I got overtaken by a man on a scooter the other day. I don’t mean a motor-scooter. I mean an electric scooter, the sort you stand up on, with tiny wheels and a battery under the deck. I’m assuming this scooter had been modified, and have a suspicion that before long it would burn its owner’s house down. But in the meantime, it was buzzing along a bike lane at about 35 kph.
Battery technology has unleashed a considerable degree of change on the roads. Once upon a time, and not all that long ago, there were three basic road users. There were pedestrians. There were cyclists. And there were motor vehicles. There were a few in-between categories, like mobility scooters and wheelchair users, but those three were essentially it.
Now, it’s all a bit different. In cycling, the big change has been the proliferation of the best e-bikes. But, to make it complicated, there are at least four varieties of e-bike. There are legal, private e-bikes. There are public hire e-bikes (legal). Cargo bikes (legal). And there are de-limited e-bikes that aren’t e-bikes at all, but electric motorbikes (not legal).
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Modernity doesn’t really end with cycling. We’ve got other new categories of battery-power road user – what I’ve come to think of as e-pedestrians. This is a trend that started in about 2001 with the Segway, the self-balancing two-wheeled thing that looked like it came from the future, but which we quickly dragged down to our level. After that we got the ludicrously named “hoverboard” which was just a daft electric unicycle without the slightest hint of either hover or board about it. Then we got the scooters.
Former multiple national time trial champion, aero expert and best selling author, Dr Hutch hasn’t yet succumbed to an ebike. But it’s only a matter of time.
And of course, we still have a few people who plod along on their own two feet waving their walking sticks angrily at everyone else, as God and the Daily Telegraph prefer.
Quite honestly, all of this has produced a continuum that stretches all the way from dog-walker to motorcyclist with very few places at which you can really find an obvious break-point. Is an illegal e-scooter more or less motorised than a legal e-bike? Where is a 50 mph de-limited e-bike in relation to a motor scooter?
Naturally, all of this has knock-on effects. One of the most pressing is the question of where exactly on the road or pavement or path we should be doing any of this. We used to have three categories trying to make the best of a system designed for two – pedestrians and motor vehicles – in which cyclists were the losers. Now we’ve got far more categories enjoying, essentially, a free-for-all, and I think we’re all losing.
On a shared path, four different people on four different “vehicles” can converge on each other, and even supposing any of them subscribed to the principle that the most vulnerable has priority, no one would be able to work out which of them that actually was
A further effect is that there are even more dimensions to the dislike we can nurture towards each other. The matrix is much more complex. Five different sorts of cyclist where once upon a time there was only one? Just do the maths. We can even hate other cyclists now, with a clear conscience. (And if you’re saying to yourself, “Five? Illegal e-bike riders don’t count as cyclists!” I say, “Exactly.”)
You might hope that all this blurring would mean the focus of the anger might end up being less on the modes of transport that people choose, and more on their individual behaviour. That we could perhaps get away from the identity politics that sets us all against each other. That we could more easily see the wood rather than the trees, and start to divide the world not into “cyclist” and “driver”, but into “moron” and “not-moron”.
To which I say, fat chance, moron. There’s a lot of anger in the world and it has to go somewhere.
How To… Upgrade
The upgrade is a simple pleasure. For less money than buying a new bike, you can buy a fresh component to put on the one you already have that will give you just a little bit of a new-toy thrill and make your bike just a little bit better and more distinctive.
You should, of course, carefully consider the performance improvement offered by the upgrade, and balance that against the cost. Consider also things like how long you’ll keep the bike you buy it for, whether you can transfer it to a new bike when the time comes, and if there’s any chance that if you waited a few weeks it you might find it in a sale.
You should consider all that. In practice, just ask yourself this, “Do I want it? Will it make me happy? Will it make my friends slightly unhappy when they see it? Doesn’t it look lovely?”
As to cost, well, who can put a price on happiness? Not you, certainly. Your family might consider themselves able to put a price on it. But ask yourself this, what the hell do they
know about cycling? Or anything else for that matter?
And you’re not the only winner. For the industry, the upgrade market gives manufacturers the chance to charge you extra to finally give you the bike they probably ought to have given you in the first place.
Acts of Cycling Stupidity
A chat with a rider I met at a café a few weeks ago revealed a story about the very windy day in the 1990s that he and a mate went for a ride. They decided, for a bit of a laugh, that they’d just ride downwind, from Peterbourgh to Lincoln, and then get the train home.
They rattled off the 50 miles to Lincoln, enjoying the easy fast ride. At Lincoln, they stopped in a café while they waited for a train. When they approached the ticket office, one of them said to the other, “Hey, mate, stand me the ticket and I’ll pay you when we get back – I didn’t bring any money.”
The other one stopped dead. “I spent my last cash at the café,” he said.
They had to ride 50 miles home across the Fens into a 40 mph gale.