Passes & Canyons Blog

E-bikes are really just small motorcycles aren’t they?

We’re all familiar with these power-assist bicycles that are now pretty much everywhere. Some people hate them. Think walkers on a trail or bike path along a creek. Many people love them–look at all the people riding them.

But pair this recent phenomenon with another, the decline in sales of motorcycles, and you have to wonder: Will these e-bikes be the gateway drug to draw more people into motorcycling?

Frankly, I don’t see how they can not be. Especially if you get into riding an e-bike at an early age.

I look back to my own adolescence. As a kid I was broke. I never dated because I never had any money. I sure as heck didn’t own a car. But I know I longed to escape the confines of the city bus system or getting a ride from a parent. I had a plan to buy a 50cc Honda Cub (we only knew it as a Honda 50) when I was old enough and I saved the $30 a month I earned on my paper route to buy one when I reached the legal age. And only when I was of age and had the money did my mother get around to saying, “You’ll never own a motorcycle as long as you live in my house.”

So I considered mopeds of various kinds. Unlike today, these power-assisted bicycles had gasoline engines. Some had the engine built right on but you could also buy a conversion kit that you attached to your bicycle’s wheel and it turned the wheel for you. I forget how it accomplished that. I never did follow through on that, though.

Maybe all that’s irrelevant. I was interested in a moped because I really wanted a motorcycle. Today’s question is whether riding a moped (which is really what a motor-assisted bicycle is: motor/pedal, get it?) will lead at least some riders to want to move up to something bigger. But if you start out as a 10-year-old on an e-bike, and it’s so much fun and extends your range so much, wouldn’t it just be natural that you would want to move up to an actual motorcycle once you’re in a position to do so?

There are some voices challenging my view, though. Not a challenge, but voicing the general thinking, here’s a quote from a recent article on MOTO eMAG: “Why would you want to spend $10K on a midrange motorcycle, when you can spend $1K on an e-bike that can do 40mph and with some tweaks even 60, weighs little, costs little, requires no registration, no license, no insurance and you can throw it around and charge the batteries at home the same way you charge a phone.”

I don’t claim to know. Maybe in another five years we’ll be seeing an increase in motorcycle sales. And maybe some enterprising reporter will be asking new riders how they got interested. And just maybe the answer will be, “Oh, I had an e-bike as a kid and this is just taking that one step further.”

Time will tell.

Biker Quote for Today

Riding a bike is not a phase; it’s a lifelong love affair.

E-bikes are really just small motorcycles aren’t they?

Is there anyone who rides a motorcycle who does not understand why so many people are enthusiastic about these new electric power-assist bicycles, or E-bikes? I mean, aren’t they really just very small motorcycles? Sure, maybe you prefer a bigger bike, but isn’t it still pretty much the same thing?

It used to be the non-biker’s option for doing it small was the scooter. Although still, even years ago there were mopeds. Those were gasoline-powered motor-assist bicycles. Wait, isn’t that what E-bikes are, swapping electricity for gas?

Of course the terminology has gotten all twisted around in recent years. These boards you stand on are now called scooters and what are truly scooters are now called mopeds and real mopeds are now called E-bikes. Fine. It doesn’t have to make sense, it just is.

Certainly there are issues that need to be resolved to accommodate all these new E-bikes on the road and on the bike paths. The Denver Post recently had a lengthy article about all of this (E-bikes coming quicker than the infrastructure for them). One reader followed that up with a letter to the editor saying that E-bikes going 25-30 miles an hour have no place on paths with mothers with strollers and folks walking their dogs. “Motorized vehicles belong on the streets!”

I’m not even going to try to sort that all out. My point in all this is simply that this surge of E-bikes can only help those of us on motorcycles.

How? Well first off, you’re probably aware that it has been clearly established that motorcyclists are better car drivers. We pay more attention to our driving and we’re vastly more aware of motorcycles on the road with us. It stands to reason that people who get out on the road on an E-bike are going to see the things we have seen for so long, and it is going to change them as drivers. That can only be good. At least some of them are sure to realize they need to just put their damn phone down and drive. Hallelujah!

Certainly as they now are thinking a lot more about their own safety they will come around to our side in terms of supporting safety measures such as banning using cellphones while driving.

Others may start thinking that as fun as it is on the little bike, maybe it would be really fun to be on something bigger, something like . . . a motorcycle. And they’ll join our ranks.

It will also help that people in cars are seeing more and more people on bikes of all kinds. The more of us they see–E-bike, scooter, bicycle, motorcycle–the more they will realize we are there and they need to be alert for us. Again, hallelujah!

So I welcome these E-bikes. In fact, I wish I had one. I’ve thought for a long time that sooner or later I’d have a scooter but with three motorcycles I really don’t have room for one. I would have room for an E-bike, however. One of these days . . .

Biker Quote for Today

My biggest fear is not crashing on a bike. It’s sitting in a chair at 90 and saying, ‘I wish I had done more.’