btw let us (i.e. me) know if you test-drove the K75S, would love to hear your story (FFX bonfire style, LISTEN TO MY STORY & all)
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One day I’ll get a Honda Ruckus.
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Completed my first full week of commuting with the RadCity ebike. I do three days a week of commuting to the office (hybrid return-to-office started earlier this month, RIP) and on Tuesday I did my first full-speed run of my old scooter commute, weird curb hops and all… and goddamn, it took me thirty minutes, which is comaprable to car speed for this particular Los Angeles commute. Carved 15 minutes off my scooter commute. Since I don’t have to find a spot in a parking structure at the end or ride elevators out of a garage in a basement, I think I actually save time over using a car here. I just take the bike directly to my desk.
I was going 20 MPH almost the entire way, but was able to skip quite a bit of traffic. Being on the ebike also allowed me to turn left from the left turn car lane in a larger number of intersections, which was risky on my seated scooter–I am now higher, so I’m easier to see, and faster, so I can get out of the way in time.
Anyway, I am Officially Delighted with my purchase choice. Also after two weeks of biking almost daily on this thing I am already feeling healthier?? though that is probably my imagination. At any rate I can tell that moving around this way is good for me.
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yeah i think a lot of bike commuting is just replacing one set of logistical considerations with another, but i just like the ones that come with a bike
i’ve been doing a lot more cycling to the grocery store and stuff and really enjoying it
like, even if it takes a long time and you have work stuff or home stuff to deal with, you’re at least riding a bike
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yeah I have a whole taxonomy of whether any given trip I take is bike / motorbike / car / walk / transit and it’s absolutely something I take for granted living here and it makes a huge difference to my QoL
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Imo a car license should require an almost unachievable amount of skill and get retested every five years, also like ALL road laws should be heavily enforced, and they should give scooter/motorcycle licenses out for free in cereal boxes
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Gran Turismo style license tests
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If I ride the bus I can read books, surf the web, and play video games and be massively less likely to die.
It rules.
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Wanted to say that since you mentioned this stuff in this thread/posted the excellent Tomos video, I have spent the last week watching SO many ride videos of weird mopeds and electric mopeds and stuff. In particular I’ve been finding videos of people riding weird mopeds around Los Angeles, where I live, which is eye-opening–taking them into parks I never visit and stuff. It’s fantastic. Making me regret that I never asked my old roommate what he was doing with his homemade mopeds. The Onyx looks incredible but also very expensive, haha. His bikes were nowhere near that good and were actually extremely small for adults in general, I remember. Like shorter than the average coffee table and very precarious-looking. No idea what he’s up to these days but I hope his hobby is still going because those were some weird bikes!!
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Done 200 miles on my ebike since I bought it.
I commute 3 days a week, Tuesday through Thursday. If I’m feeling good, I make almost the same time to my desk as I would in a car. I find parking immensely stressful so it FEELS, like, twice as fast as a car, haha, because I don’t have to deal with any bullshit at the end of the trip.
Got a pannier and started grocery shopping with it occasionally. Every two weeks we also get a box of veggies delivered by a friend who works at a farmer’s market, so with that plus the trips I‘ve been making on the bike, we haven’t had to do a normal grocery run or a grocery delivery order in a month. The bag I got is slightly larger than your average reusable shopping bag, and I just bring it into the store and use it instead of a shopping basket. That’s fun.
I have grown more used to how monstrously heavy the bike is. The first two weeks I had it, I kept doing daring stuff with it that turned out to be much too risky for how heavy it is. I brought it on the train a few times and had to deal with the inconvenience of that. Most notably, I learned that it’s not always possible to put the bike on the elevator out of one of my main train stations, because people use a bafflingly large amount of extremely serious drugs in the elevator. The first day I discovered that, I had to carry the bike up and down the escalator instead, and it was so heavy that bracing it with my legs just covered my legs in bruises. The second week I had my bike, I counted 33 bruises on just one of my legs from various awkward encounters with the bike itself. I have always bruised easily but wow! That’s a lot!!!
To avoid having to do this, I got a membership to a transit system bike garage at a train station I can bike to. Now, if I’m headed to that particular station, I just lock it up in the bike garage. The membership is sixty bucks a year so I am basically playing around a dollar a week for the privilege of not having to manhandle a 65 pound bike up an escalator. Worth it IMO.
Safety wise, I got a reflective vest. The bike has a rear light but I am thinking about getting a big light on a stick of some kind to make sure everyone sees me. My commute each way involves merging into traffic coming off a freeway exit, and I always feel like I should be much more visible in those blocks than I currently am.
