The only issue is how do you get rid of that ridiculous looking grin on your face. You just had a huge rush, got a bit of exercise, paid nothing for parking, eight pennies for 'gas', and beat all your co-workers who were stuck in traffic. The grin is real and not a good look professionally at the office when commuting.
Thanks ebikes.ca, endless sphere forums and Sheldon Brown. True spirit of the internet.
And even if you have good and safe parking at home and at the office (great!), which will cover the vast majority of trips it still limits the usefulness of a vehicle to be so tied up.
Yes, there are solutions/mitigations/compromises. But expensive and heavy locks suck and the ever present thought in your head planning a good parking spot etc. kills the joy of it.
I still make occasional trips on the Lyft bikes, which are fine. And I've been thinking about getting another bike. But especially with e-bikes, which are much more expensive and therefore much better theft targets, I just can't sign myself up for years of fretting about theft.
I've been eyeing the Bromptons but without a commute it's harder for me to justify the cost.
How practical is this really? You bring your folding bike into the restaurant where you're eating, into the bar where you're meeting friends, into the gym (it doesn't fit into a locker), into the little corner store with narrow aisles, etc? I feel like taking the folding bike indoors can work for a commute if your office doesn't have dedicated safe bike storage, but I think it falls apart as an overall response to "I'm inhibited from using my bike as my primary transportation b/c it is an easy target of theft"
Supposing I did have one, though, what do you imagine me doing? If I know where a criminal gang has taken my bike, help me understand what you see as the next step.
I've had 6 bikes stolen in a quarter century of commuting, but I've saved about $17k over what it would have cost me to use public transit for the same period. More importantly: cycling is enjoyable, I look forward to my morning commute on a bike. Not so much with other transport options.
Besides that, the rule is to always make your bike the least attractive to steal. Use two locks eg. a ring lock through the rear wheel and a chain lock through the front wheel, frame, and attached to something stationary (so they can't through the bike in a van and break the locks later). In general it's also good to put it in places where someone would notice if anyone tries to steal the bike, but not so busy that no one would notice and feels responsibility. Bonus points (remember the 'least attractive' rule), put it in some place where there are bikes that are much easier to steal (eg. not attached to a fixed object).
But expensive and heavy locks suck and the ever present thought in your head planning a good parking spot etc. kills the joy of it.
It's also a cultural/facilities thing. Eg. in The Netherlands many cities have bike parking with supervision and nobody minds if you attach your bike to eg. a lamp post. And most cities have plenty of lamp posts, so no real planning necessary :).
If you don't want a crappy bike you are going to stand out, guaranteed, and double locks won't deter.
Lamp posts is exactly what I had in mind, you can only have one to two bikes per lamp post. So depending on your destination you have your goto and a few backups ready planned.
Yes, double locks and a lamp-post in a public place will probably be good enough during the day, it is still such a hassle.
So that’s progress at least.
I would like to see more ebikes include an integrated handlebar locks in their ebikes. Cheap and effective.
This is the most hilarious non-satire comment I've read in a while. The grin is indeed an issue
That said the ramen truck would be quite a detour if I took the fremont bridge as it's in interbay near fishermen's terminal.
Getting buzzed by an SUV or honked at a stoplight works for me
Where are you located, and what behavior of yours do you suspect these people are taking such issue that they're threatening you with their vehicles? Just being a cyclist?
Not to mention that it is impossible for some people, 1:30 with a train, 45 minutes with a car and about 3 hours with a bike, makes thr choice rather obvious.
No doubt it can be dangerous and no matter how honed my instincts are with regard to predicting how cars and pedestrians are going to act there’s always unpredictable risk, so I understand not loving that.
In another life I wish I had done a few years as a bike courier, I would have loved it.
Illegal. And suicidal.
Whether an E bike is the best form of travel is going to depend on a lot of factors. It's certainly less flexible than a car.
