Concerning commuting by bike

On Saturday, June 27, 2020 at 8:32:21 PM UTC+1, wrote:
On Saturday, June 27, 2020 at 9:42:58 AM UTC-7, Andre Jute wrote:
On Wednesday, June 24, 2020 at 7:39:46 PM UTC+1, wrote:
In the local craigslist I have been sort of surprised at the numbers of e-bikes that have been turning up. I think that people with good intentions have bought these things as commuters and then discovered to their dismay that distance and not effort is the real problem. People do not want to spend a hour in the morning and an hour in the evening doing physical efforts to get to or back from their place of employment.

Both distance and effort are a problem. There is an additional problem that arises because most of these wannabe ebikers never had a bike before, and so have no concept of tending to the bike.


I have obtained most of my bikes from those people who perhaps rode a single time and then placed the bike in the garage to gather inches of dust. It is pretty amazing what great deals you can get if you're willing to watch and wait.

I know a fellow who always rides desirable bikes and yet has never paid more than 50 euro for his bike of the moment. He buys them out of the garages of people who bought them for exercise but didn't like the perspiration that accompanies the exercise.

I get stopped or approached when I'm stopped by people who've seen my bike in action for ten years. Some of them want to buy it. They're the ones who have bought electric bikes already and been disappointed, and they think mine is better. It is, infinitely better because I designed it to work as I want it to work rather than as some fatarse German legislator wants it to work, but I know they won't go any better with mine than they did with theirs. They bought pedelecs, usually perfectly good ones for substantial money. They're not commuters; they bought the bikes for exercise. It's important that most of them have never had a bike before, or if they had, rode it a handful of times and then parked it in the garage for good; they have no history of servicing their bikes either. With electric bikes they run into two devastating problems. They use the bikes like they're electric motorbikes, pedalling as little as possible. The fact that their bikes are pedelecs that will pass the German regulations is disastrous for them. The countryside here is hilly, and pedelecs are designed to produce input proportional to what the rider puts in through the pedals. So, going uphill, the rider is required to put in more and more effort just to keep progressing slower and slower; and these people aren't too hot on the gears either. This is, of course, arse about end: the electric bike should be set up, or have a facility (a throttle, say), to adjust the electrical input on hills to be a larger than even proportion of the total, so helping the cyclist out. Pedelecs from Germany (and Taiwan, for the same European market) don't have such facilities. So these people are suddenly given more exercise than they want. They call a car to take them home from wherever the battery ran out or they gave up, and park the bike in the garage for good. They see me on the road (from their cars) much further than they ever ventured on their bikes and want to know how I do it. I do it by having a bigger battery than any two of them together, and by building my own electric bike after careful thought of what was required, so that the pedelec shortcomings don't affect me, and of course I grasp that I must pedal, not just pretend I'm exercising. Even if they keep up riding, staying much nearer home, something else that goes wrong for most of them is the battery. "The battery lasted only three months! And it's offing expensive!" is a common refrain. How many batteries have I bought? Only the one I still have. They don't believe this. They rode those batteries until they were absolutely flat, time and again. I explain that by contrast, even if I've ridden only to the shops and back, call it a couple of miles, I recharge the battery. No matter how far they've seen me into the countryside, I return home with more than half the charge still in the battery. "No, no, I don't want the bother," one told me. I didn't tell him that until he grasps how fragile a LiPo battery is, and learns to care for it, he'd better stay out of electric bikes. Those people are exercising because they've been ordered to by their wives or their doctors, they aren't cyclists, they haven't informed themselves about ebikes, or electrics on bikes, or batteries, or even simple accessories like a heart rate monitor. One waited for me in supermarket car park: he wore the fancy heart rate watch on his arm because it looked like a watch and was looking in bafflement at the handlebar mounting with the chest belt in his hand, trying to work out how the chest belt would tie the mounting onto the handlebars. "Read the ****ing manual," I said to him. "No need for obscenity," he said. "This time I'm taking it seriously. I'm not wasting your time." His bike stands in his garage... The only people I know who have successfully switched over to ebikes are people who switched over from being cyclists on pedal-only bikes, who understand that the bike and its components need tending, who have a history of *pedalling*, and who read up on LiPo batteries.

Andre Jute
RTFM