Have not collected any quantitative metrics proving I am healthier but I do feel very good after biking, so that’s a success for me. I have been trying to get out there on the bike for random reasons every day of every weekend and I finally understand why people exercise, I guess?? As a kid, I loved biking but basically did not experience any “endorphins” after any form of exercise… just exhaustion and embarrassment. As an adult I’ve always done a lot of long distance walking—I used to walk between all the comic book shops in SF once a year kind of as a joke, for example, and I could do all 12 miles of that in a day easy—but I never really did anything that made me break a sweat. No longer!! I love biking. Total bike convert.
Re: the electric component, all I can say is I would not be doing this at all if I couldn’t use the motor to get up the outrageously steep hill I live on. Even with pedal assist it knocks the wind out of me. And with diabetes it’s good to know that if I have an emergency I won’t have to exert myself as much to get home. Highly recommend looking into ebikes if you have a similar disability that makes you “inconsistently able” or whatever!! It’s good stuff.
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Stroads 
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Ha, good luck getting the US to ever do that.
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nika hates not just bikes, not because what he’s saying is wrong but it’s one thing to say it as a resident of the US and it’s another thing to like, have moved to the netherlands and made videos of how much better it is there
i kind of agree? i think the biggest thing that basically all of the URBANISM YOUTUBE (can’t believe that’s a thing) creators lack is some kind of insight into how to get from where we are now to the cool stuff over there (insert joke about urban planning etc.)
like, sure, it’s yell at politicians, but there has to be something in between “nothing” and “become a civil engineer” that isn’t “go to city council meetings on the rare hours you have during your workday”
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yeah I liked the channel at first because it went into detail about North American urban planning and why it’s all fucked, but there’s a huge “smug liberal” air to it.
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if you tell me how much better things are in your country you are legally obligated to sponsor my residency visa there.
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A lot of DOT rulemaking stuff is open to public comment, you can be as much of a crank as you want and they basically have to address everything. It can make for some pretty funny reading. But yeah, even that is small potatoes, the whole place is like, structurally busted in ways that make any real change in priorities really really difficult.
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yeah my attitude is: voting doesn’t work but also voting does work, the reason republicans have the power they do in the US right now is partially down to local campaigning and winning smaller elections that the democrats refused to pay close attention to, and the local shit is also where we can stop crappy suburban infrastructure from getting funding and consideration. Voting for biden didn’t do shit for me but voting for a progressive city government guy might be able to help me out in some pretty immediate ways.
Luckily I live in Los Angeles where there have been pretty big wins for public transportation and bikes over the course of the last decade and these kinds of candidates are actually running. Right now the one big thing I’m hype for is hopefully getting a bernie kid kind of accountant guy hired to the city controller position. There are not a lot of places in the US where immediate changes are possible, but there are places where a guy who makes parking ticket maps and traffic stop maps for free as an unelected candidate are actually on the ticket. So that’s interesting. In most places though this stuff feels so intractable and so stamped into the environment already that I am genuinely not sure what regular folks can be expected to do besides spend tons of their precious free time doing actual organizing. Everywhere, someone’s gotta do it; the bigger your city, the more likely someone is already doing the work for you.
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oh yeah of course! not to say that electoral politics are completely useless, it just feels like in this specific space of URBANISM YOUTUBE there could be more coverage of people doing the work and less of the work that needs to be done
it might also just be me being bayareadoompilled and ready to leave because there’s just so much fucking money that goes into everything that even the tiny things feel really rough and for every step forward there’s two steps back around here - we finally got a bike lane on a pretty rough stretch of road bordering the high school and a residential area, which is great if they didn’t close enormous stretches of the bay trail, which is the one reliable cycling path between san mateo and foster city, for two different reasons somehow? in san mateo they’re doing work on the pumps so we don’t have access to the beach/park area via the trail, and in foster city they’re building levees on the water because whoops why did we build all these houses right next to the water let’s close the trail for TWO YEARS
maybe it’s just where I am in the bay - the peninsula feels uniquely ignored by most groups that would do this kind of organizing because just north of us the SF bike coalition is doing pretty great work advocating for the permanent closure of JFK drive in golden gate park to cars AND working on the market street closure, and the silicon valley bike coalition is ostensibly doing organizing work in san mateo county but that aforementioned bike lane is basically the only infrastructure win I’ve seen in the 5 or so years I’ve lived in san mateo and 1. again, we lost one of the best routes for commuting down the peninsula and 2. that bike lane is two blocks away from a freeway entrance/exit and also just turns into sharroads randomly?
excited to move to san diego and get stuck in though - it feels like things can actually change down there, the last time I was there they had just finished protected lanes up and down fourth and fifth street between hillcrest and downtown which is amazing, and they’re just about to finish another protected lane on adams ave closer to where we’ll live, and this all happened in like 3 years
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Get on our level
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oh my god she’s still at it
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