It was nighttime, a soft summer night, and I was standing onEighty-second Street and Second Avenue, in Manhattan, with my wife andanother couple. We were in the midst of saying goodbye on the smallisland between the bike lane and the avenue when a bike whooshed by,soundless and very fast. I had been back in New York for only a week. Asis always the case when I arrive after a period of months away, I wastuned to any change in the citys ambient hum. When that bike flew past,I felt a shift in the familiar rhythm of the city as I had known it. Iwatched the guy as he travelled on the green bike path. He was speedingdown the hill, but he wasnt pedalling and showed no sign of exertion.For a moment, the disjunction between effort and velocity confused me.Then it dawned on me that he was riding an electric bike.
Like most of the guys you see with electric bikes in New York, he was afood-delivery guy. Their electric bikes tend to have giant batteries,capable of tremendous torque and horsepower. They are the vanguard, thevisible part of the iceberg, but they are not indicative of what is tocome. Their bikes are so conspicuously something other than a bike, forone thing. For another, the utility of having a battery speed up yourdelivery is so straightforward that it forecloses discussion. What liesahead is more ambiguous. The electric bikes for sale around the city now havebatteries that are slender, barely visible. The priority is not speed somuch as assisted living.
I grew up as a bike rider in Manhattan, and I also worked as a bikemessenger, where I absorbed the spartan, libertarian,every-man-for-himself ethos: you need to get somewhere asfast as possible, and you did what you had to do in order to get there.The momentum you give is the momentum you get. Bike messengers were oncefaddish for their look, but its this feeling of solitude andself-reliance that is, along with the cult of momentum, the essentialelement of that profession. The citywith its dedicated lanes andgreenwaysis a bicycle nirvana compared with what it once was, and I havehad to struggle to remake my bicycle life in this new world of goodcitizenship. And yet, immediately, there was something about electricbikes that offended me. On a bike, velocity is all. That guy on theelectric bike speeding through the night was probably going to have tobreak hard at some point soon. If he wanted to pedal that fast to attaintop speed on the Second Avenue hill that sloped down from the highEighties, then it was his right to squander it. But he hadnt worked togo that fast. And, after he brakedfor a car, or a pedestrian, or aturnhe wouldnt have to work to pick up speed again.
Its a cheat! my friend Rob Kotch, the owner of Breakaway CourierSystems, said, when I got him on the phone and asked him about electricbikes. Everyone cheats now. They see Lance Armstrong do it. They seethese one-percenters making a ton of money without doing anything. Sothey think, why do I have to work hard? So now its O.K. for everyone tocheat. Everyone does it. It took me a few minutes to realize thatKotchs indignation on the subject of electric bikes was not coming fromhis point of view as a courier-system owneralthough there is plenty ofthat. (He no longer employs bike messengers as a result of the cost ofworkers compensation and the competition from UberEATS, which doesnthave to pay workers comp.) Kotchs strong feelings were drivenso tospeakby his experience as someone who commutes twenty-three miles on a bicycle eachday, between his home in New Jersey and his Manhattan office. Hehas been doing this ride for more than twenty years.
There is this one hill just before the G. W. Bridge that is a goodsix-degree grade, and it goes for half a mile, he told me. If youcommute to Manhattan on your bike, you have to find a way to get up thathill. A lot of people are just not willing to commit to that muchexercise on their way to work.
Recently, though, he has noticed a lot of people cruising effortlesslyup the hill on electric bikes.
Its a purely pragmatic decision for them, he said. Its just a muchcheaper and faster way of getting to work than a car. So they use anelectric bike.
He described a guy on one of those one-wheeled, Segway-like things.
He passed me going up that hill, then took the long way around to thebridge. I use a shortcut. I thought I got rid of him, but when I got tothe bridge, there he washe was going that fast!
I laughed and told him about a ride I took across the Manhattan Bridgethe previous night, where several electric bikes flew by me. It was not,I insisted, an ego thing about who is going faster. Lots of people whoflew by me on the bridge were on regular bikes. It was a rhythm thing, Isaid. On a bike, you know where the hills are, you know how to time thelights, you calibrate for the movement of cars in traffic, other bikes,pedestrians. The electric bike was a new velocity on the streets.
And yet, for all our shared sense that something was wrong with electricbikes, we agreed that, by any rational measure, they are a force forgood.
The engines are efficient, they reduce congestion, he said.
Fewer cars, more bikes, I said.
We proceeded to list a few other Goo-Goo virtues. (I first encounteredthis phraseshort for good-government typesin Robert Caros The PowerBroker,about Robert Moses, the man who built New York for the automobile.)
If its such a good thing, why do we have this resentment? I asked.
He wasnt sure, he said. He confessed that he had recently tried a friends electric bike and found the experience appealing to thepoint of corruption.
Its only a matter of time before I get one, he said ruefully. Andthen Ill probably never get on a real bike again.
