Electric Bikes Make Me Mean

I was out for a run yesterday when I heard the sound of a tiny engine zooming up behind me. The source of the sound turned out to be a man riding an electric bicycle. It's not the first time I've encountered one of these either out and about or in the news, but my reaction is always the same: what a lazy jackass.



The nice thing about a bike is that it's a fairly simple machine and and manually operated. You can hop on and ride at anytime. The only "fuel" needed (aside from food for yourself) is batteries for lights at night and even then, there are lights that don't use batteries. If you really don't want to worry about that whole "expending energy" thing but still want to feel the wind on your face, buy a moped. A cursory glance at electric bike prices and moped prices shows that they both hover around the $1000 mark.

Advantages to having an electric bike:
-- you can make climbing a challenging hill a lot easier
-- hauling loads becomes less than a chore
-- you can go faster

Maybe there's more, and if there are, please tell me in the comments. However, the first advantage can be taken care by getting an appropriate bike. If you're just riding for style, then you're probably going to struggle on hills every now and then. It's all about gear ratio. Even a fixed gear can tackle hills if you've got the right ratio for yourself. Or you can go to the extreme that some people do and map out the paths that have the least elevation change and follow those. The last two advantages can be taken care of simply by getting a moped instead.

Let's not mince words, the only reason to get an electric bike is to give off the appearance that you are a cyclist at heart. It's a slippery slope using it just for hills to using it all of the time. The man I saw riding his yesterday? Riding on road as flat as you've ever seen.

Finally, the advantage to riding a regular bicycle:
-- you don't end up a fat-ass.