars used to dominate that nobody stops me with questions.
posted by aniola at 1:13 AM on October 23, 2022 [4 favorites]


I know of a feminist bike shop that has a saddle library and while I'm glad they're filling a need, I just want to shout it from the rooftops: RECUMBENT BICYCLES.

I haven't used a recumbent bike but apparently the price you pay for that reclining comfort is more difficulty climbing hills. The crankshaft positioned far forward of the center of gravity makes it harder; with a regular bike you can lean forward, and even better stand on the pedals, using your body weight and center of gravity.

But if your commute is flat, like Amsterdam or Chicago, it's much much easier, no matter the type of bike. E-bikes are best for a) acceleration from a standstill and b) assistance going uphill. If you are biking on a flat surface at a comfortable cruising speed, if you turn on the power assist it won't do anything (though there are some types that are not power assist--they are full power drives and will give a boost no matter what, but I think those kinds are rare). So e-bikes make a lot more sense in a hilly place than flat.
posted by zardoz at 1:48 AM on October 23, 2022 [1 favorite]


I don’t want to sound alarmist, and I don’t think this is something most people need to worry about, and the proliferation of e-bikes and scooters is a good thing, but it presents a risk of lithium battery fires. I’m wondering if there are any cities that have come up with a good solution for preventing or dealing with that.

I live in a neighborhood that’s home to a lot of delivery workers and there have been a series of battery fires over the past year, including one that emptied out an apartment building on my block. The fires are difficult to put out because they’re self-sustaining.

The vehicles in question are workhorses that are commonly used for 12+ hours every day, so they wear out and need repairs and aftermarket replacement parts in a way that bikes that are used recreationally or for commuting don’t.

I feel like the city should begin building secure and fireproof parking/charging stations where people can store their bikes overnight so that they don’t have to charge batteries in their home. We provide an unbelievable amount of infrastructure for cars, but almost nothing for e-bikes. That might change, but in the meantime the city is considering banning the vehicles outright.

Anyone know if other cities have grappled with this issue and come up with solutions for it?
posted by evidenceofabsence at 6:00 AM on October 23, 2022 [1 favorite]


NYC banning e-bikes would be criminal. They're literally work vehicles here, and the people annoyed by them are the same people served by them.

In this city, it seems that e-bikes caught on first as the lightweight and relatively inexpensive food delivery vehicle of choice. At this point they're a minimum requirement for that work. People get mad about the speed and occasional sidewalk riding, but I really doubt they'd like to see a return to slower delivery times, colder food, and smaller delivery radii.

They used to bother me, but the thing is, those riders are on that bike hours a day, minimum. They know how to scoot around quickly in a way that won't hurt anyone. Startle, maybe, but being startled isn't a wreck.

Where I see more problems is inexperienced riders hopping on the electric ride share bikes (Citi and others). I watched a citibike t-bone a car recently...

I agree some differentiation in terminology, and infrastructure would be great, but I'm happy to see more people on bikes, and I hope the electric boost means more will stick with it long enough to move from dangerous novice rider I try to give a wide berth to, into experienced, well practiced bike commuting pros.

I wish the Copenhagen wheel had been more successful - I'd love a clean looking system like that. Current tech is too ugly for me to want to break up the lines of my bike.
posted by jellywerker at 6:20 AM on October 23, 2022 [1 favorite]


I don’t think I could have tolerated those cold wet days on an ebike.
In our experience the reverse is true: my heart rate profile stayed the same, I just got there faster or, when carrying ~80lbs additional child & baggage train, the same time as I had been riding solo on a much lighter bike. In the winter, it’s really nice reducing your total time outside and that made the difference for my wife & I being year-round commuters.
posted by adamsc at 6:39 AM on October 23, 2022


I went to climb a hill and it felt as if a giant had gently placed his hand on my back and pushed me forward. - Craig Mod

I love road bikes for flat terrain, but I'd exactly this same experience renting an ebike for going 400m (1300ft) up a hill, and bought a mountain ebike within two moths. If you live by nice but big hills then you need one.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:50 AM on October 23, 2022 [1 favorite]


I rode an ebike once and my experience was almost the same as Mod's as it was a rental mamachari in Kyoto. It was really fun and if more people had a test ride like that they'd probably get one themselves. With an ebike you can pretty much do all local single person trips that people would otherwise use a car for so we definitely need more of them on the streets.

A year and a half ago I went out for a long ride and on the way I spotted someone leaving their house with their kids on a Rad Power cargo bike and I'd just read article about them that week. I asked her about it and we had a good 15 minute talk about the bike and how she likes it.

