Passes & Canyons Blog

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.

This battle has been lost. I’m throwing in the towel.

It doesn’t matter what the truth is, reality wins. And the reality this time around is that the ignorant general public has taken the word “moped,” which describes a power-assisted bicycle with pedals, and given that name to scooters, which have no pedals. The “ped” in “moped” is a direct reference to those pedals. Scooters do not have pedals.

It is the advent of these stand-up scooters from companies such as Lime that put the last nail in the moped coffin. Everywhere you go downtown you either see mostly young people zipping around on these rent-by-the-minute scooters or you see them parked awaiting the next rider to come unlock them using their smart phones. These things are also known as scooters, but there was never any confusion when the only scooters of this sort were ridden by young kids who made the things themselves.

Now that these stand-up scooters are everywhere the other scooters are known as mopeds. It avoids confusion. Never mind that they are not in fact mopeds.

You see it in the article pictured above. Just as the stand-up scooters have proliferated as short-term rentals, companies are now seeking to position “mopeds” in the same way. Do these companies know that what they’re marketing are really scooters? If they do, they don’t care. The public calls them mopeds so just go with the flow. I mean, heck, in South Carolina they actually use license plates for scooters that call them mopeds.

So what about actual mopeds? What are they called now? And that’s not merely an academic question because actual mopeds are now seeing a big resurgence in popularity. Well, they’re called power-assisted bicycles, as in the descriptive phrase I used above.

I’m very torn here. I worked for many years as a technical writer and my approach there was always to use the clearest, yet accurate, term available in order to avoid reader confusion. In this case, it is just wrong to refer to things that are actually scooters as “mopeds.” But if I do call scooters “scooters” then that confuses the reader. It is impossible to be both accurate and clear.

So, as I say, I give up. This battle is lost. But I suspect in the future I will go with the awkward approach of saying something such as “scooters, which many people refer to as mopeds.” I just can’t bring myself to say something I know is not true, even if the rest of the world is just fine with that.

Biker Quote for Today

Why motorcycles are better than men: Motorcycles don’t go bald.

My mother is not well so I’ve been spending a lot of time in South Carolina where she lives. On my most recent visit I noticed that there were quite a lot of scooters zipping around. She lives in Clemson, which is a college town, so it made sense that the college kids would be using scooters. I know parking on campus is always an issue, but not for a scooter.

Then I noticed a billboard with a (I presume) public service announcement telling people to “Be Aware of Mopeds: They’re Everywhere.” And the text was accompanied by an image of a scooter. OK, do you people not know the difference?

Just on the off chance that anyone reading this does not know the difference, I’ll explain.

The word “moped” merges two concepts: motor and peddle. A moped is essentially a power-assisted bicycle that you can get around on just by peddling if you choose. To be a moped it MUST have peddles. Anything without peddles and powered entirely by the motor is a scooter.

But then I noticed something even more interesting. As you see in this photo, all these scooters running around Clemson had this tag on the back that read “South Carolina Moped.” This official sort-of license plate proclaims to everyone that this vehicle is something it in fact is not. South Carolina is very confused.

I think I do get it, however. These “mopeds” are of the 49cc variety that do not require “M” designation on your driver’s license and do not require actual license plates. There are scooters that do have more power than 49cc. These do require proper licensing. By simply playing the Alice in Wonderland game of making a word mean exactly what they want it to mean, South Carolina has sidestepped any stickiness in identifying the scooters that do not have legal requirements.

Plus, I’d be willing to bet that the legislators who proposed whatever law this is based on are clueless about the difference between mopeds and scooters anyway. It still strikes me as pretty idiotic.

Biker Quote for Today

Motorcycle + full gas tank + no red lights = happiness