I’m a person living in a rural area and have to either go by train, the nearest station being 15 mins away by car and the trains having a schedule that keeps fluctuating.
Or have to go by car where it takes 60 mins to get where I need to go. I wouldn’t want to get a late pickup or anything outrageous just something to get me places.
I’m not a car enthusiast or anything like that.
I bought an ebike and that’s been kind of a game changer. Its allowed my partner and I to share a car, and I just ebike around at 40km/hour whenever she needs to drive. It requires a bit of willingness to get cold/wet, and some creativity with bike locking, but it makes those 10-15km distances in my hometown realistically accessible by bike on an everyday basis.
That’s amazing, although in the EU rules are more strict on ebikes. Especially with ones over a certain limit. They can only really go max 25/h and if they go over they become by law a vehicle and need a license plate and a driving license to drive.
25km is so frigging slow. My wife has a normal bike and she has to slow down for me (on ebike) to catch up. I don’t understand why they didn’t make it 30km/h, plenty of people cycle that fast.
I can cycle faster than 25km/h with my pedelec by using my legs. The bike does not stop me from going faster, there is just no motor support then.
Polish law is nuts.
Thanks for the info! I was thinking of getting a e-bike but I always ran into this issue of not knowing where to lock it and also what I would do if the e-bike broke down. How do you deal with these things?
I’ve been using a ratty old normal bike to take care of those issues: I can just chain to like parking signs and people don’t care enough to steal it, and I can fix a regular bike, but as you’ve said sometimes one just isn’t down for 20km of exercise.