At some point I could see myself getting one but there are probably additional regular bikes I'd like to get first. My main problem for using one for things like errands is why I don't use my regular bike for them - they're great for going places but I can never leave them out of my sight for fear of getting stolen. Cities and property owners need to invest in secure storage otherwise so that every trip isn't a loop that starts and finishes at a person's house.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 6:58 AM on October 23, 2022 [4 favorites]


I see rather a lot of commenters saying cycling hurts their knees, which causes no end of alarm in me.  Barring existing physical issues, riding a bike should not hurt.

This is something I've posted in other forums:  Knees really shouldn't be hurting unless one is either habitually pedaling in too hard a gear, or more likely not in the best position.  Posture too can make a difference, partly because it adjusts where your knee is in relation to the pedal.

As a general rule, if the pain comes:

From the front -- Saddle may be too low or too far forward.
From the back -- Saddle may be too high, or too far back.
From the interior side of the knee -- Toes may need to point in a touch if you're using clipless
From the outside of the knee -- Toes may need to go out a bit.

I ran across these rules of thumb a while back and they've been invaluable reference for me over the years.   And seriously, if your knees hurt when you ride, adjust your position.   A centimeter or less can be the difference between sharp pains when you need to push harder or general aches from riding, and a carefree ride.

I've long been a proponent of bike riding to rescue knees, not destroy them.  I absolutely wrecked my left knee as a thirteen-year-old, to the extent that—in retrospect—I should have gone to hospital, and paid the price for the next 12 years with random aches so bad they'd bring tears to the eyes.  Took up cycling, strengthened the muscles on either side of the knees, and have—quite literally—never had another episode in the subsequent 28 years.  Cycling can genuinely be good for your knees, but you have to put in the effort to dial in your bike.
posted by los pantalones del muerte at 7:03 AM on October 23, 2022 [11 favorites]


^ ^ ^ Great comment.

I'm no athlete but from my teen-age obsession with bikes, I learned early about the benefits of higher cadence. So even on casual rides (....ok, most of my riding is casual these days), I usually spin those pedals at 80+ rpm. It's kinder to the knees. And yes my bikes have been set up carefully, especially seat to bottom of pedal stroke.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:32 AM on October 23, 2022 [1 favorite]


I haven't used a recumbent bike but apparently the price you pay for that reclining comfort is more difficulty climbing hills.

With recumbents, you don't have to stand. You can push into the seat and generate more force than you should, just like you can by standing up on an upright. The correct answer to hills for both recumbents and uprights is better gearing.
posted by aniola at 9:48 AM on October 23, 2022 [2 favorites]


+1 recumbents. A few months ago I bought a recumbent trike with an e-assist for bike commuting. I own a car, and like driving, but sitting in bay area traffic is terrible, and also climate crisis. I own a bike (Trek FX hybrid), and like biking, but 14 miles each way is too far for me to comfortably ride, and also go to meetings / exist in the same space as other human beings without access to a shower. So why a recumbent trike? I thought they looked cool, honestly. I do find taking corners at speed is (predictably) harder on the trike, but not having to figure out how to launch from a stop seemed like a win. Besides, I've got other vehicles for that! As a car-owning recumbent e-bike rider I have probably positioned myself squarely in the center of "everyone has a reason to look down on me," but eh! I show up at work not too sweaty, having gotten a moderate workout instead of smelling like I'd just biked beyond the limits of my endurance, or burning half a gallon of petrol. I'll take it.
posted by Alterscape at 9:55 AM on October 23, 2022 [1 favorite]


Some thoughts on not hurting your knees and recumbents:

If you're newly on a recumbent, you'll want your pedals in closer to the seat than you would have them for an upright. Look up tips for leg placement in canoeing or kayaking. I haven't done that myself and I don't remember which, I got my advice straight from a canoer or a kayaker that was very helpful when I was new to recumbents. I had been bike touring on my first recumbent for a week and I was like 20 and my knees were doing really poorly and I was like, "this is not right, maybe I'm not cut out for long distance bike rides, that would be surprising and sad" and then the person suggested that thing about moving the pedals and seat closer together, and that knee pain cleared up in a couple days.

Recumbents are typically designed by and for men. I have wide hips. That might be some of the source of my knee pain. But the tradeoff is that everything else is waaaay more ergonomic than with an upright and it is so worth it. I think changing out the crank arms helped, but I forget which length crank arm. There are probably more things I could do to try to optimize this but hey, now I ride an e-trike and it is no longer a problem!

The other thing you should know about recumbents is you're supposed to "spin" more than you would with an upright. My partner (with whom I have put many miles on a recumbent tandem) says I have a tendency to prefer gears that are too high (even when I'm trying not to). Also I just reeeally don't enjoy pedaling that fast.

