Way back in the BC times, I was biking along the lower reaches of the W&OD trail when something remarkable happened: I was passed by a couple of senior citizens on E-bikes. At least I am pretty sure they were senior citizens; they were unusually well-behaved for cyclists in this area, stopping at all the intersections and allowing me to catch up and get a good like at them and their gear before they whizzed off at great speed. Their skin had that crepe paper look that told of a lifetime of weathered travel in the outdoors. Either that or they were 37 and fresh from the beaches of SoCal or the tanning beds of New Jersey.
Now what was remarkable was not that someone passed me on a bike. Medicated tortoises regularly do the same. Nor was it that I was passed by an E-bike. Even before the descent of pandemicomonium I would regularly see half a dozen on my daily commute; since Covid inflicted life blight on us all the numbers of E-bikes on the trails has exploded. No, what was remarkable was that this was the first time I had ever been passed by anyone resembling the type of person that the cycle retailing industry has steadfastly maintained is one of the major target customers for E-bikes: older cyclists, using these devices to extend their participation in a hobby as their bodies have gradually begun to limit the kinds of cycling they used to do. And in the intervening couple of years it remains, in fact, one of only a handful of times that has happened.
More evidence the future is becoming a place in which I do not want to live
If this happened a couple of years ago, why am I writing about it now? Because last week the latest copy of Adventure Cyclist magazine arrived in my mailbox, with a cover that boldly proclaimed “The Future is Electric” and an entire issue devoted to various stories about these devices. In a move I’ve been expecting for a while, the Adventure Cycling Organization, finally kicked in its “E-Assist” and jumped the shark.
Let’s get the unpleasant truth out of the way first.
E-bikes are not real bicycles.
But how can you say such a thing?
Because they have a motor.
But haven’t bicycles evolved considerably since their origins?
They have a motor.
Haven’t bicycles always adapted new forms of technology?
They have a motor.
But aren’t E-bikes a valuable component of a comprehensive mobility solution that offers multiple last-mile platforms to facilitate consumer choice across an increasingly atomized transportation landscape?
Fuck. All. That.
E-bikes violate the fundamental principle that makes a bicycle a bicycle: two wheeled transportation where the primary motive power is supplied by the rider or riders. Now the bicycle retail industry and E-bike apologists are frantically trying to reframe what these devices are to obscure this fundamental truth. But you can call it “boost” or–the more common term–“assist” all you like. No one should be fooled. It is a motor. And it is a motor that takes a substantial portion of the work out of riding a bike. I have to admit, however, that like so many substitutions of a new vocabulary that are designed mainly to obscure the truth–the military’s re-framing of slaughtered civilians as “collateral damage” springs to mind here–this one is pure genius. “Assist” sounds as if the motor is just giving you a little nudge along when you need it, like a Boy Scout helping a little old lady cross the road.
The reality is quite different. According to Wired, these are the three major classes of E-bikes:
Class 1 ebikes are limited to a top speed of 20 miles per hour, and the electric motor works only when the rider is pedaling.
Class 2 ebikes are also limited to a top speed of 20 miles per hour, but they have throttles that work when you’re not pedaling. That doesn’t mean the motor won’t assist you if you decide to pedal. Most Class 2 ebikes offer electrically assisted pedaling alongside throttles. As with Class 1 ebikes, you can generally ride them the same places as an analog bike.
Class 3 ebikes can go up to 28 miles per hour and must have a speedometer, but may or may not have a throttle.
Only the last category is regulated to any degree in the US and it varies widely by jurisdiction. The basic description I have provided above is what you will see on any e-bike advocacy site, it is what is included in the Adventure Cycling issue and the intent is to be reassuring. Yes, goes the message, that last category is a little troubling but most e-bikes being sold are basically no different than any other bicycle, and OK, there is that one in the middle with the throttle, but. . .hey, look over there! A unicorn!
The reality is very different. The Wired article goes on to note:
It’s the honor system. A lot of ebikes, like the Wing Freedom 2 and X, will let you remove the top-speed restriction in exchange for a promise that you won’t ride them in bike lanes or they’ll give you a notice that you should only unlock them if you’re on private property. It’s easy and usually done through the bike’s display screen or if the bike has one, a companion app. Most only go a few miles per hour over their class’ limit, but others, such as the Vintage Electric Roadster and the HPC Black Lightning, can go much faster than 28 miles per hour. It’s how some manufacturers can sell a 40 mile-per-hour ebike with a motor many times more powerful than normal and still be compliant. You toggle a setting and suddenly it’s a Class 2 or 3 ebike, at least legally.
