111–120 of 188 posts
I ride an ebike every day. In Chicago they are very prevalent on every other block as part of the bike share system (so no need to worry about storage, theft, recharging or maintenance), and for 15 cents a minute it has become my main form of transportation.
Bike paths would have been a great thing to put in the infrastructure bill instead of all the special interests and pork. What a missed opportunity.
This sounds great in theory, but I don't find it convincing. Motorcyclists say the same thing about speed being a benefit and maybe it is in some cases, but if you look at the stats, the faster the bike, the more likely you will die. Speeding is a factor in 32% of fatalities. I'd be surprised if it's significantly different on an e-bike.
There's a pretty big difference between going 20 mph vs going 60 or whatever on a motorcycle.
There’s a pretty big difference between going 10 and going 20 too. Physics lets us know that 2x the speed of a mass carries 4x the energy, so a 20mph crash does 4x the damage of a 10mph crash. I’ve had a bike crash into rocks at under 20mph that could have killed me were it not for a helmet and padding. (I did not walk away unscathed, years later I can still feel the injury to my shoulder…)
Crashing at 60 on a motorcycle is pretty likely to kill you. Crashing going 20 on a bike might break bones - as long as you hit something stationary, rather than throw yourself in front of a car doing 40. Crashing at 10 mph and you might be able to jump off or walk away with only scratches.
It’s also fun to think about how crashing at 1000 mph is not that much more likely to kill you than crashing at 60 mph on a motorcycle. At some point, the speed is enough to do all of the damage.
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> Today I got cursed out by a spandexed “real biker” as I passed by with my electric whirrrr. So, a motorbike a passes a human powered vehicle? That should come as no surprise to neither of you. :) To be honest, I don't get the appeal of e-bikes for the type of riding you do. Getting up to 15 MPH when you're riding for 8 km in a city when stopping for lights should be no problem without disabilities on a decent bike.…
> To be honest, I don't get the appeal of e-bikes for the type of riding you do. Getting up to 15 MPH when you're riding for 8 km in a city when stopping for lights should be no problem without disabilities on a decent bike. I think most people in the North America and Europe live in cities that are so flat biking is just like walking faster. Maybe that's where your frame of mind comes from. Where I live the hills ar…
or you have (and use) gears?
It will just take a while
> Previously, you had to be a serious cyclist to access this speed (and corresponding ability to simply exist on car-dominated roads), but now almost everyone can. Wow, interesting that they frame this as a positive. I'm a general advocate for e-bikes but this has been the absolute biggest drawback I've noticed with them: e-bike riders suddenly get all of the speed of a very fit cyclist but absolutely none of the roa…
Yeah, for the most part, speed comes with experience (genetic freaks of athleticism aside). I can ride at 30mph as comfortably now as I could 20mph 10 years ago. 10 years ago, 30mph was sprinting, and I was not as skilled at maneuvering the machine as I am today. Even with my lack of current fitness (I quit racing and training years ago) I can still comfortably ride with groups of people much more fit because of the…
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> They go really, really fast, for sustained periods of time, and yet are as thin and quiet as a pedal bike. Not really? Class 1 and 2 ebikes in the US top out at 20 mph. Ebikes in Europe usually top out at 25 km/h (15.5 mph). Even 20 mph is achievable by a moderately fit person on a road bike for a sustained period of time.
I'm talking about the thousands of Sur-Ron and Segways, Super 73s, etc. which have pedals simply to be technically class 2, yet can hit 70mph. I'm not sure why the downvotes. Oh well.
No ebike is hitting "70mph". The hearing and tires avg l aren't good enough and the battery didn't even deliver enough power.
I appreciate the fact that e-bikes are bringing biking to the masses. I really do. But from this post I also read a lot of coping, because your cycling infrastructure is bad. Like the speed argument is completely bogus if you wouldn't need to cycle next to cars that are going that fast. If you had separated bike lanes, maybe not even attached to streets. Proper bike infrastructure is what gets people to bike, e-bikes…
Are e-bikes bringing biking to the masses? At least here in the UK it seems that standard cycling is very common among ordinary people (and a basic bike can be bought for £50-£100). Whereas e-bikes are mainly owned by the relatively wealthy as they sell for upwards of £1000.
The biggest issue I see for higher priced bikes is secure parking (as mentioned in the article). No one provides secure/supervised parking and its tricky to get insurance. You can't really lock any nice bike outside the supermarket and always expect it to be there when you get back.
Sort of funny if you know the Festool brand as they’re considered very premium.
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So results in untamperable lockdown next time it connects to icloud?
It's more than that. To factory reset an iphone, you _must_ be able to log in via the current apple account. Regardless of whether the owner has marked it as lost or not. The lost mode simply allows you to remote wipe the phone to reduce the risk of hackers getting in somehow.
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Yeah, for the most part, speed comes with experience (genetic freaks of athleticism aside). I can ride at 30mph as comfortably now as I could 20mph 10 years ago. 10 years ago, 30mph was sprinting, and I was not as skilled at maneuvering the machine as I am today. Even with my lack of current fitness (I quit racing and training years ago) I can still comfortably ride with groups of people much more fit because of the…
You can ride comfortably at 48km/h? I guess you should attempt the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hour_record .
I'm was never a track racer, never even much of a road racer, but at peak fitness I could do a 40K time trial in ~56 minutes, on a time trial bike and a flat course. That only won races where the fast guys didn't show up. 10 years ago if memory serves a 50 year old guy almost broke the 50 minute mark. It's really not as fast as you think it is.
Alex Dowset did nearly 55KPH his last track hour record attempt, and didn't set the record. Power required to go a given speed follows the cube of the velocity so it's nothing near linear to go 10kph faster into the wind at those speed, but yes, in a group, 48kph is attainable for a moderately fit cyclist.
Furthermore, my point wasn't about being "comfortable" as in "breathing easy" it's "comfortable" as in "feeling ok going that fast on a bicycle and knowing I'm relatively safe because of the experience I have.