Originally Posted by
BigAura
Nothing wrong with eBikes as transportation VS. other motorized vehicles. It's an environmental positive for sure.
BUT they are motorized and when people add motors to their bikes to move their fat-butts around it's loss to bicycle culture and world health, not a gain.
You have it backwards... If a motor allows you to move your fat-butt around instead of not riding a bicycle at all, an E-Assist bike is a good thing...
I'm talking a legal E-Assist bicycle, where you still actually HAVE TO PEDAL to get anywhere on the bicycle.
The other types of E-Bikes that are basically a moped are, I agree are not really a gain...
An actual example is my wife, I got her a E-Assist bike and she and I have now done 2 short tours on our E-Assist bikes. A total of 800+KM each tour. Each of us riding 400KM each tour, she would never have done any riding without the E-assist, now, once you take off the amount of assist she got, it works out to 277KM of actual pedaling effort for her to do each trip... Also, to get ready for the trip she did about 1,000KM of riding to acclimate the body to long Hrs riding (for her), that again, when one deducts the assist % it works out to 693KM of riding effort that she actually pedaled...
970KM worth of pedaling is what she actually did ride her bike the first year we got it out of the 1,400KM total with assisted KMs, probably about the same the second year too...
A HUGE GAIN compared to close to "0 to 50"KM a year, without the E-assist bike like her old bike that just sat in the garage for years, rarely used.