Skin in the game....

Today, I met an inanimate object that swallowed my heart. My love is now being kept alive by artificial means.

Her name: Stromer. She is Swiss, as she is beautiful, and electrifying.

OK, yes, she is an electric bike. My third. But she is IT. I know it this time. Not that I didn't love my other electric bikes. My Giant. My Torque. But the Stromer, she has it all.

First off, she is beautiful. I know you are not supposed to like a bike because of her looks, but this is an electric bike that does not look like one. She has a very heavy dose of the Cool Factor. Black and sleek and she hides her battery in a such a way that when you scream past people up mighty hills they have no idea that you are combining your human power with just a teeny touch of her electric oomph.

What I really have come to appreciate is that if you put some skin in the game, she puts in an equal amount. By that I mean, using the pedal assisted option, (it also has a throttle option), if you are putting in a pretty good dose of pedal power to get up a hill, she tosses in an equal amount. So you essentially flatten every hill, and can get into work, as I do, traveling 12 miles over hill and dale to the city core and not arrive in a sweaty mess. You get some excercise, that is for sure, but its like walking to work instead of running.

I have had her in my arms for 30 days now, and I am whipped. She rides like the wind (top speed around 20 mph), can go forever (ok, maybe about 40 miles on a charge, but that is all I need on 98% of my commuting days), and she makes me feel young again. For this, I am willing to spend the money it takes to bring her home. Yes, its substantial. about $2900 bucks. But, I figure, she will pay for herself in avoided car costs in 18 months. Then, she starts paying me. And if we are together for the next decade, I will have become a rich man, and we will have shared a lot of laughs together. And you can't put a price tag on that....

Generating Revolutions on a bike

You can't help but have a deep appreciation and respect these days for the Power of Facebook, Skype video, and other means of virtual communication. Heck, it played a significant role in the Egyptian's peaceful overthrow of its government last week. No small thing.

But I remain troubled by it. I was in my local bike shop yesterday, Electric Bikes NW, to get a tune-up, and got to talking with Eric the owner, catching him just as he was heading home on his bike. We moved quickly from talking about bikes and into talking about the state of affairs in our world today, as seems to be our pattern. Eric has traveled much of the world, and is such a believer in self-reliance, that I think he must be 4th generation Amish. In between talking about the pluses and minuses of Obama and how corporations everywhere are hosing us, we got to talking about how easy it is to miss seeing the pain we cause to one another by our selfishness, ignorance, or just plain mean-spiritedness. We humans can act so nobly at times, and yet are such total bozos the next. I want us to design social systems that encourage us to tap into our Better Selves. Eric favors us all just voluntarily wising up and doing the right thing.

But how is it that we sometimes listen to our Better Angels, and others times just tell them to go to hell?

Family upbringing, religious/moral conviction, cultural norms all can be big influencers for doing the right thing. But even when these things pull us toward being a jerk, getting to know someone really different from ourselves, through meeting them face to face , can have a powerful, life-changing impact in changing how we see ourselves and others. It’s why I love to travel to unusual places like Iraq or India. Travel is the ultimate elixir that can turn a Muslim or gay basher into a Muslim or gay-accepter. or turn someone who thinks the poor are all lazy and need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, into someone who finally decides that “there but for the Grace of god go I”.

I read a remarkable book some years ago, called Childhood's Future. It showed how our culture has dramatically shifted the past 40 years so that we no longer have to interact during the day with anyone who is in a different social or economic class. We can now go to our own private gym rather than a public park, travel in a private car to our private office without ever having to come in contact with others through public transportation. Even when we do enter public space, like on a subway or walking a downtown street, we can keep closed off to everyone else. I was walking on the streets of Amman Jordan last year, lost as usual, but the first 20 people I met on the street were walking alone, talking on their mobile or texting somebody. It felt intrusive to interrupt!

This is one more reason why the bike can be such a revolutionary tool. You are way closer to folks on the street with a bike than when in a car. And when we go somewhere, we can interact with all our senses, not just tweet with one. I went to a small town in Mexico recently and rented a bike for a day. At every turn, I seemed to meet and interact with folks along the way, waving, asking for directions, stopping frequently to look at some locally-made street art. The girl pictured here was producing her own art masterpiece, and then went on to explain its larger meaning to this gringo, while her mom worked nearby!. A bike, it seems to me, is just a small tidbit of technology that generates revolutions, even revolutions of the heart, if we use it well...

I like to write too, don’t get me wrong. Yet, while we can post blogs to each other all day, what really sticks with me as I write this was talking directly with Eric yesterday, the falling winter sun shining in his eyes, as we went back and forth, figuring out how to fix the world and ourselves....

I'd say more, but I gotta go, I haven’t had a chance to check in on my Facebook page today....

E-bikes- how do we get to a tipping point?

I just finished reading a great article by Insight, a local environmental group, about ebikes. Here is the link, and my response. http://daily.sightline.org/daily_score/archive/2010/03/18/circuit-breakers

Green America: Real Green: The Case for Electric Bikes

Green America: Real Green: The Case for Electric Bikes

I spoke this week through a live video skype chat with a co-worker in Indonesia..her first question to me was, "So, is everybody all a-buzz with the new IPad that came out?..as we talked more I soon learned that Indonesia, like parts of Japan and China are light-year's ahead of us in some aspects of using technology, and they follow the tech world very closely. One tech-savvy friend recently returned from China and said he ran across one teen using his mobile phone with tools he had never even heard of before."Oh that", the youth said, "ya it's been around. Wait a couple years, it will eventually make it to the States too."