In some ways, the bike-ification of New York City can be seen as theultimate middle finger raised to Robert Moses, a hero for building somany parks who then became a crazed highway builder who wanted todemolish part of Greenwich Village to make room for a freeway. But areall the bikes a triumph for his nemesis, Jane Jacobs, and her vision ofcohesive neighborhoods anchored by street life, by which she meant theworld of pedestrians on the sidewalk?
The revolution under Bloomberg was to see the city as a place wherepedestrians come first, a longtime city bike rider and advocate I know,who didnt wish to be named, said. This electric phenomenonundermines this development. The great thing about bikes in the city isthat, aesthetically and philosophically, you have to be present and awareof where you are, and where others are. When you keep introducing moreand more power and speed into that equation, it goes against thephilosophy of slowing cars downof traffic calmingin order to makethings more livable, he said.
Some bicycle-advocacy groups are cautiously optimistic about electricbikes, or even cautiously ecstatic. E-bikes have the potential todemocratize bikes for millions of Americans, Paul Steely White, theexecutive director of Transportation Alternatives, said, adding that hewas bullish on e-bikes, though it has to be done right. I get hislogic. Think of all the people who will be drawn onto bicycles by thepromise of an assist when going uphill. The most important factor forbike safety, more than bikes lanes or helmets or lights, is the numberof cyclists on the streets. The more people who ride bikes, the saferthe conditions for everyone on a bike. (Hence the name of the bikeadvocacy group Critical Mass.) In this equation, bikes are the rarespecies that can be introduced into an urban ecosystem for the purposeof discouraging cars.
I went into a bike shop and asked about the electric bikes for sale: twothousand and change each.
We dont call them electric, the salesman said. We call it pedalassist.
I asked if he had tried one. He gave me a huge smile. He had, and heloved it.
Why? I asked.
It looks like youre pedalling, but you are not doing nothing.
A few weeks after this exchange, Iwas in Paris. There are bikes everywhere, often in the lanereserved for buses, and cars proceed with great civility toward peopleon two wheels or two feet, at least compared to New York. The other day,while pedalling down Boulevard Saint-Germain on a Vlibthe Parisversion of a Citi Bikea woman in a dress with short blond hair cruisedpast me, her stylish bag flung over her shoulder. I immediately thoughtof that sense of joyous stealth or imposture implied by the bikesalesman in New York. She was pedalling, but there was no question thather speed and momentum derived from something other than her effort. Westopped together at a red light. When it turned green, she placidlysailed ahead and out of sight.
I immediately searched out an electric bike to rent. I found a store onthe Rue des coles that sold stately Holland bikes, both electric andregular. The guy agreed to rent one to me, and I began sailing aroundtown. I found the effect narcotic and delightful: on a flat road, Imoved faster than I did on a normal bike, with less exertion. Downhillswere no different than a normal bike. Uphill, I maintained speed, withjust a tiny bit more exertion. Now and then I could feel the happy bumpof electric power. Assisted living was so pleasant! The only problem wasthat, like some mouse in a cognitive-behavior experiment, I began tocrave that bump. It was the effect of the assist I wanted; it was thefeeling of being assisted.
This is an issue of shared values and perspectives, my bike-advocatefriend said. This whole thing is about attentiveness. How do you dealwith technology and the frailties of being a human being? Bicycles aremechanical augmentation of walking, really. It gets pretty etherealwhyis it bad to have a motor when you are already using gears? Who gives ashit if you are using a motor?
But, I feel there is a clear line between human power and non-humanpower, he added. I think there should be a very simple classification:human-powered or not human-powered. And if you are not human-powered,you should not be using human-powered infrastructure. You should be inthe street. E-bikes being licensed as motorized vehicles is good.E-bikes being in human-powered infrastructure is no good. . . .
At which point we arrive at the insidious genius of our iPhone, Google,A.I. era, in which the distinction between human behavior that is andisnt assisted becomes almost impossible to detect, and thereforeto enforce.
This parallel found expression one afternoon in Paris, while I was on the electricbike in route along the Seine, way at the edge of town. The road wasmostly deserted, the riverfront lined with shrubs and trash. I took outmy phone to take a picture of the scene as I cruised along and then,creature of my era, I pressed the little icon that brought my own faceonto the screen. I took a selfie. When I lowered the phone, I saw anolder man walking along the river, waving at me in a strange way.
He had white hair, wore a rumpled suit, and held his waving hand in apeculiar position that I now realize is how one would hold a pocketmirror if you were trying to make it reflect a beam of light. At thetime, I only noticed that there was something patronizing about his bodylanguage and wave, like he was trying to get the attention of a child.Before I had to time to even consider waving back, he turned his palmtoward himself. With impeccably expressive poise, he mimed an orangutanstaring sadly at his own reflection. I sailed onward, chastised andfrozen-faced, moving a bit faster than I otherwise would have. I didnthave time to react. He is still vivid to me in this pose, his bodylanguage and mopey face indelible. You always remember the picture youdidnt get to takebecause its preservation in memory depends entirelyon you.
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The Electric-Bike Conundrum - The New Yorker