Riding an ebike has compensated so that I don't have to be the perfect ideal of how you Should Ride (which was never going to happen, I was just going to keep on riding wrong and on bikes built by/for men) AND my knees don't hurt!
posted by aniola at 10:14 AM on October 23, 2022 [2 favorites]


First, may I rail against the absurdity of current e-bike regulations in the US? I don't know what the rationale is, but defining Class 1 as a 20mph pedal-assist and Class 2 as 20mph with a throttle is ridiculous. As far as I can tell, it's just based on how closely the riding experience resembles an acoustic bike, which is pretty pointless.

I have a throttle on my cargo trike in addition to pedal-assist because it's useful when I want to zip through a short green light while heavily loaded, or climb a short-but-steep hill, without having to turn up the pedal assist. Also because nobody makes analog control levers for regenerative braking yet, which means I need the throttle for regen modulation.

I don't care if other people use a throttle, because a bike going 15mph is going to hit me just as hard in a crash either way. I DO care if the bike is instead going 20mph, because speed is one of the primary determining factors in crash safety. (If you're about to say "But people use throttles to accelerate too fast" please note that an ebike's acceleration curve has nothing to do with whether it is throttle-controlled or exclusively pedal-assist.) I keep the assist on my cargo trike limited to ~15mph, which is plenty for my purposes and pretty consistent with how I ride un-assisted on a lighter bike.

Furthermore, pedal-assist (especially the nice torque-sensing kind) is more technically challenging to implement. That means cheaper bikes are most often throttle-controlled, and thus Class 2. Some places restrict trail use to only Class 1 ebikes - which means that if you can only afford the absolute cheapest ebikes, you're banned from the trails.

I would love to see Class 1 become "15mph limit" with Class 2 being "20mph limit" and no mention of throttles.

I haven't used a recumbent bike but apparently the price you pay for that reclining comfort is more difficulty climbing hills.

NOOOOOoooo! Please let this misconception finally die. This may have been true a decade ago, but: (1) It has noting to do with inability to stand on the pedals. As aniola explains, you can generate way too much force on a 'bent by pushing back against the seat - probably more than you can by standing on the pedals of an upright. And (2) recumbent frames have gotten stiffer and lighter (at least some of them). And (3) front-whee-drive moving-bottom-bracket bikes like CruzBike eliminate the long chain and are extremely efficient for climbing. And (4) it's really all a moot point anyway when you put e-assist on it.

aniola: Recumbents are typically designed by and for men. I have wide hips. That might be some of the source of my knee pain.

It's true that the recumbent world may have an even worse gender imbalance than the rest of cycling. But! If hip-width is the issue it probably isn't related to the frame design, and would be addressed by changing the cranks or bottom bracket to give a different Q-factor (horizontal distance between pedals).
posted by sibilatorix at 1:37 PM on October 23, 2022 [3 favorites]


People whizzing about on E-Bikes simply to avoid pedaling seems like the precursor to the floating couches in WAll-E.

It's definitely not. Just staying upright on a bicycle is a fair amount of a workout. I rarely see anyone not pedaling an ebike, and there's a lot of people riding ebikes that are getting more exercise than they would normally.

Also, bicycles in general are so efficient that unless you're training and racing, touring or climbing serious altitude they aren't that much exercise to begin with. It's more efficient and less exercise than walking. You have to put in serious miles at speed to burn significant calories on a bicycle.

If you're a casual cyclist just cruising around at low speeds and doing light errands you're probably getting more exercise walking into a store and carrying a bag of groceries out of it.

The only time I've ever lost weight on a bicycle was on extended bicycle tours, and most of that effort was hauling a load, the significant effort of setting up and striking camps and just generally being cold and outside burning more calories than normal.

Beyond myself I know plenty of active cyclists who are overweight, and cyclists call riders like me "clydesdales". I have big ol' ham legs and I've been like that since I was a kid. It's great for sprints or mashing up a hill, and even better for falling like a brick down hill, but not so great for endurance riding at speed.

It's awesome for descending, though. I basically never use power from my ebike descending a hill and on the casual party-style group rides I go on I "win" on descents every time just by riding a well tuned, efficient bike, letting go of the brakes and being comfortable at high speeds while much lighter and skinnier riders have to put their bike into high gear and crank on it to keep up.

On personal rides I even make this into a game like hypermiling a car for maximum fuel/energy efficiency. I know my trails so well that I know exactly how much speed and momentum it takes to coast up and over a hill and keep rolling. There's a high point on my local trail where I basically don't have to pedal or use any power assist at all once I start coasting down hill.

