@clive i ride my e-bike to work as often as i may (just about 15 miles each way) and i think all big cities should make an effort to get as much car traffic replaced by bikes/ebikes as possible.
Inside the city, getting around on ebike is as fast or faster than going by car.
I ride an acoustic bike myself around NYC, and in rush hour -- even if I'm going far and deep into the city -- it's nearly always faster than taking public transit, and oftentimes faster than taking a car
Ebikes are a pretty catalytic technology for helping more people replace car trips with cycling
@clive I was hoping we would be statewide by this point but at least it's something! And seperate project may launch in Boston, Cambridge & maybe Springfield?
Just a half hour ago I was reading the latest Micromobility America newsletter and they mentioned a program in Tampa that I'd not yet heard of ... in its second year!
One thing I was wrong about in that piece is that, in the final paragraph, I imply that people riding ebikes don't get the exercise that those riding traditional pedal bikes get
Turns out research suggests the difference isn't so strong
Ebike riders ride longer miles than acoustic bike riders, so they exert less per mile but make it up in volume lol
@clive You might want to try using the hashtag #bikenite which is used by a gathering each Friday evening to curate (if that's the right word) a series of questions and answers about all aspects of cycling.
@VirginiaHolloway@clive To be clear, if you want to add questions to the hashtag-bikenite (friday after work), The process is to ask your question be included, and add the tag #BikeNiteQ before Wed night, where @ascentale will work with you to get your question posed to the group.
@clive we did the same in europe a few years ago. The result was that prices of ebikes exploded and almost only affluent middle income earners got bikes when gas prices went up with circumstances. When gas prices went down they went back to their cars
I'm definitely going to talk about examples outside the US!
I'm primarily focusing on US cities' experience in this piece, though, given that the bulk of Mother Jones' readership is in the US, and American cities tend to have rather terrible cycling infrastructure 😅 so the challenges here are geographically and culturally specific
@76c71aae3a491f1d9eec47cba17e22@mostr.pub @clive That’s kind of the point, tho? The US tends to focus on electric car subsidies, and it’d be great to hear about an experience with eBikes here.
Yep yep -- I'm particularly interested in thinking about how much mobility bang for the buck a government can get when subsidizing ebikes, compared to the $6 billion-and-climbing that the US federal government has thus far spent subsidizing electric cars ...
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