Electric bikes - in The Guardian

[661-Pete]

Picked up this story yesterday: did anyone else?

As so often happens (in the Grauniad at any rate) the comments are as informative reading as the article, and mostly positive.

Not sure about the

...It's hard to read the faces of puffing cyclists as I glide past – but I think they are a mixture of envy and contempt...

bit though, where does he find those sort of cyclists from? I frequently pass an electric bike at lunchtimes as I spin through the local housing estate en route to the country lanes (I don't think it ventures outside the built-up area). Certainly I'm not 'puffing' as I glide past it - and I'm no way the fittest of cyclists! If the lady who rides it finds it the best way of getting around - good luck to her! Better than the car.

As for 'envy and contempt'? Neither of these. It just doesn't cross my mind to feel any emotion at all. In fact it would make as much sense to say I feel 'envy and contempt' at a passing motorcyclist. I don't motorcycle myself, it's just another form of transport and I recognise that.

Oh, and while I don't know much about electric bikes, I do know a bit about Guillan-barre. A horrible disease, Mr. Caplin has my sympathies and I wish the best for him. My sister-in-law was struck down by it a few years ago, but happily she made a complete recovery and is now fully active again.

But Mr. Caplin might do well not to cycle across a busy pedestrian crossing - battery-assisted or no. As has been commented upon.

 

[gaz]

*huff* i read it yesterday, and unfortunately they had comments turned off.

i agree with the image of him on the crossing, it's the first thing i thought when i saw it.

 

[661-Pete]

Just noticed something. In the paper copy of yesterday's Guardian, the same article but a different photo - same crossing but Caplin is cycling along the road from left to right, quite correctly. Curiouser and curiouser...

It's a different set of pedestrians in the two photos, so they were not posed.

 

[gaz]

Meh, it's the newspapers for you, i quite like the guardian as it's often a good read. So good becuase half of there writers don't know anything about what there writing about.

 

[Twenty Inch]

Once spent an hour in Southern Spain chasing a fat german Hausfrau up ahead of me, before I realised she was on an electric bike. Quite funny really.

If they get people out of cars and keep them mobile when ill-health or old age catches up with them, then I am all for them.

 

[ianrauk]

Similar story to me.
Going up the A21 towards Bromley. Up ahead I saw a *cough* large cyclist.. So thought right, let's have him, easy meat.. but just couldn't catch up.. got to the lights at the top of the hill and saw that the rotund one was on a leccy bike.. cheating chubby fecker..

Once spent an hour in Southern Spain chasing a fat german Hausfrau up ahead of me, before I realised she was on an electric bike. Quite funny really.

 

[WeeE]

The real attraction of these bikes to an able-bodied but not-very-fit-yet beginner - and maybe to German hausfraus - isn't speed or laziness, it's confidence in motorised traffic.
Really, it comes down to impatience/entitlement - the feeling (sometimes your own feeling) that you're inconveniencing motorists - going slowly uphill, say.
I imagine, too that it does in fact leave you less vulnerable to driver carelessness, say when you start off again at lights or roundabouts. You can get off from a standing start at something more like the speed of the rest of the traffic.
But you have to live on the ground floor to have an electric bike. To carry one of those things up to the second floor a couple of times a day, you'd have to be so fit and strong that...you probably wouldn't bother paying for an electric bike anyway.

 

[numbnuts]

Oh the shame, I got over taken by an electric bike, I gave chase, but I couldn’t keep up I’m going to buy one when I’m old…….
around about next week