I see rather a lot of commenters saying cycling hurts their knees, which causes no end of alarm in me. Barring existing physical issues, riding a bike should not hurt.

Yeah, this is mostly true. I mean my knees are shot from injuries, biking and walking my whole life and skateboarding.

But like a lot of details about cycling bike fit is total mystery to a lot of people and this has a lot to do with the gatekeeping in a lot of mainstream bike shops focused on racing and high performance bicycles.

I can't even count the number of stories (especially involving women in bike shops) where people were treated like shit because they weren't the right kind of cyclist with an expensive enough bike.

And a professional bike fitting and tuning session can cost a significant fraction of the price of a decent used or new utility or hybrid comfort bike that doesn't suck, and most bike shops that do professional fittings aren't catering at all to someone who just wants a good, basic bike and so they're left to figure it out on their own.

It's taken me years and years to learn how to fit and size my own bikes and troubleshoot ride comfort. I'm still dialing in my seat and cockpit positions on my new bike I built from the frame up, and I'm someone who can build a bike from a totally naked frame set with little more than hand tools and do everything short of custom wheel builds, which is a black magic that still eludes me for some reason.

This is also a major issue with pre-built ebikes.

A lot of these off the rack and affordable ebikes would be what we call Bike Shaped Objects in the cycling world if they didn't have power. They come in limited size ranges, with bare entry level components in the drive train and brakes and cockpit, they're heavy as fuck and they aren't in general very well built or designed by modern bicycle standards, and by modern I'm talking like good 1980s era steel frames on up to today.

If these bikes didn't have power assist with big cushy seats and fat tires they would be a lot less comfortable to ride and the power assist covers up a lot of bike fit and ergonomic defects.

I'm very thankful I know how to build bikes and work on my own bike. Starting with a properly sized frame and style of bike that I already love with or without power and then adding power to it is a huge win because it makes it insanely efficient. My ebike is a good bicycle first and a great ebike second.

If an electric bike is replacing a car, fine. Otherwise ebikes introduce inefficiency and e-waste to one of the most efficient machines ever designed.

A lot of these ebikes are replacing cars, or at least replacing many miles of car usage or allowing people to become signal-car households and more.

The most "wasteful" part of an ebike as it is right now is the Lithium Ion battery and that's changing soon. There are new battery chemistries available now like LiFePo that are less toxic and more recyclable than Li-Ion 18650 or related cells. Solid state batteries are coming really soon, too, and entering mass production. As are graphene batteries.

And I'm hoping that by the time I use up my current battery, I'll be able to afford and find something like a LiFePo or Graphene battery in the same capacity and about half the size and weight. This is pretty much already possible right now.

Putting aside the issues of the battery, there's not really that much e-waste in an ebike. There's the motor core which is just magnets and copper wire. There's the wiring harness, which is just copper wire in insulation and it's about as complicated as a handful of USB cables. There's the motor controller board or unit, which is usually a handful of power mosfets and resistors and isn't insanely complicated. Then there's the display/computer and head unit, which is less complicated than an iPod and vastly less complicated than a smartphone or apple Watch other advanced modern tech.

Outside of the battery most of it is readily recycled copper and metal by weight.

With regards to riding efficiency, one of my only complaints about my particular mid-drive ebike is that without power it's a lot more effort to pedal, and this could easily be solved by adding a magnetic clutch to disengage the crank arm spindle from the rest of the drive so it has an active two-way clutch or freewheel. It would be awesome if I could take off the battery and pedal it like a normal bike instead of having to pedal through the magnetic and mechanical resistance of the motor core.

I’ve never ridden an ebike, and it’s been quite a while since I rode my acoustic bikes, but one of the things I loved about riding around in Seattle in the winter is that I never got cold ... I don’t think I could have tolerated those cold wet days on an ebike.

I'm an all-seasons rider, rain or shine, hot or cold, and this is actually one of the best parts about riding an ebike!

In cold and wet I don't have to manage my layers and worry about sweating out or overdressing, or stopping to shed or don layers. I can just suit up in my rain suit and thermal base layers and go for it.

Too cold? Turn down the power or even turn it off and pedal harder.

Too hot? Turn up the power or cruise on the throttle and catch a free breeze to get your core temp back down. Rinse and repeat.

It's also fantastic in the summer when it's way too hot out. I can crank up the power or ride the throttle without pedaling and catch a free breeze.

This is also really handy and more healthy if there's wildfire smoke or major smog happening because I can keep my respiration rate lower and suck in less smokey air, or ride more comfortably with a particulate mask.

