Can e-bikes revolutionise long-distance commuting?

Yeah, I feel the same. Also commutes get a lot longer due to the infrastructure not being there and bikes being second class citizens. I try to commute by bike, but it feels longer and scarier than it should.

To build on your point, though not as bad in SFBay as elsewhere - there are neighborhoods that are only car-friendly, and don't have accessible walk/bike paths between buildings/houses that would make it efficient to bike.

The entire basis of city planning in the US has been based on cars for the last 60+ years. I don't see that changing anytime soon, unfortunately.

Cars are also designed (except for hybrids and maybe some electrics) to have jackrabbit-starts which make it intolerable at high speeds. You don't realize this until you drive a hybrid or electric, but it affects your attitude towards not only other cars but bikes and pedestrians as well.

SUVs have specific problems with their high center of gravity and visibility. I used to joke to my friends that, while renting an SUV for a week, I got flipped off about 3 times. Never happened with other rentals or my daily.

In London they have built some amazing cycle super highways which are great to cycle on, however you can go incredibly fast and some people do - I've seen three ambulances in a week along there (Embankment) recently scraping up people off the road. It's safer than being with cars and lorries but pedestrians seem to not look and walk into the cycle lane because bikes are pretty silent... anyway I do agree with cycle lanes but maybe we need to think through pedestrians and speed as well...

> It's still very dangerous to bike in Silicon Valley.

How much does this depend on where you are in SV?

When I lived and worked in Cupertino, for instance, my job was in a small office park on De Anza near Bollinger. My apartment was near Homestead and Stelling. The layout of Cupertino was basically mostly residential neighborhoods on roughly a grid, with islands of office parks and strip malls, except for a few main streets like De Anza and Stevens Creek that had mostly businesses.

It was pretty easy to bike in such a way as to have most of the trip be on the residential streets, which were generally pretty low traffic, and since things were mostly on a grid that didn't add distance.

That was 25 years ago, but looking at aerial/satellite maps of today's Cupertino, it looks like it is still basically the same.

Not exactly - your summary misses a few of the points they brought up on how e-bikes make fair replacements for cars in a lot of commuting situations. The article leads off with how the excessive commute made an employee more irritable until he switched to using an e-bike, then how a growing number of Dutchmen are switching to e-bikes and how a growing number of companies are helping with the purchase of e-bikes.

The entire thing is pretty much exactly as the title is asking, though perhaps a little less glorious than "revolutionizing", and more just talking about the practical concerns of more people using e-bikes and how governments are responding.

To weigh in, I think it's a cool initiative with a lot of questions to consider, since I'd largely agree that an electric vehicle is probably a hazard to those with non-electric transportation. Though, at least in the US, I can't imagine normal traffic responding well to the inclusion of e-bikes, even if it would solve transportation needs for a lot of people. I am curious how the insurance looks for it as many years back (8ish maybe?) I looked into getting an e-bike but the insurance increase was prohibitively much.

20mph is slow - Fit cyclists would be able to keep up with him.

My cycle to work this morning had a top speed of 40kmph (24mph). I was feeling particularly slow this morning and am only just getting back into cycling. I expect that soon I'll be quite a bit faster.

> Ideally, the law would set that speed limit to ~20mph since that is what a person pedaling can readily achieve.

Federal law already does that (in the USA, at least). E-Bikes sold in the US can't go faster than 20mph.

You're also right in that e-bikes aren't going to revolutionize commuting anywhere but in crowded cities. It does solve the last mile problem, though. Trains can get you from the country to the city and the ebike can get you through the city faster than anything other than a motorcycle.

They're also fun as hell to ride. :)

There was heavy lobbying over that.

There's a continuum of two wheeled vehicles from a kid's BMX bike to a Harley. There has to be an arbitrary cutoff on how much vehicle you can use on a bike path.

Here's what the top end in electric bikes looks like.[1] Out-accelerates a motorcycle. Suitable for dirt-biking. $8000. That has far more performance than a 50cc moped from Wal-Mart for $249.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A65dt-zLdSw

And secure bike storage that is secure and doesn't suck.

