Electric bike, stupid love of my life

I can wax poetic the same about my cars; what's the point ?

Depends. If you're out in the boonies with nothing but shoulderless rural highway roads then yeah, ebikes aren't great, but for the majority of Americans (let alone westerners or people in general) ebikes are more than enough.

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 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.

I'm glad Americans are (re-)discovering the motorcycle. It's like the 1960s all over again. But this time instead of Hondas it's e-bikes. I just hope they take a safety class and stay on the road where they belong.

When I lived in Southern Germany, before WFH, I went by bike (non-ebike) literally every working day of the year (22-25 km depending on the route). 35 degrees (just leave earlier), snow, rain, whatever. It was so great, you automatically build up a lot of condition, have a lot of energy when you arrive at work, and some 1-2 days every week I'd cycle back through the hills to get some extra climbing practice.

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.).