The other night, I was making dinner when I realized that we were completely out of ginger. Our grocery store is pretty close by, but it’s too far to walk and still get a meal on the table in time. You can drive it, but at dinnertime the parking lot is an absolute zoo. Forget circling to find a space—sometimes it’s so tough to turn left into the parking lot that you end up idling in the middle of the street forever. And did I remember to fill the car up with gas? What a hassle!
However, I wasn’t annoyed, because I had no intention of driving to the store. Instead I clicked on a helmet, hopped on my e-bike, and set out. I cruised past cars stopped in traffic. I sailed up a long hill. I zipped right up to the doors of the Harris Teeter and locked my bike to the rack, next to two other e-bikes. Yes, I still had to wait at a register, but once I was out, I rode home in no time flat. The trip was probably 15 minutes instead of a 10-minute drive, which, yes, means it took 50 percent more time. But it was about 700 percent more pleasant!
Since I bought this fairly inexpensive transportation device in 2021, I’ve ridden hundreds upon hundreds of miles, each of them replacing a mile I would once have driven in a car. I’ve taken uncountable trips to the grocery store, and scores of rides to the office or the Metro or to meet friends for a night out. Freed from traffic and parking worries, faced with a ride in the fresh air rather than yet another trip in a car, I go out more. My suburb has come to feel like a place newly worth exploring.
My e-bike has changed my life. I’m happier, healthier, and more active. My relationship to my community has been completely transformed. I guess I’ve become an e-bike guy. You can, too.
E-bikes have gotten enough media coverage in recent years that you might assume they’ve attained mass-cultural ubiquity, but it’s not really true. When I start going on tiresomely at parties and cookouts about my e-bike, a lot of people ask: What’s an e-bike again?
An e-bike is a general term encompassing any number of motor-assisted bicycles, from janky near-mopeds with jury-rigged batteries that would curl a fire inspector’s hair to luxe, $5,000-plus beauties made by the big names in cycling. Even Porsche makes one! But they pretty much all operate on the same basic principle: You pedal, as on a regular bike, and the motor gives you a little boost. That boost can vary; my e-bike tops out at 18 miles per hour, while you’ve likely seen some riders zooming around at speeds well higher than that, often not even touching their pedals. In 2021, more Americans bought e-bikes than electric cars, according to one study; the 880,000 e-bikes sold that year nearly doubled the sales of the year before.
I’ve never exactly been a consistent cyclist. I enjoy riding, and at times have made it part of my life. But I’m the kind of person who trained for, and wheezed his way through, a cycling tour of Provence with his dad, but who almost never rode to work. I spent three months in the Netherlands, where abandoning cars felt incredibly liberating; when I returned to the U.S., I struggled to ride consistently. Unlike pancake-flat Delft, the Washington suburb where I live is a crenelated topo of rolling hills, such that if I rode anywhere I was sentencing myself to multiple back-breaking climbs just to get home. As I got older and less in shape, those climbs became more and more daunting. The idea of doing them while hauling groceries, or anything heavier than a backpack? Oof.
In early 2021, though, I was ready for a change. I was sick of driving everywhere—sick of turning on the car to go a mile to the grocery store, sick of driving myself to tennis matches and soccer games. Our office was open, but I hated taking the freeway into the city. I felt compelled by arguments like my colleague Henry Grabar’s, that the point was to think of e-bikes not as more expensive bikes, but as cheap replacements for cars. I ordered a cruiser from one of the many direct-to-consumer companies whose ads’ algorithms were getting better and better at inserting into my social media feeds. And I gave it a try.
The first thing to say about riding an e-bike is that it really does feel like magic. You pedal the same way you’ve been pedaling bikes since you were a kid, but the bike just sails forward, as if a giant hand is pushing you from behind. You’re not going alarmingly fast—my bike has variable speed settings, so you can really cruise at whatever speed you want—but you are going faster than you’d expect, given the modest effort you’re putting into pedaling.
So on my first ride I was already enjoying the process. And then I reached the Edison hill.
Just about a block from my house, the road bends sharply upward toward Edison Street. It’s not a long incline, but it’s made more perilous by the fact that for this section, the street narrows and the bike lanes disappear. If you’re heading north or east from my house, there’s basically no other bikeable route, so this hill had become my nemesis: I dreaded laboring up to Edison Street. By the time I got to the top I’d be sweating and swearing and casting nervous glances over my shoulder at the impatient drivers riding my ass.
But this time I turned my e-bike to its highest setting and—there’s no better way to put it—simply rode up the hill. I wasn’t flying or anything, but I was able to maintain my speed through the ascent, and minimize my time on this perilous stretch of road. It was not harder work than riding on level ground. It felt the same.
This was how I discovered that for a rider like me—older, a little out of shape, not interested in showing up at work drenched in sweat—the real power of an e-bike is the way it changes your mental map of your community. Yes, the assist I get from the motor minimizes distances, so that a destination 5 miles away no longer feels annoyingly far. But my e-bike also flattens the map. Where once my calculation about whether to ride someplace had to take into account whether the steep hills between me and, say, downtown D.C. would make the ride a torturous ordeal, now those hills disappear. They are simply not part of my calculations. Does it seem like there are some bike lanes between here and there? OK, I’m in.
Once I realized this, I made a vow: If I’ve got an errand that’s within 5 miles of my house, I’m gonna ride there. For the most part, I’ve fulfilled that pledge. I don’t ride in the snow, though I’ve made plenty of trips in drizzle, in blazing heat, and in freezing cold. (I bought insulated pants!) I can’t haul too much on the bike, though I’ve managed to figure out how to carry such suburban-dad loads as five extra-large pizzas, three bags of mulch, a full propane tank, or eight cases of Spindrift. I can’t drive my teenagers to their various obligations on my bike—though I bought a second e-bike, and they often grumpily ride that to work and to friends’ houses.
