My First Ebike Ride

I rode an electric bike for the very first time last weekend. I’ve been seeing them more and more often over the course of the last three years but had never had a scenario where I really wanted to ride one. I was fine riding my regular human powered bicycle and the regular bike share bikes.

I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed it! It was a marvelous experience. The park I was in has a loop that’s about 10 kilometres long. I kind of thought the area I lived in was pretty flat until I went north and realize there are a lot (and I mean A LOT) of hills. I had already gone to the gym that morning and was walking around one of the northern neighbourhoods, so I wasn’t looking forward to riding a heavy bike uphill…so I decided to finally give the e-bike a shot.

I’m somewhat lying. I tried a friend’s bike share bike once for about 5 seconds a few months back, but don’t think it did it any justice. That taste of the electric life gave me the motivation to finally try it out.

From the very first minute on the bike, I immediately understood why people love these so much. I especially noticed the benefits since right off the bat I was headed up a pretty steep hill. I put in nearly 0 effort to up that hill. It felt more like I was pushing an acceleration pedal rather than actually putting in any work and it made it all the more pleasant to ride.

The Ride

It was a perfect spring day and riding around the park was absolutely beautiful. If this was a regular bike ride, I would have been a little more focused on pedaling since it is quite hilly in this portion, but I got to look at the scenery and slow down and speed up without worrying too much about how much energy I was using. It felt like taking a tour ride of the city more than exercising.

My Take

I think the best use of this for me personally would be for hill assists. This would come in handy if I want to go somewhere and I’m not trying to get a cardio workout in out of it. I think if I lived in a flat-area (like The Netherlands), I wouldn’t really be in the market for an e-bike. Flat areas are usually extremely easy to continually bike around (especially if you’re not trying to go as fast as possible). If I were going at an average speed of 10-12km/hr, I could probably bike all day…but only if the area is relatively flat. If I lived in a hilly area, this would be absolutely perfect for all the hills in the area. In a city like Washington, DC there are many areas that are extremely flat, but often times steep hills appear seemingly out of nowhere and can make it hard to suggest a bike in a lot of scenarios. I think a lot of the bikes offer multiple modes that let you choose between power and eco modes where the motor offers a wide array of assist options that can make it much easier to push up a hill.

My Urbanism Opinion

All of my friends know me for talking about the wastefulness of cars and how often I promote cycling and transit as a way to get around…so it’s a little surprising that I haven’t tried a common thing like an e-bike but it adds to my arguments in favour of reducing car dependency (especially in urban areas). So often people use arguments like “they don’t want to be sweaty when they get to work or that it’s too much work to use anything but a car and these put at least a few of those arguments to rest. I am hopeful that the availability of e-bikes kind of adds more fuel to the movement towards non-automobile transit. Just a few more of these on the roads would go a looooong way in reducing urban noise, congestion, and energy usage. I would hope that one day, the streets in the urban US become more like the streets in Barcelona or Prague: full of life and people and not monopolized by cars.

Energy Usage

I’m always interested in seeing how much energy is used by different modes of transport (I think it’s one of my first posts on this site) and from what I’ve seen, a lot of electric bikes have a maximum motor power output between 200 and 400 Watts. I can confidently say that the vast majority of the time you won’t be using the maximum power draw, so if I lean towards the lower end and assume an average power output of 150W, then an hour would use 1.5 kilowatt-hours…which is the equivalent of roughly two Big Macs.

I am definitely looking forward to my next e-bike ride. Maybe if I move a little bit farther from my main activities I’ll consider buying my very own.