But let’s forget about the fact that there is an utterly predictable violation of these supposed classes taking place. Let’s look at the definition of Class 1 and 2. That top speed, the point at which the motor–sorry, the “assist”–stops “helping” (in the case of Class 1) or blasting you along (Class 2) is 20mph. Motorists may not have a strong sense of what that means, but sustaining an average speed of 20mph is going at a pretty decent clip for a cyclist. Bicycling published a short piece that compares Tour de France pros with “average” cyclists. And yes, that latter term doesn’t mean most cyclists, it means most racer wannabes, who make up a very small portion of your cycling population; that group is, however, the one that–at least until recently–the retail cycling industry has pursued like a dog chasing a dangling strip of bacon, because they will part with extraordinary amounts of dosh to make themselves incrementally faster. But the article notes that on an average flat stage of the Tour a pro rider would average 25-28mph in comparison with the “average” rider’s sustained speed of 17-18mph.
Thus this “assist” which, we are being encouraged to believe, is merely a gentle nudge helping cyclists to maintain the kind of speed that their aging bodies are no longer able to maintain, is set at a speed that virtually none of them would ever have been able to sustain even when they were younger and in peak condition. Just as noteworthy is the fact that this 20mph threshold is in fact five miles per hour over the posted speed limit for all of the arterial bike trails in the DC area, although I admit that that limit is routinely violated by cyclists as it is, particularly the aerobar arseholes who insist on doing their triathlon interval training on a crowded public trail during rush hour (admonishment delivered as a former triathlete). What was previously a problem of individual lack of responsibility is now an ethical problem of the entire bike industry. Everyone knows that even in places where dedicated bike trails exist, they are mostly still crap when compared with Europe or parts of Asia. The vast majority of them are multi-use trails, which means that the bike industry is now betting the farm on selling large numbers of bikes that encourage people to whiz along at 20mph on trails shared with pedestrians, joggers, people with strollers. A low-speed collision between a bike and a pedestrian can be horrendous; hit someone going 20mph and it is likely to be fatal for the pedestrian and maybe for the cyclist as well.
All of this is, of course, perfectly logical. No one would be snapping up these devices if the scooters allowed them to achieve the same kinds of speeds they could achieve without a motor. In fact, for most of the truly average cycling population, that would mean an “assist” that would cease to function somewhere in the vicinity of 12-13mph. And that is not to cast any shade. If you’ve followed this blog you know that I’ve done a fair bit of randonneuring, long distance rides that represent a pretty significant mental and physical endeavor. I complete those distances in a pretty healthy time and my average speeds have been occasionally in the 14mph territory if I am in peak physical condition (that was for maybe one month in the last few years) and regularly around 12-13.
Don’t try and tell me this is an “assist.” This is a motor. It is an engine. And that makes the thing you, dear e-bike rider/reader, are riding not a bicycle. A two-wheeled form of transportation? Sure. But not every two-wheeled form of transportation is a bicycle. If we are going to try to maintain the fiction that e-bikes are bicycles, then so are those annoying-as-fuck “e-scooters” ridden by the lazy and febrile that already infest so many urban environments. Or, for that matter–since this, spoiler alert, is where we are inevitably heading–so are motorcycles. If you have a device with a throttle on it and which means you don’t need to pedal in order to achieve forward motion (the very small fig leaf of “assist” disappears) then your pedals are gratuitous appendages, much like the two lobes of the brain of anyone who buys this “assist” bullshit.
Therefore, along with ditching the industry-speak “assist” let us call these devices what they are. Scooters. Or motorbikes. But definitively not bicycles.
The Septuagenarian Fantasy
Having disposed of bullshit marketing myth number one, that these bikes are not motorized vehicles (technically, the engine in my aging Kia Sorento is also an “assist” in that it gives me that little extra boost I need when attempting to push the entire vehicle along by paddling my feet out the driver’s side door) let us turn to the second myth: that these bikes allow aging cyclists and/or those with some physical impairments to extend or embrace their love of cycling. Now this statement is true on its face. If the gods are kind, I have high hopes that I will still be cycling well into my twilight years. But if they time comes when my body is no longer able to push a bicycle around, I don’t at all rule out purchasing one of these Scooters to help me go on the occasional longer ride or to allow me to haul a large load on a bike tour.
But the genius of the bike industry lies in how often this type of late-in-life cyclist is invoked as the “typical” scooter customer. Advertisements, apologist publications and sites for the scooter industry, and blogs of individual cyclists are filled with testimonials from this type of scooter rider. I’ve seen letters from scooter enthusiasts crop up occasionally in the letters column of Adventure Cycling Magazine over the last couple of years, supplemented by the occasional testy missive from a bike shop owner who is now making lots of money from scooter sales and complains about the lack of articles in the magazine devoted to scooters. It was only a matter of time. And, sure enough, when Adventure Cycling finally devoted an entire issue to the electrified–if not electrifying–future, along with a rather craven mea culpa from editor Alex Strickland, the issue includes feature articles about older touring cyclists and lots of references to how these types of devices will allow people to go on touring until they are 105.