The building housing a former sf employer required bikers to use the (slow, smelly, frequently occupied with very slow users) service elevator and store their bikes in a crappy room in the corner of the basement. In what was obviously a hastily converted area. A coworker was locked in the bike storage for 4+ hours. He left at around 2am after putting out some fire, the door to the bike room in the basement was set to lock behind him (yes, this is almost certainly wildly out of code), and the building was solid enough that his cell didn't work from the basement. There were frantic calls to police by his wife. He was found when the basement was opened the next morning.

In lieu of suing everyone in sight we got permission to ride the normal elevators with bikes and to keep them in our office.

Living in China, the electric bikes were always scary. They were fast, heavy, and silent. Still, there should be a way to make it work with more infrastructure. Maybe self driving electric bikes will be a thing?

As a bicycle commuter, I would love to see more people doing anything that isn't cars and would glad share bicycle infrastructure with these guys. The more drivers see us, the more they look. Their speed differential is no more than what you or I have with a lot of casual cyclists, and the electric battery doesn't weigh more than a fully loaded backpack.

Is the real issue that they aren't 'real' cyclists and didn't earn it?

FWIW, my "cheater bike" tops out at right on 25kmh under power - it'll go faster than that if you pedal hard, but the electrics aren't helping any more.

It still makes it really easy to go fast tho, even in jeans and a tshirt, with a backpack full of laptop (and 20+kg too much paunch) - it's pretty easy to out-accelerate most lycra-clad commuters if they don't notice you coming. It's pretty easy to out pace lots of fit looking bicycle riders on long up hill inclines - but if they care, they'll mostly blow past me again doing 40kmh on the downslope on the other side while I'm just rolling along at not much over 25kmh where my assist tops out.

(Safety-wise, my battery weights 850g. The motor and controller add up to maybe 1kg. I'm pretty sure I've seen lycra-louts with more weight in their bidons than my electric assist adds!)

Which have you got?

Where is here for you? In The Netherlands, an e-bike costs you about 1300 EUR. Not cheap for a bike but not overly expensive either, there are more expensive non-e-bikes that are regularly bought.

Why is it a sin to attach a kickstand to a bike?

As someone who commutes by bike (short-distance, non-electric), I'm not sure what the perceived problem is when stopping at a traffic light. I understood it as “pedestrians never stop at red lights, so I'd like to not do it either on a bike” which doesn't really make sense to me. As a cyclist on the road I'm bound to the exact same rules as cars, even though motorists frequently seem to have a problem with me having the right of way in certain circumstances. The latter is something bike paths separate from roads fix, but that's already the case here outside cities for the most part, it's just not feasible within them. Ideally you'd want to completely separate all modes of transport from each other, but again, not feasible.

There's also slowing down to a crawl when approaching the light and learning how to balance on a stopped bike. The later is something I've never mastered.

There are literally tens of millions of people in Asia who commute on scooters every day who have no problem stopping at a red light and balancing their scooter.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. You don't need to balance the bike when you're stopped - you put your foot on the floor and wait. I know it's different in every country but pedestrians and cyclists frequently wait at lights. Are you more concerned about wasting time by not having right of way or do you find bikes fall over when you stop?

Issues that are probably bigger than "balancing" when you're commuting by bike are: access to safe cycle paths, getting sweaty before work and the weather.

How often have you gotten a ticket for treating a signal like a stop sign? Personally I've never gotten that where I use it judiciously (ie, no traffic that could possibly get confused by my running the red).

This never occurs to me as a problem on my motorcycles...

Learn to track stand [0]?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRR4paQnUsQ

With a big enough increase in bike paths, this calculation may differ: going slow enough to be allowed on a bike path, while still being able to split lanes when needed, could be a huge advantage. Additionally, if you live somewhere that is space constrained (like a small apartment without parking) an electric bike is significantly easier to find space for.

It basically boils down to: do you have the storage space for a small car, and just want faster highway and street commutes? A scooter makes sense. Do you have to bring it up an elevator or want to use rail trails? E-bike all the way.

Who's "dismounting" their bike when they stop...it's leg down or just trackstand.