I don’t want to sound alarmist, and I don’t think this is something most people need to worry about, and the proliferation of e-bikes and scooters is a good thing, but it presents a risk of lithium battery fires. I’m wondering if there are any cities that have come up with a good solution for preventing or dealing with that.

This isn't alarmist at all, and there are very, very few vetted and tested ebike batteries out there with certification from safety testing labs. Mine is not.

This is the very real and serious danger to current ebike technologies, specifically Li-Ion 18650 cells and how they're used and when and how they are charged, and how people bring their expensive ebikes inside to keep them safe and then also end up charging them where ever they can inside.

I have spent a fair amount of time talking about ebike battery safety on various forums, and battery safety with all sorts of Li-Ion batteries isn't just an ebike problem but it's amplified by the size and quality - or lack of quality - of the battery packs being used.

The first rule is don't go cheap on purchasing your battery. There are way too many cheap and dodgy ebikes and ebike kits being sold with the cheapest possible battery packs.

If you purchase an off-the shelf ebike or a DIY kit the battery is and should be the most expensive and most important part of the system and I strongly recommend budgeting for this and to get ready for the sticker shock, especially since battery prices have increased a lot in the last couple of years due to supply chain issues.

Get your battery from a reputable dealer. EM3EV.com (aka Grin Technologies) is a known high quality builder. Lunacycle is another known good dealer, as is the bafangusadirect.com site, which is where I got my complete mid drive kit. There are a few others, but do your homework.

The second rule is to take care of your battery and charging cycles.

Protect your battery. Don't drop it, bang it up, and try really hard not to drop your bike while the battery is mounted.

Never charge a battery right after it's been used and "hot". Also never charge a cold battery that is near or below freezing. Charging during either of these temperature extremes increases the chance of dendrites forming in the battery, which is a fault that leads to internal short circuiting, which usually means thermal runaway - aka a battery fire, where one or more cells shorts internally, heats up nearby batteries and starts a chain reaction.

While it's tempting to go for the highest power, fastest charger you can afford, lower amps and slower charging is much safer and better for battery health. I went with a 3 amp charger but in hindsight I'm wishing I just went with a plain old 1 amp charger. I don't really have a need to charge my battery in less than 3-4 hours, so a 1 amp charger that would take 6-8 hours would be fine. They also make smart chargers with adjustable output and cutoff limits, like cutoffs at a percentage of full capacity or "float" voltage, which I'll talk about next.

Another battery health tactic is to never charge it to more than 90-95% capacity, and never deplete it below about 30-50%. This means buying more battery than you think you need for your total range, which is a double edged sword for both cost and total battery weight.

Another issue with batteries is that they need to be rated to have enough peak amperage output to match your ebike system. It's really easy to buy a cheap third party battery that doesn't have the amp output ratings sufficient enough for your drive system even though it uses the same kind of battery case or shape, same connectors, and same battery tray or whatever. Ideally you want a battery that has a safety factor of being able to output more amps than your ebike can draw at total peak power via the controller.

All of the above also helps get the most battery life and capacity out of a given ebike battery and is good for its health. If you're constantly running an ebike battery below 10-20% that battery isn't going to last as long as one that isn't being constantly discharged to flat or nearly flat, and your battery is too small for your needs.

The third rule is that while charging you want a safety plan.

You don't want to leave them unattended and just constantly plugged in, wither inside your home or garage or outside. However, it is usually beneficial to leave your battery on the charger after it's completed charging for a period of time of like 30-60 minutes because a good battery with a good battery management system (BMS) board inside of it will use that period of time to cycle and balance the groups of battery cells that make up the battery pack.

Remember to take your battery off the charger when it's done.

Also, if your battery has a master switch, turn it off while charging. There's some weird quirks with many ebike batteries where if the switch is left on it charges it to 100% max, but if it's off it cuts off the charger at like 90% or so.

If your battery is removable, it's a good idea to remove it for charging. In the worst case scenario it's a lot easier to move, push or drag a battery outside if it's not attached to a bicycle.

When charging indoors, keep it away from flammable objects and generally treat it like it's a can of gasoline or a bomb ready to go off, and there are a number of strategies to deal with this.

At a minimum it's a good idea to try to charge it in an open place away from the walls, fabrics, wood, refuse or other flammable objects - perhaps on a tile or concrete floor.

Even better is getting or making a battery box or bag. This can be as simple as a metal trash can with a lid, maybe a few inches of sand on the bottom as a fire break and thermal mass. They also make self-venting fireproof bags for large ebike batteries. I've also seen people use metal surplus ammunition boxes, but note that you don't want to close or seal a battery in a box because if it goes into thermal runaway it produces a lot of hot gas that needs to vent.