As far as the Adventure Cycling Association is concerned, pushing this line makes a lot of sense. Bike touring has always tended to skew older. That was one of the things that initially surprised me when I undertook my first ever bike tour, the supported Bon Ton Roulet. I was in my forties at the time and I was shocked to discover that the vast majority of those on the tour appeared to be older, often considerably so, than I. That was a great lesson, actually, because many of those people were way more capable as cyclists than I was. However the organized bike touring industry skews older for some very obvious reasons. The first is money. While some of these tours are extraordinary value for money, they do cost. When I first did the BTR it was somewhere in the vicinity of $350 for a week of cycling; it is now up around $800. Many of the fully supported Adventure Cycling Tours–they carry your gear, you cycle and camp each night–are in the $1600 range. Higher end tours where you stay in Inns and B&Bs every night can start at $2500 for a few days and from that point the sky is the limit. Many of these tours also require you to fly to get there, adding significant expense. If you are Silicon Valley Boy Wonder you might be able to toss around that kind of cash in your 20s, but most people only have that kind of disposable income in later life (if at all). But the major commodity that is in short supply until you are older is time. In the severely over-worked and under-vacationed US, many working adults have very little discretionary vacation time (if they have any at all) and most of that is sucked up by the apparently mandatory shuffling between families over the holidays. It isn’t until you are more advanced in a specific career–or, indeed, until you are retired–that you have the time to throw away on a week long bike tour.
Therefore, it makes sense that Adventure Cycling would start to pitch motorized scooters to this population. This group has, after all, been pretty relentlessly targeted by the electric scooter marketing apparatus over the years, dangling the promise that these cyclists can, with the age of a magical assist, recover the kind of cycling bodies they used to have 20 years ago. Of course, this obscures a rather inconvenient truth: for years and years “cyclists of a certain age” have been participating in bike tours just fine, hauling themselves up hill and down dale, besting head winds, even dragging a pannier-laden steel frame across the country, without the aid of a motor. But bike tour operators operate on a shoe-string and in a world of thin profit margins, if making more of their tours “e-bike friendly” (I threw up in my mouth a little having to type that) can pull in the couple of extra cyclists ensuring that all their tours are fully booked, then that is a win for them.
The pertinent question however, is this: is there really a huge group of aging cyclists out there who are in such decrepit physical condition that an electric scooter is their only remaining option? I seriously doubt it. Some? Sure. Now maybe I’ve just been exposed to a superhuman portion of the population, but my experience with bike touring has involved numerous people in the 60 to 80 range who seem to have had little trouble participating in even relatively strenuous tours. But, the bike industry will respond, not everyone is like that! There are hordes of older people who would be riding bikes and doing things like bike touring, if they just had a little “assist.”
This, however, is classic strategy of capitalist marketing bullshit: transmute a desire into a perceived need. There are, I suggest, very few older cyclists who actually need an electric scooter. There are, however, probably a lot of cyclists–well, soon to be ex-cyclists, if they switch to riding scooters–who want one. For one very obvious reason that is at the heart of the electric scooters appeal.
You can get where you are going faster and with less effort.
If you are an older cyclist, the thought of being able to cruise the roads and power up hills with little effort, without all that annoying stuff like having to maintain a level of fitness, is probably too seductive to ignore.
However, much of what I’ve just said is beside the point. Because the biggest lie of the cycling industry (a lie that has either been bought wholesale by cycle touring operators or that they are mendaciously participating in distributing, is that electric scooters are being snapped up by a bunch of 70 year-olds riding with hip replacements.
Underlying Conditions
If I put these sentiments in a letter to Adventure Cycling, it would probably engender more than a few angry letters from aged cyclists who will go on to talk about how riding an electric scooter has allowed them to continue doing what they love. Even in this form I’m expecting a certain amount of hate. It isn’t that those people don’t exist. But we have overlapping problems of selection bias here. Older cyclists are, as I mentioned above, already over-represented in the Adventure Cycling membership. Moreover, they are likely to be the most vocal advocates for electric scooters because they are the one group riding these devices who can rationalize their choice with a claim to be acting out of a position of virtue.
This, however, brings us back to my story at the beginning. Because it is very clear that the vast majority of electric scooters are not being sold to cyclists in their twilight years. As I noted, on an average ride along one of our packed commuter trails I might see anywhere up to a dozen of these scooters. Virtually all of the riders I’ve seen have been younger than I, often much younger, and appear to be in reasonable physical shape, certainly capable of biking without the aid of an “assist.”
