One underrated lesson Luigi taught us is that transit privacy is necessary for a free society and ebikes are the transit modality of a free people.
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I truly do not want to hear from European conservatives about the need for speed governors, location tracking, and neutralizing the revolutionary capacity of ebikes because it's scary when they go fast. Please hesitate to say that ebikes are a mixed blessing because they simply aren't. Of course the materials have a colonial origin, but the lithium needed to produce an ebike is an unimaginably small fraction compared to an electric car. Of course electricity is still in many places nonrenewable, but the electricity needed to power an ebike is many orders of magnitude less than an electric car. The alternatives are bad while ebikes are good, and any attempt to neutralize that goodness in service of protecting a car-centric society is regressive, conservative politics.
Get the fuck out of your car and onto an ebike. Get one that's powrful enough to carry you at road speeds. Get one where you can override the software speed limit. Get one where you can pack as many batteries as you need. Part of what makes ebikes rad is that they return the capacity for hacking your vehicle back to you, while hacking an ICE or EV is a death sentence for most people. Wear all the moto protective gear every time. You will not regret it. I do not miss paying for gas and being trapped in a car.
The alternative of either cooking the planet by failing to electrify or having electrification mean everyone drives 4 ton colonial rare earth metal luxury clusterfucks is grim while a future of cities based around public transit supplemented by low-weight, low-complexity, high-freedom ebikes is beautiful.
Needless to say it is ONLY a mass adoption of ebikes in the period while they are still a free technology that will prevent them from being regulated out of existence. It is black bloc as transit infrastructure: we need median income median privacy-needs people on ebikes to keep them viable for everyone. More mundanely, roving packs of ebikers shift transit infra priorities. So there's a collective benefit beyond all the obvious personal benefits too.
They are a societal cheat code and we know how governments feel about those: too good to be so free.
@jonny I’m consistently surprised by how many conservative type young dudes rock like tacticool black/army green e-bikes in rural alaska. never guessed that crowd would be a dominant ebike sector but they totally are, love that for them
@seachanger
It's a weird space because half of ebike hackers are like "fuck it I zip tied a hundred model plane batteries on my stolen BMX and im hustling to survive" and half of them are like "when the rapture happens I will be able to bike directly into jesus' arms where he's waiting in Minnesota or wherever with my solar powered survivalist bike"
It's a weird space because half of ebike hackers are like "fuck it I zip tied a hundred model plane batteries on my stolen BMX and im hustling to survive" and half of them are like "when the rapture happens I will be able to bike directly into jesus' arms where he's waiting in Minnesota or wherever with my solar powered survivalist bike"
much like Luigi, something we can all agree on
Its also dope as hell to be on the road on a vehicle where other people on it are also people instead of everyone in a city being anonymous steel bricks of road rage. I talk to bikers and people in cars talk to me while we're just rolling around the city because that's what not being in anonymizing steel brick does.
I dont really feel in any more signficant danger than when I'm in a car because I literally get the best of all worlds in transit: when I need to, I can go as fast as a car, so I can just occupy a lane and be fine. When traffic is tight, I can split lanes and maneuver like a motorcycle, leaving all the traffic behind. When things are hectic I can behave like a bike and pop up onto the sidewalk temporarily and actually safely go 2mph among pedestrian traffic. It's a vehicle that makes sense everywhere except the highway.
Biking is different than driving in material ways, like you just make fundamentally different decisions about where to be with your body than when you are locked into rigid line world of cars. I dont put myself anywhere where another car could crash into me at high speeds. I cross all intersections with another car as a horizontal buffer. I can pull over, stop, cut into an alley, choose a side street or sidewalk depending on what's around me.
@jonny I am always at my most punk when I'm on my bike.
Ebikes are also different than motorcycles - I would never ride my motorcycle up onto a sidewalk because that's loud as hell, rude, smelly, explicitly illegal, and is much heavier & has a much greater acceleration = has a much greater potential danger to pedestrians. Similarly I would not choose routes, go moto speeds, or need to maneuver like a car s.t. I put myself in cross traffic danger.
It's just a different modality altogether than cars, motorcycles, or acoustic bikes, and none of the law (good), infrastructure (bad), or public perception (bad) has caught up.
@jonny perhaps nice to know, in the Netherlands there is quite some legislation about e-bikes: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/fiets/vraag-en-antwoord/welke-regels-gelden-voor-mijn-elektrische-fiets-e-bike (couldn't find an English translation, sorry)
@RonaldSnijder
Right thats part of what I meant when I was referring to European conservativism trying to neutralize them before the infrastructure adapts or their potential is realized
Right thats part of what I meant when I was referring to European conservativism trying to neutralize them before the infrastructure adapts or their potential is realized
@RonaldSnijder
Before I translate, I love how "fatbike" is either an English loaner word or a word that totally transcends language because that's just what they are
Before I translate, I love how "fatbike" is either an English loaner word or a word that totally transcends language because that's just what they are
Read your bike history. Bikes have been a radical technology everywhere they exist. From a materialist perspective, you dont just invent the most energy efficient means of conveyance by an order of magnitude and have it not be revolutionary. You dont invent a technology that dramatically reshapes people's relationship with space and have that not be revolutionary.
Ebikes are an evolutionary step in that history. To be able to gain access to the City with a stolen BMX bike and the cost of a single Uber ride in parts is revolutionary. To not need government identification and an elaborate system of regulation to interact with space is, for now, revolutionary. To be able to avoid automated plate readers and move freely in a surveillance state is not a luxury, it is necessary.