Keeping a large ABC and electrical fire rated fire extinguisher and leather gloves near by your charging place is a really good idea.

You can also keep a bucket of water with some salt in it near the charging station, sufficient to fully immerse the battery. When you immerse a Li-Ion battery back into water - especially salt water - it will not only cool it off and help prevent further thermal runaway and chain reaction but it also completely shorts out all of the cells in the pack and effectively dumps all of the potential electrochemical energy into the water. This, of course, completely kills the battery and it should not be attempted to rebuild or reuse the cells in the pack.


And, well, as you may imagine most people aren't aware of or following any of these rules. Especially with delivery workers who rely on ebikes they're probably not following most of these rules. They're riding their batteries hard, charging them hot to keep rolling and also likely buying multiple budget batteries to save costs.

In the articles I've seen about NYC ebike delivery gig workers there are ad-hoc or co-op ebike service stations that have developed so delivery gig workers can have a place to charge their spare batteries to keep working, and the pictures I've seen of these charging stations is total battery fire nightmare fuel where they have power strips running everywhere with racks and racks of batteries right next to each other just waiting for a chain reaction between dozens and dozens of large ebike batteries.

And I can't really blame them. They're doing hard work for pennies in adverse conditions without the infrastructure to support them and keep up with this new technology.

In an ideal ebike-friendly world we should have secure ebike storage like the fully enclosed individual bike storage garages that one can sometimes find at public transportation centers with fire management and mitigation and built in power for charging. But all over the place the same way we have parking for cars at shopping centers.

I would love to be able to pay a small fee to lock my bike up inside a secure and enclosed bike locker box that has a built in smart charger or at least a power outlet for my own charger. It should also have a hard tie down to lock and secure it inside the locker with my own lock. Bonus points if that bike locker had an alarm and an app to alert my phone about an attempted break-in or something.

It's ridiculous to me that we don't have this kind of cycling infrastructure everywhere considering how much infrastructure we have built out just for parking and fueling cars absolutely dominating the transportation landscape, especially in the US.
posted by loquacious at 2:44 PM on October 23, 2022 [13 favorites]


I love seeing old couples out on a pair of e-bikes.
I love seeing families out on cargo bikes, or cargo bikes carting groceries home.
I love seeing people commuting on bikes.
I am frequently scared shitless by novices on eMTBs flying along mixed use trails where I walk with my kids and dog. It's very hilly there, and before electrification that kept most of the bikers out. Now you've got lots of inconsiderate men (always men) flying around kicking up dust on their heavy machines.
Echoing comments from above, e-bikes are great when they replace cars or increase non-car mobility; not so great when they're displacing walkers.
I think in the US the central problem is that a certain kind of annoying man is fascinated by powerful machines. See also ridiculously large trucks on public roads.
posted by grubby at 5:21 PM on October 23, 2022 [4 favorites]


What grubby said. I work in the bike industry, I own 3 ebikes, all of them are perfectly good bikes with an e-assist added. I am always pedaling on my assisted e-bike and if the e-assist goes out I can easily keep riding. I could give two fucks about ebikes on the street. Great idea, more power to that.
It's the e-bike riders on multi-user paths that chap my knickers. I even have a checklist for dipwads on these things. Overweight too heavy frame, no helmet, wheel barrow wheels, going too fast, poor riding skills, poor situational awareness, legs do not pedal or move, 'bike' is useless without the motor running. You can read how Rad Power and other ebike manufacturers are getting sued due to riders not really understanding the dangers involved and dying in higher numbers due to this trend.
People on this thread are saying 'don't call them mopeds' but that's exactly how people use these e-wheelbarrows. The pedals are only there so they are classified as bikes on the multi user paths.
I've seen what looked like an electric low-rider motorcyclist on a bike with 8' fatties sloping down the path on his commute. People race around blind corners and take chances they would not be capable of doing on an unassisted bike.
Obviously I've been gnashing my teeth about this for awhile. I'm trying to make my peace with the people I see, stay out of trouble and now ride my acoustic bikes more just to go au naturel more often.
posted by diode at 6:12 PM on October 23, 2022 [4 favorites]


I rarely see anyone not pedaling an ebike

99% of all children with e-bikes in campgrounds in SoCal are 100% throttle riders. No point here, just a data point.

