Rob_E

I am already as car-lite as I'm likely to get, because my wife has no interest in ditching her car, so there will likely always be one car in our family. But for my part, I've been without a car for several years now, and there's no e-bike in the picture, but I have thought about one. I can see how it would help someone transition to a car-free lifestyle. I don't want to trade in my bike for an e-bike. I value the exercise I get as well as a sense of freedom and accomplishment that I get from traveling under my own steam. But I can see where an e-bike might help out in a few situations. For the most part I get everywhere I need to go with my bike, along with transit when it's available. But every now and then there's a situation where time and/or distance make a trip unfeasible without a car. These are almost always optional trips, and I just generally opt out, but I could opt in more often if I had an e-bike. I have an idea that I'd like to build up a cargo e-bike to combat both the time, distance, and capacity issues that crop up every once in a while when relying on a bike. For instance, two nights ago there was a show downtown that went until after the busses stopped running. I don't mind biking between home and downtown, but it can take close to an hour, and I do need to get some sleep before work in the morning. In this case, my wife was off work, and I took her car, for the second time in recent memory. If I hadn't taken the car, I would have had to choose between staying home and getting to sleep even later than I did. With an e-bike, the trip would have till taken more time than the car, but with a combination of motor and pedaling, I think the time difference would have been in the neighborhood of 15 minutes, rather than 30 to 40 minutes. For an old, tired man who has to be up in the morning, that's significant. The other time I used the car was for an event in a town 35 miles from home. I've biked it before, but never there and back in the same day. The distance is easily within my limit for a day's riding, but it would require a good chunk of time. That's about 7 hours of riding for me, and half of those would be after 11pm when the event was done. Again, an optional event, and I would never have considered it without a car. But if I had an e-bike with that range, I might consider it. Yes, it would still be a longer trip than with the car, by a fair amount, but it wouldn't be the all-day affair that biking there and back would be. There is probably one event every month or two that takes place in a neighboring town in the 20-30 mile range that I am interested in, but don't attend because the event ends after transit stops, and I don't want to be riding for hours at a time after midnight. It's not a tragedy. In fact it's helped me become better attuned to what my own town has to offer. I am not starved for entertainment by any means. And it's certainly not worth buying a car for. In fact, one reason that I got rid of my car was because I was using it so infrequently that keeping it running was more trouble than it was worth. But an e-bike would fill that niche for those times when I would use a car. So, this car-lite person definitely has an interest in e-bikes, and may get one some day, but it would be purely a luxury purchase. I can't even claim that it would help curtail the driving I do, because that's really only a few times a year, so it's difficult to use that as an excuse for anything.