For one person who doesn't need to carry a lot and who lives somewhere that has dedicated bike lanes or can at least safely share the road with cars and where the weather is neither much too cold nor much too hot and there aren't daily thunderstorms, sure.
I don't mean this to be critical of E bikes or biking in general. I wish the built environment (in the U.S.) were more supportive of biking. Things like the weather are what they are, but the lack of dedicated bike lanes are a choice we made in the U.S. It can be especially bad in the suburbs and rural areas.
Personally (U.S east coast, mid-atlantic), I could reasonably use an E bike for a limited set of my trips in the spring and fall except the roads near me are hostile to bikes and there are no sidewalks in many cases. In the summer (July - Sep), an E bike isn't suitable due to heat, humidity, and on a lot of days severe thunderstorms.
In my area traffic is completely quiet. In a car you can go 120km/h in the highways fine, and even almost that in some specific non highway streets.
I always want to get one until I remember:
1. I WFH and “university FH”. Both are >100km from my house for when I rarely need to go.
2. My gym is 15km away and I barely get there in time in my car at the aforementioned speeds. There are no closer ones.
3. My non-e-bike is just my weekend workout (which I love) but if using for workout, e-bike doesn’t make much sense.
4. The only other use case for my car is getting groceries for my entire family or other cargo heavy things.
If you have time,
or don't have time, but still want variety in your route/scenery,
there's no better option.
If I didn't live on the 3rd floor[1], or had bike storage downstairs, I'd get one ASAP.
[1] I need an e-bike for the same reason I can't carry 20kg up 4 flights - my right knee is functionally useless.
Folding bicycle?
* https://www.bicycling.com/bikes-gear/a20048132/best-folding-...
* https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-folding-bike...
There are e-bike variants available as well.
(General consensus seems to be Brompton is (at) the top tier, but not cheap.)
Most electric folding bikes, the fold allows easy moving in cars/elevators or storage, I would not personally recommend them for multi-floor stair commutes unless you are comfortable with what you are getting yourself into.
I've also had two former colleagues trade folding e-bikes for folding e-scooters just to avoid the hassle of taking the folding e-bike up two flights of stairs at the office end. The e-scooters are far easier to maneuver/stow on busy commuter trains if that is a factor too - you can get roughly the same range at 50% of the weight and its far smaller folded.
As a typical example:
* https://www.radpowerbikes.com/products/radexpand-electric-fo...
That's a 64lb/29kg bike, and not uncommon for a folding ebike.
Yeah, that's the problem, unfortunately.
> The e-scooters are far easier
Alas, they have the same "my knee is made of soap" problem.
Been riding a motorcycle in London though for the last 15 years. A bit more effort to get started I guess but worth considering. From a theft point of view there's so many motorbikes about that a 10 year old boring one with a decent chain is quite unlikely to get stolen, probably cost less than an ebike too.
I'm 6'2" 260lbs and can ride a lectric xpedition all over Seattle hills with my girlfriend on the back and enough gear to have a picnic and go shopping for a fun day out. The same bike has a two seater orbiter for little kids on the back and still room for cargo.
I just got back from Paris and Amsterdam. In Paris, I saw a dude riding a bike towing a trailer with 6 more ebikes on it. This was around Montmartre, which is notoriously hilly.
In Amsterdam, there's this thing called a bakfiet, which is super popular and carries even more cargo than that lectric bike I have. It's big enough for you to put two teenagers into with a parent driving, or two dogs comfortably, or enough groceries for your doomsday shelter.
I don't buy the cold either. Bar mitts exist, and are on almost every bike in NYC, which definitely gets cold in the winter. I've seen it in Boston too. You can also get studded tires for the snow, and to be real I'd rather lose control in the snow on a <100lb bike over a >2000 pound car if the snow is really that bad.
