Tag Archives: bicycles

News, Transportation, Travel

Suddenly, E-Bikes are Everywhere You Look

 

The easier way to see Victoria, BC. (Photo: Cycle BC)

If you travel much, you’ve likely seen the e-bike craze for yourself. Touring by bicycle has long been the preferred way to see picturesque locales, but there was always the question of whether there was a hill involved. Or an Alp, in the case of Switzerland. While bicycle tours were once the property of the fitter among us, these days it’s difficult to find an existing Swiss bicycle tour company that doesn’t offer an e-bike upgrade, opening up new vistas for the more sedentary.

Exhibit A: The New York Times went for an electronically assisted Alpine spin last summer. Of course, in Switzerland, as writer Tim Neville, points out, e-bikes are just lying around:

For 50 Swiss francs a day, about $62 at $1.25 to the franc (with discounts for multiple days), you can rent an electric bike from one of 400 rental stations around the country and then set out on some 5,600 miles of well-marked bike paths.

Closer to home, it’s the same story in Victoria, BC. I rented a non-electric hybrid bike from Cycle BC, $24 for a full day, but when I got back I noticed a row of e-bikes along the wall. They’d converted a few of their Norco hybrids to e-bikes, via a BionX kit, with the battery pack strapped to the bike rack. A motorized hub drives the rear wheel. The e-bikes rent for slightly more ($9 per hour, $35 for the day), but they open up a full day of biking as well.

E-bikes are terrific for touring because you no longer need to worry so much about knowing the terrain, or estimating your fitness. If they can get up and down the Alps, they can handle hills elsewhere just fine. And if you haven’t been on a bike in a while, or ridden very far, touring all day on a bike can quickly come to seem overly optimistic. I always remember the pained look on a 60-ish man’s face, on a Caribbean bike tour, when the humidity, heat, and distance to the beach we were visiting overwhelmed him, and he had to pull up while the rest went on ahead.

Here in the Northwest, electric bikes have enjoyed an elevated popularity for years, at least according to Google, which ranks Oregon’s interest highest, Washington’s second. (“E-bike” is apparently a Californian term.) Seattle’s cliff-faced hills have long prompted a certain surreptitious interest in some kind of help getting up them. Electric Bikes Northwest was founded in the misty past of 1996. They remain the go-to source for e-bike information, with a guide to picking out the electric bike for you, and four different kinds of electric conversion kits.

But as of just two years ago, Sightline could run a whole series wondering where the e-bike excitement was. It still makes good reading, but the market is catching up fast. E-bikes can now be a low-end or high-end purchase. In Portland, you can pick up a top-of-the-line Kalkhoff for just $4,999. (Or you can rent a Kalkhoff and pretend you own a very expensive electric bike for the weekend.)

Here in Seattle, most of your new-bike options are in the $1,000 to $3,000 range. Besides Electric Bikes Northwest, there’s also Greenwood’s Seattle Electric Bike, who sell OHM electric bicycles; Pioneer Square’s Seattle E-Bike, who sell Prodeco when they’re in stock; and Laurelhurst’s Bicycle Center of Seattle, who have an electric bike department with a variety of brands. (They also sell an electric trailer, which will push your regular bicycle around.)

Conversion costs for an existing bike vary widely, depending upon the kit, its weight, power, and the type of motorized hub–whether it’s front or rear, or provides an integrated assist or a stand-alone boost.

Weight still remains an issue–electric bikes can push themselves around fine, but if you have to hoist a full-size e-bike at any time, you might notice if it weighs more than 50 pounds. (Smaller, lighter varieties fold up for traveling or storage on your boat.)

Speed tops out between 15 and 20 mph–that and power limited to 750 watts keeps the e-bike in the legal vicinity of a bicycle, as opposed to a scooter or motorcycle.  The distance they can help you travel depends on you, how much you can or want to pedal, and how big a hill is involved. An “average” might be 20 miles, but speeding up an Alp, Neville reports, exhausted a battery in seven. (Of course, you can also buy a spare battery, just like you might with a cell phone.) In any event, batteries recharge quickly: they can get back to 90 percent of a charge in as little as 20 or 30 minutes, while taking three or four hours for a full charge.

News, Transportation

Seattle Bike Boxes Explained (Again), Plus New Bike Maps

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Bike capacity, this park has it. (Photo: MvB)

A popular spot? (Photo: MvB)

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Every once in a while, Seattle’s Department of Transportation seems to read my mind. They’ve just announced an educational video on the topic of bike boxes: “I’m not sure everyone on the road—car drivers and bicycle riders alike—knows what a green bike box is and how to behave around it,” said Max Hepp-Buchanan, Co-Chair, Seattle Bicycle Advisory Board.

I can vouch for the ignorance of the driver of the black Lexus SUV that rolled to a stop right over the bike box in front of the East Precinct on Pine Street. She seemed only vaguely familiar with the crosswalk, for that matter. Now, all the distracted-driving population has to do interrupt their cell phone conversation for a second, navigate to the bike box video here, and learn all about it.

