I’m a person living in a rural area and have to either go by train, the nearest station being 15 mins away by car and the trains having a schedule that keeps fluctuating.
Or have to go by car where it takes 60 mins to get where I need to go. I wouldn’t want to get a late pickup or anything outrageous just something to get me places.
I’m not a car enthusiast or anything like that.
I live in a rural area and have just accepted that owning a car is a necessity. The shitty thing about living in a car dependent system is that your awareness of the shiftiness of the system doesn’t necessarily exempt you from having to still live inside of it.
Yeahhhh :( it sucks
I bought an ebike and that’s been kind of a game changer. Its allowed my partner and I to share a car, and I just ebike around at 40km/hour whenever she needs to drive. It requires a bit of willingness to get cold/wet, and some creativity with bike locking, but it makes those 10-15km distances in my hometown realistically accessible by bike on an everyday basis.
That’s amazing, although in the EU rules are more strict on ebikes. Especially with ones over a certain limit. They can only really go max 25/h and if they go over they become by law a vehicle and need a license plate and a driving license to drive.
25km is so frigging slow. My wife has a normal bike and she has to slow down for me (on ebike) to catch up. I don’t understand why they didn’t make it 30km/h, plenty of people cycle that fast.
I can cycle faster than 25km/h with my pedelec by using my legs. The bike does not stop me from going faster, there is just no motor support then.
Polish law is nuts.
Yeah that’s a bummer. I’d say an ebike might still be a good idea. Even at 25km/hour you can still get places pretty fast, and if you are in a rural area where you have a lot of ground to cover its way more sustainable long term as a day to DAT option than regular cycling. Some days its just hard to go for a 20km bike ride just to get some veggies and bread, you know? Ebikes make that trip much more pleasant and less tiring.
I agree, I think my top speed on a bike is like 18km/h
Thanks for the info! I was thinking of getting a e-bike but I always ran into this issue of not knowing where to lock it and also what I would do if the e-bike broke down. How do you deal with these things?
I’ve been using a ratty old normal bike to take care of those issues: I can just chain to like parking signs and people don’t care enough to steal it, and I can fix a regular bike, but as you’ve said sometimes one just isn’t down for 20km of exercise.