That said, yeah, there's no climate control in a bike. If you dress in layers and with the appropriate gear it's mitigated but definitely less convenient imo. Also if you're a super commuter, yeah ebikes will take forever, but to be fair super committing sucks regardless. Sucked my life out doing 3-5 hours a day in Philly traffic back when I was doing that, really happy and privileged not to have to do that anymore. The gas was stupid expensive too, I was filling up every other day at minimum.
I'm not saying we should get rid of cars. I am saying that there are and always have been alternatives, and those alternatives are pretty darn nice these days, and for me better in every case save for Costco runs and camping/road trips. Mostly, I'm saying that we shouldn't resign ourselves to being car dependent, because it sucks.
After getting my first big boy west coast job, I was determined to never have to go through the bs trauma I got being car dependent again, and I'm much happier for it.
No more getting stuck on the PA turnpike for hours due to an overturned 18 wheeler. No more rear end collisions from rush hour cloverleaf merging. No more snow rusting out my brake lines and limping back to my mom's house to replace them with my dad before driving back to college to drop my gf off for work. No more borrowing a friend's car because my transmission gave out and my office had a super restrictive WFH policy. No more hailstorms and dealing with insurance who didn't want to cover the brand new rental car I was using when my transmission failed (yes that was literally the same month). No more inspections or tags or biannual maintenance or anxiety over how to get to work when things go wrong. No more stressing about geopolitics affecting the price at the pump when I was barely making enough to get by in the first place.
After 7 car free years in Seattle, I bought a car again. I love my Subaru. I've modded it a ton, and drove it all over the west coast. I will continue using my Subaru. My Subaru is a luxury, and it is a convenience, and I'm so much happier that I don't need to treat it as a requirement to earn a living or feed myself or whatever.
It's not super popular. The things are a hassle to carry anything with, and any small things are easier done with a regular bike with a satchel or just carrying the bags. Doubly so in a place like Amsterdam, where general commodities are within walking distance and any big things are near a central station.
>It's big enough for you to put two teenagers
Two teenagers? With the average Dutch height? Are you trying to break their legs?
I've seen them before in Seattle too around 2017 when prime now was still a thing.
I shouldn't have said super popular, you're right, and more like early than late teenagers (thinking of my brothers), and even then I don't think it would be comfortable. I am saying they're an option if you really need the cargo room though.
Stuff like this is comically large imo
https://urbanarrow.com/family-bikes/family/
And then there's the absurd https://www.icebike.org/biggest-cargo-bike/
Realistically this is my gf's bike, albeit with the running boards and a pop up basket in place of one seat in the back
https://ebikeescape.com/lectric-xpedition-review/
And this is a newer trim of my bike, although I have paniers and a pop up cargo basket on the rear rack
Now that he lives in Amsterdam with three young children, he goes Christmas tree shopping with a cargo bike with the kids in the front cargo space.
2020: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2020/12/getting-the-christmas-tr...
2021: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2021/12/getting-christmas-by-bik...
2022: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2022/12/getting-christmas-by-bik...
During the weekends I'd often cycle through the mountains/hills as well. Sometimes with our 3/4 year old daughter in a Thule bike trailer.
The only downside was that Germany doesn't have a lot of dedicated cycling lanes and drivers are either too careful or completely reckless around bikes. And it was definitely not normal for German standards, I often got questions from Germans how I kept up with it through all weather.
At any rate, I have so many good memories of the daily cycling and it's a thing that I miss now. We do pretty much everything by bike now as well, but we live in a city (in The Netherlands) and everything is nearby. I do frequently go for longer trips in nature in spring/summer. The upside is that cycling is much much safer here (dedicated bike lanes, etc.).
Transport e-bikes can take several people, furniture etc. No problem bicycling in bad weather either, people regularly bike in ice and snow.
Essentially, it becomes a choice whether or not you want to use it as workout.
There was so much smoke at my work on thursday (forest fires) that those who biked in were hitching rides home because physical activity outside was to be curtailed due to air quality.