I’m all for educational videos, but they may want to discuss having them broadcast as PSAs before movies around town–at least there would be the prospect of someone who needed to see it, seeing it. Well begun, half done, and so forth.

Where SDOT can count on people visiting their site to learn more is when their new bicycle maps come out–they’ve handed out almost 120,000 copies since 2007. You can request a printed 2012 Seattle bicycle map now, via online form or by phone. They’ll mail it to you. If you can’t wait, there’s an online version you can play with as well.

One of the most eye-opening ways to gauge Seattle’s progress on bike infrastructure is to go somewhere else: I snapped the above photos at a lakeside park in Thun. It was a sunny weekday afternoon, and I saw what I thought was lively usage of the bike parking area. My hosts snickered. On the weekends, the whole area fills up with several hundred bikes, they told me.

In my hotel, there are not one but two magazines devoted to varieties of bike tours. They’re aimed at the Swiss, who apparently like to bike about their country and see the sights that way. Yes, there’s an Alps segment–but as the e-bikes for rent in my hotel lobby attest, the Swiss aren’t stupid about how hard bike touring should be. How many Seattle hotels do you think have e-bikes in the lobby to help tourists with Seattle’s hills? Excelsior!

News, Politics, Transportation

The War on Running People Down in the Street

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If you lived here, you could have a car in your living room by now. This 24th Ave E & Montlake Blvd apartment's guard rail is put to heavy use each year. (Photo: MvB)

UPDATE: Thanks to Andrew Sullivan and Sightline for the links.

It’s a sad fact that you have to get out of your car, occasionally, and at those times you’re vulnerable if you’re anywhere near a street. Short of only patronizing drive-thrus, and making sure your home comes with a garage, there’s one sure way of bettering your odds of living peacefully with cars.

That’s slowing down the car before it hits you.

In “The War On Kids, the Elderly, and Other People Who Walk,” Sightline’s Eric de Place is writing about a bill before Washington legislature, which would allow cities to set 20-mph speed limits on their residential streets, without paying for an engineering and traffic study first. It seems picayune. What difference could five miles per hour make? It turns out to be life-and-death, because the relationship of fatalities to speed is not linear.

Someone hit by a car traveling at 40 miles per hour has an over-80-percent chance of being killed. At 30, it’s still 37 to 45 percent. But at 20, it’s just five percent. The key factors are stopping time and response time–at 20 miles per hour, the driver is in control of their car, and can stop before hitting someone. As you increase speed, you have less time to respond, while stopping distance increases.

There are apparently people for whom a five mile-per-hour difference is a bridge too far. Their time is far too valuable (despite their predilection for traveling long distances on residential streets) and in their cost-benefit ratio, the cost of a few lives is worth it. I don’t know how else to put it.

When you peruse the Seattle Department of Transportation’s 2010 Traffic Report, you learn that 529 pedestrians were hit by people in cars last year. Over 8,000 times, drivers hit other cars–but in fact, the citywide collision rate has been trending downward. It’s pedestrians who are getting hit more often than before.

Image from SDOT's 2010 Traffic Report

The top three reasons for collisions seem indicative of a larger “my hurry is more important than your hurry” mindset: they were “not granting the right of way to a vehicle, inattention and following too closely.” Speeding, especially on arterials, can be a huge problem. SDOT found that a full 25 percent of SW Admiral Way traffic fell into the aggressive speeder category, exceeding the posted limit (30 mph) by ten miles per hour or more.

At Crosscut, senior citizen Doug McDonald notes that “Sixty percent of the dead pedestrians were senior citizens,” while in a majority of the pedestrian-hit-by-car incidents where responsibility could be assigned, the driver was at fault. (This is not to ignore the number of collisions caused by pedestrians strolling obliviously into the street, but the person they’re doing in is themselves.) In 2010, you were most likely to be killed by a car walking between 9 and 10 a.m., 1 and 3 p.m., and 6 to 7 p.m.

Interestingly, though you’d never know it from the complaints about from people driving cars about how terrible traffic is, Seattle’s average daily traffic the past two years is the lowest it’s been since 2000. And not by a negligible amount, either. 2003’s high of almost 980,000 daily vehicle trips fell to 900,000 in 2009, bouncing back slightly to 910,000 last year.

It’s not clear how much a 20-mph speed limit on certain residential streets would affect accident rates. There is always the question of whether people would obey the limit in the first place. But it doesn’t seem like a terrible thing, does it, if people want to request a lower speed limit where they live?

News, Transportation

The Real Meaning of Bike to Work Day

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"Summer in Ballard," courtesy of our Flickr pool's Slightlynorth

Friday, May 20, 2011, is Bike to Work Day, capping off Bike to Work Week (May 16-20), both of which are part, naturally, of National Bike to Work Month.

