I want to ride my e-bicycle
Charge! Here comes the electric bike future, writes David Slack.
We were driving back to Auckland from Mount Maunganui as a vast line of traffic crawled the other way from Katikati towards whatever fun was on offer at the Bay Dreams festival.
I was thinking: would we make this trip without a car? Would you, could you, on an e-bike?
They’re magic, those e-bikes, the way they flatten out hills and let you ride in your ordinary clothes without getting a sweat up, and have you noticed how every bike shop is selling them now and how all these new e-bike shops are opening up, and how people bail you up and won’t shut up about them?
I can entirely see the e-bike changing life as we know it. But I have to be realistic. It’s a long way from the Mount to Auckland.
Also, I can already hear the comments section saying: ‘‘Hey genius, it’s a middle-class indulgence. Who has three to five grand for one of those things?’’
Fair point, but look at what you won’t be spending on petrol. Also, how about easy weekly payments? Some of the e-bike businesses are getting into that and good on them, because this is a numbers game and you can just feel the numbers building and building, all the way to the point where the size of the biking herd makes you feel safe, and everyone piles in.
That’s great for us all, even for your diehard commuter out there in his car in his wretched traffic jam, because look at the gaps that open up with each and every commuter turned e-biker.
You hear all the time now about the imminent death of the car as we know it and I won’t be crying at the funeral. But how, specifically, is it all going to change? What is the future for cars? Petrol-free, more than likely. Driverfree, also highly likely, it seems.
But how, precisely? Will the human drivers be able to cohabit with the driverless? Will people go on spending fifty thousand, two hundred thousand on a car when driverless ones might be zipping around available at any moment and costing you no more than a cup of coffee?
In times of flux and uncertainty, an imaginative person like, say, Julie Anne Genter can guide our thinking. She knows the options for the future of transport, she knows the options for the planet. I hope she gets the chance to steer us in the best direction. I hope we make some intelligent plans now that we’ve left behind all that antediluvian roads-ofnational-significance thinking.
But what about that tricky first question? How do you get your surfboard and your Weber portable barbecue down to Whangamata on an e-bike? Well, how about this? In Tauranga you open your newspaper and find all the local politicians, even Simon Bridges, agreeing that fast and frequent commuter rail between Tauranga and Auckland could be a very good thing. Hear, hear, and if there’s somewhere on the train for my e-bike, that might just be my longdistance solution taken care of.
I can imagine nothing better than an abundance of public transport options. Easy for me to say, heresy for so very many people to hear. Hello, Mr Traditionalist in your SUV. You love your cars don’t you? I recognise your love. But I also think: man, how can you love these things when they do so much harm: the death and the maiming, the pollution and the global warming. How high a price is a fair one for convenience?
I’m excited for a new and better world that might be coming, and clearly: change is everywhere. Once upon a time you wouldn’t have considered going to the beach with a sound system so loud you could share your enjoyment of The Edge with every last person on the beach, but now everyone’s doing it, and isn’t that nice for us all?
When people talk about the future these days, so often the mood feels fretful and uneasy, principally along the lines of: ‘‘is this all falling apart?’ or at least: ‘‘can you reassure me that these amazing robots and this incredible artificial intelligence won’t leave my kids without a job or a future?’’
Never mind, let’s charge on anyway, shall we? We can be there in no time on an e-bike.
@DavidSlack