“Electric Bike, Stupid Love of my Life”
“I’ve long since posited world peace could be achieved if you bought everyone in the world a bike, but now I want those bikes to be electric. I want everyone to feel this silliness, this punch-drunk stupidity of pure love, this sense of cheating the rules, the norms, this sense of ever-present delight. At our worst, humans mindlessly consume, sear the earth and each other, fill our bodies with poisons. At our best we invent electric bikes. Batteries have gotten more efficient, motors smaller and more powerful. The last decade has brought great efficiency to these machines, and the next ten years will only double down on these gains. Electric bike numbers are up, year over year over year. Tremendously so. Those who know, proselytize. We can’t help it. The charm is too great. The game non- zero sum. The more people who know, the better the world. It’s a wild notion, this sense of goodness to be had if you just reach out for it. Goodness with no real downside. Like solar panels or wind turbines, electric bikes are machines that buoy the spirit and the earth.”
This is a really great essay, and I recommend heading to the link and reading the whole thing.
I’m in Tallinn, Estonia, today. I walked a few miles from my hotel to see the Tallinn Maritime Days, a festival at the marina and harbor on the Tallinn Bay, in the Gulf of Finland. It was a great day, and this essay was timely, as Tallinn is notable for how it is so common to ride bikes and scooters here. Most are electric, and it is wonderful how embraced they are. People of all ages ride them, and there are wide lanes for them—nearly the size of the roads for cars in the main arteries. I hope, as the essay suggest, more people at home get the bug, and we start to demand more infrastructure change, so we can more fully embrace two-wheeled travel.