E-Bikes Can Do A Lot More Than Most People Think – CleanTechnica

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

I’ll be the first to admit that my e-bikes do a lot more sitting than I’d like. I take the occasional ride for fun or for exercise, but the rest of the time, the bike’s sitting in a shed with the battery in the house. Sometimes, I wonder if the bike’s sad out there just like I’m sad in the house not riding.

I’d love to ride more and use the bike for things like grocery getting, but there’s a busy street in every direction with poor or nonexistent bike infrastructure, and the sprawl where I live much of the time puts many of the things my family needs a pretty long ride away. With only 24 hours in a day and 8 needed for sleeping, I can’t afford to spend an hour or two a day riding around town dodging distracted drivers. Add in 100+ degree heat and increasingly violent thunderstorms, and it can feel tough to want to ride at all.

Many people feel this way about bikes, and if I’m honest with myself, it’s mostly a matter of infrastructure. The weather is unsuitable for riding where I live maybe 2-3 months of the year, leaving at least nine months of great riding weather. If there were better infrastructure, it would be possible to ride a lot faster across town and make it work for more if not most of my errands.

Support for improving infrastructure to this point isn’t there in most places because most people can’t see the value of allocating money to it. To the average person, a bike (even an e-bike) is too slow and too open to the elements to be worth riding for any serious task. So, giving the people in Spandex more playroom at the expense of people who are doing serious work in their real vehicles makes no sense at all.

So, one of the big barriers to getting bike infrastructure is getting people to believe more in the bikes themselves. If we can show that they’re ready to do serious work and provide serious transportation for many people, people would be more willing to offer it as an alternative to cars so that people can have more affordable transportation that has the added mental health benefits.

In this article, I want to share some videos I found that show e-bikes doing things most people don’t think they can do in hopes that some people can be convinced to support money for bollards, Jersey barriers, and other protected bike lanes.

An E-Bike Camper??

Normally, an e-bike is the last thing you’d think about for camping or hauling a trailer. After all, even a car is entirely incapable of pulling a trailer in the United States, right? To even pull a tiny little trailer with a lawnmower on it, you need a half-ton pickup. And to haul a camper? You need a diesel one-ton dually for that!

Funny exaggerations that are based partly in truth aside, most people would be shocked to see someone pull a camper with an e-bike, right? If that’s you, get your blanket out and prepare to elevate your feet:

Using CAD (cardboard-aided design), he came up with a design for a folding trailer that’s light like a pet or kid trailer with the ability to fold out and give a human being room to use it as shelter. Using an action figure (NOT a doll!), he found that it worked out, but the action figure had his own problems.

You’ll have to watch the video yourself (and Part 2) to see exactly how he used wood, expanding foam, foam board, and other videos to build a camper for both him and his action figure. In short, he used PMF (poor man’s fiberglass) to build a composite trailer that doesn’t weigh the bike down too much. The end result, painted and coated, looked pretty nice!

Sadly, it wasn’t to last. In Part 3, he took the new trailer out on the road to see how it actually worked on a real camping trip. Instead of testing it a few blocks from home, he took it up into the mountains to someplace more scenic. It worked great for staying clean and dry, but when he decided to load it into a truck, the wind caught the folding back section and tossed it onto the road. Surprisingly, it didn’t get too broken considering what happened.

While most people wouldn’t take a bikepacking or bike RV trip, this shows us that bikes can work for a lot more than we think. Instead of trying to create a living space, something similar could be used to haul large loads of groceries, do deliveries, and maybe even carry power tools from job site to job site.

But, again, infrastructure.

A 30-Mile Commute?

While a bike might work great for people who live in the urban core and want to bike a couple of miles to work, the rest of us who drive in or drive along the ends of the spokes from suburb to suburb couldn’t possibly use an e-bike for that, right? If you’re going more than maybe 5-6 miles, that’s just too much.

Or is it?

With rain gear (something many people don’t think about when considering bikes), this video shows an actual ride along 30 miles, even without infrastructure dedicated to bikes. Somehow, he managed to do it all without dying or transforming into a communist or something. I’d even say that most people would enjoy this kind of a ride, as he stuck to many back roads to avoid traffic, seeing some pretty nice scenery along the way.

Again, this is something most people wouldn’t consider doing, but if it’s possible to do this 30-mile ride, there’s no excuse at all for people doing rides under 10 miles.

Final Thoughts

Doing this article, I really rethought my own use of e-bikes. While they make great fun machines, there are definitely more local errands I could be doing on bikes than I currently do. I could certainly use the exercise, so it might not even be a waste of time. Plus, I’d have no problem charging them up on solar power, making for some real off-grid utility.

Featured image by Jennifer Sensiba.