And I find that I am simply more likely to leave the house, for any reason, than I used to be. Yeah, I’ll get that ginger, back in a jif. It’s a nice day out? I’ll just ride over to the beer garden and work there. Friends are playing basketball in a neighborhood with no parking? Great news, I’m on my way. I even took a semester-long teaching gig in the city that would have been a nightmare, traffic-wise—but it was a fun ride across the river, so sign me up! The result: a far more active lifestyle. I’m not pretending that these rides on a motor-assisted bicycle count as aerobic exercise, but they’re definitely better than sitting on my ass, staring at my phone.
The big green-and-black e-bike I purchased was not from one of the fanciest brands, but from Rad, a direct-to-consumer company that’s known for its affordability. While its batteries are not customized in the manner that’s caused well-publicized fires in cheaper brands, the company does use cheaper parts all over the bike as a way of keeping costs down. My experience has not been flawless. The bike’s so insanely heavy, like 65 pounds, that it’s tough to get it to the shop whenever I have a flat or some other problem. My bike shop hates Rad, because, overwhelmed by customers, the company can take weeks to respond to requests. (Recently I only got my hands on some much-needed parts by tweeting at them.) The battery stopped working entirely, leading to a long, frustrating process to get it replaced. The cheap disc brakes struggle with the heavy bike and wear down with astonishing speed—I’ve learned how to tighten them myself when they get soft, but I’ve also had them completely replaced several times. Most frighteningly, the front wheel popped off entirely during a hard braking event shortly after I purchased the bike. (I’m pretty sure that was because the authorized assembly contractor didn’t know what he was doing.) For all these reasons, I wouldn’t recommend a Rad bike to you, necessarily.
Yet even after all this hassle, I still love my bike, and I’d do it all again. The ways the bike’s made my life better far exceed the annoyances it’s caused. Eventually this bike will die, and maybe I’ll invest in something nicer, easier to get fixed—maybe even some $5,000 riding machine. But honestly: I spent about $1,500 on this semi-crappy e-bike, and I’ve already gotten more than two years of transportation and joy out of it—and that’s not to mention the money I’ve saved on gas and parking. Plus I get to be holier-than-thou to almost everyone I know! Seems worth it to me.
Recently, after a Sunday morning soccer game at a field about 2 miles from my house, I threw my bag into the crate on the back of my e-bike. It was a beautiful morning, still a little crisp, but I was sweating like crazy from an hour and a half of chasing the guys who intercepted all my passes, so I didn’t mind riding home through some cool air. I turned on the bike and pedaled along the soccer field to the nearby bike trail and turned toward home.
Riding in the other direction was a guy on a racing bike, decked out in Lycra, reflective jersey, biking gloves—the whole shebang. As he approached, he eyed me sitting up straight on my e-bike, sweaty T-shirt, orange milk crate strapped to the rack. As he passed by on a curve, I heard him mutter, the way you do when you’re disgusted, half to yourself, half to the object of your disgust: “Get a real bike.”
It took a moment for the words to sink in. What did he say about me?! I got it together to yell at his receding, well-sculpted back, “You sound like a dick!” As I rode home, stewing, I thought of plenty of other things I wished I’d said: “Get a real SHIRT!” “Your calves are overmuscular!”
It’s true that when you get an e-bike, you are likely to come under some fire from people who ride “real” bikes. It seems like cheating, what I’m doing! I’ve heard from co-workers who are sick of e-bikers weaving dangerously around them on the trail at 25 mph. I’ve definitely seen the disdain in the faces of bike guys as I pass them or try to find a spot at a rack for my big fat tires.
I do try to keep my speed down on trails, given how much damage my tank of a bike could do to a jogger if something went wrong. (And because it simply seems a little more polite not to treat the bike trail like I’m a motorcycle.) But you know what? I am riding a real bike. Would that jerk in the Lycra rather I were driving a car? Would that be better, overall?
The fact is, the more people who ride e-bikes, the more people there are on his team. Thanks to all my time spent closely observing the bike lanes of my city, I’m now basically a one-issue voter in local elections, and that issue is sustainable mobility. When I do drive, I’m way more cognizant and careful of cyclists than I used to be, and so are my newly licensed teenagers, who are also e-bike riders (if not always by choice). Everyone who cycles benefits from an upsurge in interest in cycle infrastructure in our community, and things will only get better. No less a group of cycling experts than the Dutch have embraced e-bikes: Half of all bicycles sold in the country are now electric. If it’s good enough for them, surely it’s good enough for American bike guys.
Are you, at last, convinced that an e-bike has the potential to make your life easier, greener, more adventuresome, and more fun? Great news: It’s easier than it’s ever been to purchase one, with more and more manufacturers getting into the game, and many cities and states offering e-bike credits. A Washington, D.C., attorney and e-bike evangelist has put together a terrific buying guide for commuter e-bikes, which you can find here. Many cities now have dedicated e-bike stores, which will let you test-ride various models (or even rent them for the day). When you do take the leap, get ready to have your world expanded and your mind blown. I think often of a fellow e-bike person I know only from Twitter, a woman named Ronnie Chen, and her words of wisdom just three days into her own e-bike ownership: “I have come to the conclusion,” she wrote, “that all the annoying evangelical e-bike enthusiasts weren’t promoting them hard enough.”