I basically never use power from my ebike descending a hill

I generate power for my ebike descending a hill. Regenerative braking, which is the best thing ever if you ask me. When I'm going down a hill above 15 mph, the brake automatically kicks in, and it takes all those extra mph I'm not going and it stores that energy in the battery for later. Hills that I used to barrel down at 40+mph because I didn't feel like riding the brake (and then have to wait for whoever I was biking with, who normally had to wait for me) ? I can now ride those hills hands-free at 15mph.

I can't even count the number of stories (especially involving women in bike shops) where people were treated like shit because they weren't the right kind of cyclist with an expensive enough bike.


I was at a tightly-packed college co-op party in the pre-pandemic era, and I had told an acquaintance that I didn't thing bike shoes were necessary. He had just informed me that all real bicyclists used them. I was about to debate him on the point when someone standing behind me pulled up to the conversation and said "you know she biked across the country, right?" - it was a very satisfying life moment.

Bike Shaped Objects

If anyone is interested in attending an upcoming workshop on changing this state of things, there's momentum around changing this, memail me for details.
posted by aniola at 7:33 PM on October 23, 2022 [5 favorites]


aniola--- have you read any of Ken Kifer's stuff? He used to rail against that kind of mentality on his webpage.
posted by drstrangelove at 3:53 AM on October 24, 2022


Almost certainly. And I've heard countless tirades on the topic. To be clear, the online workshop is not mine, just something I know about.
posted by aniola at 10:02 AM on October 24, 2022


I generate power for my ebike descending a hill. Regenerative braking, which is the best thing ever if you ask me.

Yeah, I sure wish the Bafang BBS system had regen, but that's a whole extra engineering challenge not unlike my idea about a magnetic clutch to completely disengage the motor core from the mid drive unit so you can pedal normally without power.

You would need some kind of additional lockable freewheel or freehub to drive the chain and turn the motor core into a generator, and then the mid drive unit would also need some kind of a two way lockable/unlockable pawl/clutch system so it didn't turn my drive train into what would essentially be a fixed gear drive train where the pedals move whenever the rear wheel moves.

Another option could be a dynamo hub, but most of those are of such low power because they're designed to be used on normal bikes with low moving/pedaling resistance and provide just enough power for some lights or USB for a phone and wouldn't be enough to put a dent in a large ebike battery.

And at that point I would lose a lot of the benefits of the BBS mid drive system. One of the major benefits to the BBS design is that the only real change to the host bicycle is that it replaces the bottom bracket, cranks, and deletes any front derailleur and turns it into a 1x drive.

Everything else is just a normal bike, which means if I bend or destroy a rim I don't have to have to rebuild a new wheel on a hub motor. If I want to swap out to spare wheels or rims, it's essentially just a normal bike, and any wheels or rims I want to use that fit are good to go just like any normal bike.

Another huge benefit of the BBS mid drives is that they're generally a lot more efficient than hub drives since I get a lot more torque, a wider ranger of gears and a more efficient range of power/RPM bands, and I can select and tune my gear range and derailleur hardware just like a normal bike.

I recently scored a smaller BBSHD compatible chainring at my local co-op for a few bucks, and I'm running a touring-grade cassette with a really wide gear range so my bike absolutely rips up hills compared to most ebikes, especially anything with a hub drive. It'll happily churn up a 8-10% grade with 50+ pounds of groceries and my fat butt on it with no pedaling needed.

So, I don't really need regen and I prefer the ability to coast and descend normally, but my riding style tends to favor energy conservation and "hypermiling" where I try to avoid using brakes through smart riding and thinking about brakes in terms of wasted heat and energy, as well as wear and tear on brake pads.

If I'm using my brakes at all it's because I'm either slowing down for the safety of others or controlling a really steep and usually off road descent. If I'm using them at any other time I'm not thinking ahead far enough or riding smart enough to conserve energy or I'm otherwise going too fast.

I started riding very conservatively like this after getting over an initial case of the zoomies because this DIY ebike is literally the first and only powered vehicle I've ever personally owned, so for a while when I first built it I was having way too much fun hammering on the throttle.

I have driven cars, scooters and a few dirt bikes, but a high powered ebike is it's own unique kind of awesome and fun because of how much torque it has, how it's practically silent and it's just a very magical science fiction kind of feeling because it just goes and there's no insane racket and heat from an ICE engine.

It also has the additional fun factor of how making a slow car go fast is more thrilling than a fast car going fast because it's more challenging and, well, dangerous. 30+ MPH on a bicycle is waaaay more exciting than 30+ on a motorcycle with fat tires and suspension and all that sort of thing.

Side note: I live somewhere relatively rural and remote. I'm not doing these kinds of speeds on crowded urban trails around other people or in traffic. My local trail can be so empty that some days I can do 7-10 miles without seeing another person at all. I emphatically do not put other people in danger with my bicycle, and that was true even before I had an ebike.

