E-Bike

From Medium.com

By Connor Hearld

*becoming more eco-conscious*

It sounds fake doesn’t it? Well, also backwards. Riding a bike is supposed to be a healthy move in the right direction. Doesn’t making the bike electric just make it a worse off bike you’d maybe ask yourself?

While I wouldn’t recommend an e-bike for your health needs, assuming you don’t plan on pedaling at all if you have a decent throttle. An e-bike for me has been a great way to stay outdoors. With less time than I used to have and more concern for my own health, I wonder if it’s time to put up my skateboard I used to ride to work and just stick solely to my e-bike.

The electric bike I decided to go with was a Pedal Electric Core 2.0. It’s quite expensive I know, but I figured with not using my vehicle, it makes up for it(I currently have a broken down Ford Focus, one of the worst vehicles in my experience thus far). Obviously it’s not a cost free decision. I still need to pay for the electricity charging my bike as well as the new maintenance that comes with maintaining a bike instead of a car(still need to fix the car).

Getting an e-bike has been a choice of “this will get me by reliably and quickly.” There are better options I’m sure, maybe even cheaper bikes. One of my worries when it comes to the cost of said bike is that you are risking a decent battery.

RadWagon 4 Electric Cargo Bike
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From TheAtlantic.com

By Michael Thomas

Today’s happiness and personal-finance gurus have no shortage of advice for living a good life. Meditate daily. Sleep for eight hours a night. Don’t forget to save for retirement. They’re not wrong, but few of these experts will tell you one of the best ways to improve your life: Ditch your car.

A year ago, my wife and I sold one of our cars and replaced it with an e-bike. As someone who writes about climate change, I knew that I was doing something good for the planet. I knew that passenger vehicles are responsible for much of our greenhouse-gas emissions—16 percent in the U.S., to be exact—and that the pollution spewing from gas-powered cars doesn’t just heat up the planet; it could increase the risk of premature death. I also knew that electric cars were an imperfect fix: Though they’re responsible for less carbon pollution than gas cars, even when powered by today’s dirty electric grid, their supply chain is carbon intensive, and many of the materials needed to produce their batteries are, in some cases, mined via a process that brutally exploits workers and harms ecosystems and sacred Indigenous lands. An e-bike’s comparatively tiny battery means less electricity, fewer emissions, fewer resources. They are clearly better for the planet than cars of any kind.

I knew all of this. But I also viewed getting rid of my car as a sacrifice—something for the militant and reckless, something that Greenpeace volunteers did to make the world better. I live in Colorado; e-biking would mean freezing in the winter and sweating in the summer. It was the right thing to do, I thought, but it was not going to be fun.

 
RadWagon 4 Electric Cargo Bike

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Fromm Inverse.com

BYTOM VANDERBILT

The electric vehicle revolution is already here — sporting two wheels and a pair of pedals.

Transportation, like most human behaviors, is shaped by a mixture of utility, convenience, visibility, and familiarity. As energy-conserving, satisficing humans, we reach for what is easy, what we can see, what we know. Nearly one-third of car trips in America, for example, take us less than one mile. Why not walk or ride a bike? Because our impulse to drive is a virtual muscle memory. Habits, notes Charles Duhigg, “shape our lives far more than we realize — they are so strong, in fact, that they cause our brains to cling to them at the exclusion of all else, including common sense.”

When the bike-share system CitiBike arrived in New York City a decade ago, I immediately and enthusiastically signed up. There was just one problem. The nearest station, in those early days, was precisely a mile from my house. As transportation planners have found, people are generally unwilling to walk more than half a mile to a transit stop — and so was I. The subway, meanwhile, was a block away. As you might imagine, whatever my intentions to embrace the service, I generally defaulted to the easier option. It wasn’t until a bike-share station opened a block away that I became a regular user. My behavior only changed because the context did.

Image courtesy of Cake

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From TreehHugger.com