Now, sure, appearances can be deceiving. Maybe all of these people are in fact 97 and miraculously well preserved. And, sure, you never know what debilitating underlying conditions people might have that have led them to purchase an electric scooter. I strongly suspect, however, that the only debilitating underlying condition afflicting these people is the condition of being an American: desperate to get something for nothing and willing to pay extra for the privilege.
The E-bike/scooter industry was raking in money prior to the pandemic and since the World began locking down they have, like the reset of the biking industry, benefited still further from the boom in bike sales as people became desperate for ways to get out of the house. Electrek, a puff publication for all types of electrified vehicles, noted that many commentators were sure that with people losing jobs left right and center, and everyone having to take a hard look at their budgets, that high-priced e-bikes would suffer. In fact, the reverse happened; some established companies like Dutch bike manufacturer Van Moof, saw a 50% jump in sales; American e-bike retailer Lectric reported a 140% increase in sales after the March lockdowns. Some of this was driven by companies releasing lower-priced bikes; predictably, Electrek spins this as riders using e-bikes “as a way to remain active while keeping their distance from others” while ignoring the blindingly obvious fact that if that were the only purpose then people could have bought regular bikes. By the end of 2020, Forbes was forecasting that e-bike sales would grow from 3.7 million dollars a year to 17 million a year in only a decade.
With sales figures and growth potential like that, it is very clear that it isn’t just a relatively small number of aging hippie cyclotourists who are buying these things. And that matches with what I have seen out on the roads. Which leads us to one inescapable conclusion.
Dress it up how you like, the fact is that sales of electric scooters masquerading as bikes is being driven by the inherent laziness of a large group of people who are simply taking to a logical extreme what has always been regrettable but, until now, minority component of cycling culture; utilizing disposable income to purchase technological upgrades that will substitute for actually getting fit. In the past, for that, small group, the actual gains were mostly illusory. Now, the potential is real; no more need to actually acquire the relatively small amount of fitness to bike a few miles to work. A class 2 electric scooter will do it all for you.
One of the things that plagues a discussion of most aspects of cycling–from the effectiveness of bike helmets to the level of minority participation–is the lack of reliable data. Majoritarian, “normal” cultural activities like car driving are mined extensively for data to optimize and improve those systems; “alternative” activities are subject to hit-or-miss data gather practices that leaves practitioners and system designers alike operating almost entirely on anecdote and conventional wisdom. So while there are no shortage of articles, like those above, about the financial health of the bike industry, more fine-grained data like the demographic profile of electric scooter riders, or the sales of the different classes of scooters (my guess, based on my own road and trail-based observations, would be that Class 2 purchases are massively outstripping Class 1) is largely absent. It isn’t even clear that–another common industry marketing pitch–that these devices are serving to get non-cyclists into the saddle. Most of the people I’ve read about who have purchased an electric scooter were already cyclists.
I’m sure that electric scooter riders will probably react with howls of outrage at being called out as lazy. They will have any number of rationalizations concerning why they needed to buy an electric scooter to do a job that an existing type of bike could have done with a little more physical effort on the rider’s part. We Americans are, however, experts at rationalizing activities that are harmful to self, others, entire communities, or all three. It may even be the single defining feature of what it means, now, to be an American: the ability to rationalize self-interest and self-absorption. We do it adroitly with everything from guns to systemic racism and misogyny. As US Citizens we are still living through the nightmarish consequences of the collective indifference toward building and funding a modern society that would be even moderately resilient in the face of an utterly predictable crisis; amidst all the talk of vaccines and infrastructure bills, we have learned to avert our eyes from a number of daily preventable deaths that a year ago we found appalling.
Purchasing an electric scooter is not participating in a brave new world of alternative transportation. It is, literally, buying into the same messed up view of social reality that has made Cadillac Escalades and Cathedral Ceilings a “need.” And it is the betrayal of the psychological and spiritual heart of cycling that is represented by the transition to electric scooters to which I will turn in my next post.
Alchemy 
Well it’s nice to read you again. fortunately i haven’t come across too many ebikes in my neck of the woods here in the countryside. The only time i did was travelling along the danube from Passau to Vienna. Lots of ebikes as you get closer to the city. They afforded me a good draft though and only when i passed them as they slowed to turn did i realize they were ebikes.
i’ve given some though to an ebike for myself and here are the only 2 reasons i would ever consider one:
1) my wife doesn’t ride regularly and i’d like to do this bike tour with her – so ebike! i ride my bike and she rides her ebike.
2) i’m older and i’d like to get some fresh air and ride into the countryside but i can’t ride these bumps like i used to – ebike to the rescue!
BTW: throttling the speed of the ebike is my number 1 wish. no need to ever go more than 13mph.
hope to see you around this season.
mike