Anyone got any experience commuting 10-15 miles one way on an ebike in a car dependent city? I'd love to make the plunge but.my city in particular has a proud tradition of maintaining one of the highest rates of pedestrian deaths in the state. Id have to cross multiple 4-8 lane roads during rush hour in order to get to work so becoming road pizza is a very real concern
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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One thing most often missed with bike-curious people, like yourself, miss is that the roads taken by bike are usually not the ones you'd drive.
A car route is often a poor choice when riding a bike. Avoiding fast moving cars means avoiding those dangerous areas. Pedestrians die because they don't have an alternative (parked across the road, or it's near home, school, etc).
For example, I'm at a friend's place and I rode my bike here. The path I take is through slower neighborhoods and dedicated trails. If I drove my car, I'd take a very different route.
My advice is to think of some regular trips you make; work, shopping, or otherwise. Then use Google or Strava or other mapping software to see what their suggested bike routes are. You may be surprised at what's available. I know I was when I started biking more regularly.
Also there are health benefits. If you're not exercising every day, then commuting for 5 days by bike absolutely will improve your health. I've lost a ton of weight. Take a look at how deadly heart disease is for folks without regular "walking 20 minutes a day" exercise is.
For sure, I have a regular bike I ride for recreation when I have the time and I'm very familiar with the city. My average shift has me driving between 100-300 miles a day, usually without leaving my county. I've mapped out bike paths using Google and just kind of looking at adjacent roads and whathaveyou. Problem is for ~8 of my 10 mile commute would be following an 8 lane road that doesn't have any viable alternatives near it. It's lined by shopping plazas, with disjointed, disconnected housing subdivisions behind those. No bikepaths to speak of. After that it would be half a mile of mixed development side streets, crossing a 10 lane intersection, small stretch of residential street, crossing a 6 lane road, and then finally into the business park my job is located. A business park with a 40 mph speed limit, down winding roads with no bikepaths and sidewalks that like to end abruptly and switch sides of the road.
My city itself is damn near hostile to pedestrians and the area I live in is the poster child for awful design.
Shopping is another thing entirely that is just luck on my part. I'm a short walk to the shopping "hub" for my area
If most people in your city live 10+ miles to your jobs, that's a fundamental city design flaw that isn't getting fixed in your lifetime. Sorry.
No doubt about that. It's less a city and more a bunch of dense suburbs piled on top of each other. Urban sprawl is a huge problem here, it is starting to fill in but it'll probably be a good 10-20 years before anything regarding decent city design starts to manifest here. I just want to free up our one car for my wife haha. She can't find good work because I've been stuck taking the car most days and my schedule isn't very conducive to sharing the car most of the time
Yeah but they're useless in the dead of winter in Northern latitudes. Or in the rain.
I live in rainy northern latitudes. You are absurdly mistaken.
This is patently false. There is an honest shocking amount of people who go out of their way to bike in snow. I do it too but not for enjoyment. And what is rain going to do, infuse the bike and rider with more microplastics?
What makes you say that? People of Oslo seem to differ. People of Tallinn complain about road maintenance and still ride their (e)bikes in the winter.
As an inhabitant of one of the most bike-friendly countries in the world, Denmark (which happens to very much be in northern latitudes and get a lot of rain) since birth, I can categorically and without a doubt declare your claims to be absolute horseshit.
I live in Chicago and the number of people riding bikes, powered or not, including motorcycles for good measure, plummets in the winter. It's not zero, but anyone using them is either desperate or (in the case of not doing or out of sheer necessity) completely nuts. I've lived it, don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about.
Just because you live in a place where not a lot of people use bikes in the winter and the rain doesn't mean that bikes are useless in those cases, which is what you said.
So yeah, I WILL tell you that you don't know what you're talking about when you make such preposterous statements.
Honest question: How do you deal with extreme cold and/ or rain when biking to and from work? I'm interested to learn more.
For the cold I often leave with light gloves and a jacket but often take off the jacket halfway when you get warm of the exercise
For the rain you have plastic pants and poncho to put over your clothes.
A lot of companies also have showers so you can just wear sports clothes that dry fast and take a shower and put on decent clothes. Combining fitness and your commute.
Poncho.
You should tell that to everyone using electric bikes during the winter due to it easing biking a ton during winter.
Personal experience so this is confirmation bias. I love my eBike. I drive it nearly all year. Winter is the exception. It's not the cold weather either, I ride it sometimes as low as 10°F (≈-12°C).
Where I am, road conditions are the problem. Snow plows push snow into the shitty bike gutter lanes, taking away that option. You could take your chances on the sidewalk, but the city doesn't put ice melt down, so then you'd need to be weary of other pedestrians, slick spots, and other hazards that come with sidewalks. You could take your chances going further into the road, but now You're dealing with potholes, drivers who want to get by you, and still potential for more slick spots. Not safe at all. Lastly, the bit of biking infrastructure which isn't a gutter but a proper bike trail just isn't tended to at all.
Cities say they care, throw down money to at least build something they call infrastructure, but actually maintaining it is something that normally doesn't happen.
Extremely popular in urban areas in Denmark.
An electric cargo bike has replaced our car in our family of 2 adults and 2 small kids.
But it's a good idea to bring the battery inside with you in the winter.
Useless in the rain?
Mine personally combusts into a giant ball of flames if I hit a small puddle. It's really annoying going through so many fire extinguishers.
In actuality I've driven my jank as fuck ebike in torrential rain without a problem. This is with an external battery I slapped on and wired in parallel with the integrated battery. The connectors are sealed by electrical tape alone and it's been perfectly fine for two years. Water is a non-issue of all the important stuff is integrated and sealed correctly.
That's because bicycles dissolve in water. It is a fundamental limitation of bicycle physics that cannot be solved.
That makes sense, i thought my bike were stolen but they're just washed away.
That's fine if useful elsewhere. Snowplows are also useless in Thailand, so...