> to do it day in and day out gets tiring

Can confirm this: I'm doing a 14 km commute and yes, for the first few weeks it's really tiring. Wanted to go to sleep as soon as I got home every afternoon. However, after say 2 or 3 months, your metabolism sort of adapts to it and you do it "naturally", without thinking too much about it. The idea of taking the bus again makes me anxious, though.

Funny thing about exercise is you get better at it, people who have had ebikes for a while (especially the ones that assist based on pedal power) tend to be less overweight and fitter for a reason. Also trikes work just fine for someone with mobility or balance problems (although a decent e trike is by no means cheap, similar up front to a second hand car).

I live in a city with mediocre to poor bike infrastructure at best, and I see plenty of 50-70 year old women doing 25km/h on ebikes or 10-15km/h on regular bikes.

Granted I wasn't overweight when I started, but after 5 years of largely being a couch potato and doing office work, I averaged around 20km/h or ~12mph door to door over a commute of 10 miles on a 40lb trike.

After getting fitter I'm about the same speed but a shower and change of clothes at the other end is optional now even on a 32C day rather than being drenched.

Your experience can only be due to bike hostile infrastructure or laws. If you had to stop three times for 2-5 minutes a piece at each intersection in a car while the empty lane for bikes and pedestrians got a green light on the off chance they showed up, you'd probably be complaining about how inconvenient driving was.

That's what e-bikes are for.

I do it every day. It depends on elevation gain (so it could take much longer depending on the route) but usually I'm closer to 15 minutes than 20. 15mph on average for a daily bike commuter doesn't seem unreasonable at all to me.

That would be an extremely leisurely pace. If you commute regularly on a bike and are reasonably fit, you should be able to ride at about 12 mph without breaking a sweat, which gets you a time of about 25 minutes.

I used to do a 5 mile commute. I didn’t have to deal with any major elevation changes, and it was about 35 minutes. Maybe a professional athlete could do it in 20, but they would still have to wait at stoplights occasionally. You will definitely arrive sweaty unless you are in a very cold climate. All that said, I consider 5 miles to be pretty reasonable for a bike commute.

Google maps pads their bike times by a huge amount. (I just googled 8km in 35 minutes and got results asking about that as a running pace).

You are both right: 5 miles is about 20min on an electric bike, but 35min on a traditional bike.

I do a 4.8-mile trip on a class 3 ebike (28 mph) consistently in 14 minutes in San Diego north county.

YMMV. Google map estimates for cycling are very inaccurate in my experience.

Well, first of all, if you bike regularly, you get all the training you need. The first couple of weeks are perhaps a bit hard, but that's about it for anyone in somewhat ok shape. And then there is the catch which is also the headline of the article we are discussing here: e-bikes. They allow anyone to go at a reasonable speed even uphill. That is, why they create a huge biking crowd.