Anyway, I realized I was going too fast, too often, and I was going through brake pads and bike chains like they were candy, and I honestly wasn't having as much fun hanging on to a bike with skinny tires and no suspension at those kinds of speeds because it's so mentally and physically punishing.

So instead I got into this intentionally conservative and relaxed riding style and making a whole game out of it, because it's a lot more challenging and a lot more chill, and it gets me a lot more range, costs me less in the form of brake pads orchains, and even puts less wear and tear on charging cycles on my battery.

I *love* this hypermiling game. There's just something really satisfying about knowing my local trails and routes so well that I can carry just enough speed to coast and float over the tops of small hills at like 2-3 mph and use the power assist or throttle as little as possible. I take it so far that I even do things like following the cleanest possible line and using small terrain features in the road like it's a pump track, which is all things I used to do on a normal, unpowered bike just for fun and clean, efficient riding.
posted by loquacious at 1:17 PM on October 24, 2022 [4 favorites]


I live near Boston and I often take my son on a trailer on the Minuteman Bikeway. It's a straight 10 mile shot from Somerville to Bedford, with extensions all the way to Lowell, and the kid loves it, so we have gone all the way there. If you go on that path in the weekend, you'll come across a service that lends recumbent bikes to people who need them. They start out in Bedford, go some or all of the way in, and then out. And it's every kind of recumbent, including some powered with hand cranks rather than pedals. Last time I rode there I saw a lady with one leg in a stiff brace using this, and the recumbent was so low and supine it could have doubled as a medical stretcher.

On a very related note, there's a guy in my neighborhood who recently switched to an e-bike, because he also recently switched to a second-hand liver. We both live on the top of a very steep hill, and the e-bike gets him home, with his daughter on the back.

So, yeah, if you need something adaptive so you can have the sheer unmitigated joy of the world quietly rushing at you while you ride, DO IT. Or if you need to get from A to B. Fuck the haters. Mount your steed and go.

That said.. OMG, be careful. When you're on a push bike, you can go up to a serious speed where you can do yourself a mischief, but whether it's the pedaling or the act of positioning yourself at the top of a downhill, it's 10 seconds of putting yourself in the right mindset to handle the speed safely. When you're on an e-bike, a split second twist of the handlebar can give you way more torque, and way more speed, then your cerebellum is ready to handle. Take good care.
posted by ocschwar at 7:35 PM on October 24, 2022 [2 favorites]


I'm sure I will add one to my already impressive collection. Just haven 't yet. The longer I remain "analog," the more the technology matures.


The early bird gets the worm.
The second mouse gets the cheese.
posted by ocschwar at 7:46 PM on October 24, 2022 [1 favorite]


It would be fun to compare and contrast the conversations about e-bikes and e-scooters and such with the conversations about cars 100 years ago.
posted by aniola at 7:50 PM on October 24, 2022


Bikes are liberating. eBikes are liberating in a different way, particularly for folks who find long journeys on self-powered bikes difficult.

Folding bikes are equally as liberating. They take up less space in a city apartment. They can live in the trunk of your car and open up places you wouldn't otherwise explore. Some are small enough that you don't need to leave them chained to a post awaiting a thief.

Folding ebikes aren't quite there yet though, from my experience. Too heavy, but time will fix that too I hope.
posted by yorkie at 11:12 AM on October 25, 2022


Metafilter: e-wheelbarrows
posted by sammyo at 12:59 AM on October 26, 2022


e-wheelbarrows are actually a thing
posted by aniola at 1:14 AM on October 26, 2022 [2 favorites]


A million years late to the party but two thoughts on what seem to me to be common misconceptions:

1) Speed as an e-bike problem. I am currently in lousy shape. If I wanted to, it would be no trouble at all to hop on my acoustic road bike and rip along at 25+ mph on the flat (albeit not for very long in my current condition). The weight difference vs. an e-bike is negligible—the heavy part of this equation is me. I get that somebody who doesn’t ride a lot might not be the best at bike handling or situational awareness, but that changes quickly enough.

2) Knee problems. Certainly a real thing, but I suspect gear use is an issue here. One of the things that drives me nuts about Peloton is that they constantly want you riding at a very low cadence, which is not how you should ride a bike and is where you get knee problems. Use your lowest gears and spin the pedals quickly (try to aim for at least 85 rpm if you’ve got a cadence sensor). You’ll go pretty slow up a steep hill, but at least it doesn’t hurt.
posted by sinfony at 7:44 AM on October 26, 2022 [1 favorite]


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