The League of American Bicyclists rates Seattle #23 of 244 bicycling communities (er…by population, I’ve been told, not for bicyling-osity). We’re in the top 20 for miles of bike lanes and paths (dropping a bit in the rankings if you rate us by miles/100,000 persons), and we’re in the top 10 in terms of bicycle commuters, with about 10,600 people riding to work on bikes.

That’s just three percent of commuters, but it makes a big difference. See photo exhibit A.

Apparently it makes a big difference to people who drive cars, though not the way you might think. Danny Westneat had a column this week headlined “What’s with all the bike bitterness?“:

“For those of us who daily attempt to ‘share the trail’ with aggressive bicyclers, our lives are in danger,” read an apparently serious letter-to-the-editor that we published this week. “The mandate from their mayor gives them power over our streets, sidewalks and all trails…. When is this going to stop?”

Bicyclists do take lives in their hands, but typically it is their own. Here is a list of bicyclist fatalities that far outstrips the deaths of anyone hit by a cyclist. (To be fair, I can think of one person who was killed by a bicyclist.) This isn’t to say cyclists are any better or worse human beings–just that it’s harder to accidentally kill someone with your bicycle than a car. Conversely, as KING 5 reports, there were 448 traffic deaths in Washington in 2010–and that represented a substantial decline.

While it may be right-thinking, I doubt that the majority of people who have more than a 5-mile commute to work are ready to ditch the car for a bicycle. When Dan Bertolet says, “Requiring people to pay the true cost of their driving is not an ideological conspiracy to force the innocents out of their cars and into spandex bike shorts,” he may be correct, but he’s not persuasive. (UPDATE: Dan points out that he can be plenty persuasive. My bad for not pointing to this post, which I belatedly remember reading.)

The “reverse social engineering” he talks about–to counteract the social engineering that demands you drive a car–is exactly perceived as cutting into the thin household “margins” that the majority of people operate on. That’s why there’s widespread grumbling over the city of Seattle spending even a proportional amount of transportation dollars on bicycle commuters.

It’s a Catch-22: Because society is set up to move the vast majority of people by car, and it’s failing at doing that well (due to a variety of factors, but certainly because urban density precludes a car in every kitchen), there’s stress and pain out there. Rather than reinvent, many people would rather just double-down on wider roads and cheap gas.

Still, to answer Westneat’s question about the bitterness, read Tom Fucoloro on how much fun it is to ride a bike. I think Fucoloro’s attitude is spot on–he highlights the individual pleasures (and sense of accomplishment) that making this decision brings, and leaves the social benefits to the side. Very few people ride a bike, really, primarily to fight traffic congestion. They ride because it makes sense to them, because it’s faster and more convenient, because it’s fun, because they’ve figured out a safe way to commute, because they like the exercise, because their friends ride…and on and on.

The bitterness comes in part from the people who are “stuck” and, whether they know it or not, are envious of the bicyclist. Just as an underwater homeowner is stuck, and is bitter about someone moving to greener pastures, people who commute in cars are stuck, and aren’t happy about it. It’s one thing if we’re all in the commute grind together, but when people opt out and you can’t, it’s upsetting.

Some people are stuck in their cars because they’ve had to make economic trade-offs (affordable suburban house for the family equals 45-minute commute to work). But others are stuck emotionally, and completely anecdotally, I find that these people are the most bitter, and who develop doomsday scenarios from each new mile of bike lanes. Somehow, making bicycling safer and more convenient becomes the equivalent of a loaded gun to the temple, forcing them onto a Schwinn and certain death.

Peruse the angry comment threads on a bike article and you can pick them out: they are the people who can’t find a reason to ride a bike at any time–it’s stupid, it’s silly, it’s not serious. The evident enjoyment, then, that cyclists derive from riding around has to be denied–it’s smugness, it’s spandex, it’s the menacing hordes of The Wild One, it’s Stalinism.

Their emotional stuck-ness translates to their inability to imagine that 10,000 other people have figured out a way to use bicycles as transportation, have negotiated that endless list of reasons-you-can’t by simply deciding to do it. (There’s no right answer–some people use a car for larger shopping trips, some attach a cart to the bike, but when people are frightened or frozen by habit, they just don’t display adaptability.) In their minds, cyclists are somehow faking it.

That it’s non-rational is evident in their attempt to deny someone else’s experience, or even the long-studied results of road diets (generally, speeding abates, capacity is preserved), because they are really arguing with themselves over the possibility of change in their lives. Again, anecdotally, my conversations with people who have good reasons for not cycling, or who just don’t care to, are not drenched in bitterness, as a rule.

But just as a tip, if you bike to work tomorrow, and you meet up with bitterness, try a little compassion rather than an argument. It may not seem like such a big deal to you, but imagine what that freedom means to someone who can’t imagine themselves able to enjoy it.