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My E-Bike Changed My Life
One could change yours, too.
BY DAN KOISJUNE 18, 2023
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!
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!
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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.
The first thing to say about riding an e-bike is that it really does feel like magic.
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.