The use of new technology on bikes seems to be following the same path. China continues to forge a path, but unfortunately with its bikes it is so far using the wrong "app". It's disregarding the environmental wisdom of combining human power WITH electric/tech power, and trying to do it all with an all-electric bike, and forgetting about the human power that directs it. Fortunately, while the US is about 5 years behind China in the use of e-bikes, the good news is we are taking a better approach so far by putting bikes out there that combine the two pwoer sources perfectly. And if you want to find a bike shop in Seattle that truly understands this, promotes it, and yet doesn't oversell the whole idea, go to NW Electric Bikes. http://www.electricvehiclesnw.com/main/contact.htm The owners know what they are talking about, have been doing this for years, and I believe may be at the forefront of a tidal shift in how we get around in the coming decade in urban America.

To read a recent NY Times article comparing the US and China approaches, see: http://s.nyt.com/u/tSp

E-Bikes taking over China!

My friend and fellow bike-enthusiast Emory Bundy just sent me this article below on electric bikes in China. It is incredible how they have grown in popularity there in the last decade! I concluded the following after reading it: I predict E-bikes will become a very big part of our transportation mix in this country in the coming decade. But to do so we must make sure the traffic laws are strictly enforced, good roadways are created that put a priority on bikes, and that we use lithium batteries like the E-Zee Torque has. And, we need electric bikes that we really pedal for most of our power on the flat, not the ones pictured here that mostly rely on fake-power!

E-Yikes! Electric Bikes Terrorize the Streets of China
Once Seen as Environmental Boon, Bicycles With Batteries Now Traffic Menace

By SHAI OSTER
BEIJING-Bundled against the cold beneath a highway overpass on a busy Beijing intersection, traffic warden Zhao Delong waved his colored flag in frustration at the new silent killer stalking city streets.

"Those electric bikes just don't listen! The problem is they go too fast. They can't stop like bikes. I saw an accident just over there the other day where someone on an e-bike rushed through the intersection and plowed over someone on a regular bike," Mr. Zhao said as he tried to keep China's newest road hazard in check.


Powerful battery-powered bicycles are crowding out their push-pedal brethren, delivering a jolt to the Bicycle Kingdom.

By some estimates there are 120 million e-bikes on China's roads-up from just 50,000 a decade ago, making it the fastest growing form of transportation in China. Cities at first embraced them as a quieter and cleaner alternative to gasoline-powered scooters.

Officials were caught off guard when that environmentally appealing solution turned out to be deadly on the streets. In 2007, there were 2,469 deaths from electric-bicycle accidents nationwide, up from just 34 in 2001, according to government statistics.

That's roughly 3% of China's annual 90,000 traffic accident deaths. Still technically bicycles, they're operating in a legal gray zone. Drivers of electric bikes don't need to pass stringent driving tests to get licensed, and courts are struggling to sort out lawsuits.

Pedestrians complain that e-bike riders pay little heed to the rules of the road. Drivers of electric bikes are "totally devoid of conscience and respect for the law," complained Wang Mingyue, a blogger on the popular Beijing News Web site.

China's e-bike industry started under the planned economy of the Maoist 1960s. Primitive battery and engine technology doomed early efforts. After China liberalized its economy in the 1980s, a handful of entrepreneurs tried to revive e-bikes just as city planners were casting a worried eye on the explosive growth of exhaust-spewing mopeds and scooters.


By the 1990s, cities were starting to ban motor scooters, creating an opening for electric bicycles. Electric bikes had government backing: inclusion as one of 10 key scientific-development priority projects in the Ninth Five-Year Plan. They had the personal endorsement of former Premier Li Peng, according to an academic paper on the history of e-bikes in China by Jonathan Weinert, Ma Chaktan and Chris Cherry.

By 1998, regulators realized they had to limit the speed and size of e-bikes, too. The rules were loosely enforced and left a loophole. If it's got a pedal, it's a bicycle. The original standards put the maximum speed of an electric bike at 20 kilometers per hour (a little more than 12 mph). But e-bikes' power soon outpaced that. Some are capable of 25 mph or more.

The market grew slowly at first. That changed after China was hit by severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in 2003. National e-bike sales jumped from 1.5 million in 2002 to four million in 2003 as commuters sought an alternative to crowded public transport, where germs spread quickly.

Electric-bike fatalities rose, too. In 2003, 87 people were killed in e-bike accidents. A year
later, 589 died.

The deaths led to a backlash. Beijing and Fuzhou banned electric bikes in 2002. Beijing lifted its ban in 2006.

More cities decided they'd had enough. The northeast industrial town of Shenyang banned e-bikes in 2009 after their numbers spiked in the wake of a motorcycle ban.


Over the summer, Changsha city traffic police set up checkpoints and handed out 60,000 tickets in five days for e-bikes that violated weight and speed restrictions, or didn't have proper registration.

In Zhejiang province, Hangzhou banned out-of-town e-bikes; in Wenzhou, police confiscated 5,000 electric bikes in half a month for being too fast and large.

Riders like Yu Dejiang were caught in the legal crossfire. Mr Yu, a 30-year-old air-conditioner repairman in Wenzhou, splurged this summer and spent half a month's salary on a new electric scooter to replace a secondhand one that got stolen. Two weeks later, police dusted off old regulations on the books, confiscated his bike and fined him 700 yuan-about $100.

"The e-bike is a necessity for my work. The fastest and cheapest traffic vehicle I can afford. It's the same for most riders here. I can finish my work on the bike. There are no buses in many places and I can't afford to buy a car. What do you expect me to do?" said Mr. Yu. A few weeks later, he was back on the streets with another electric bike, looking over his shoulder in case city authorities crack down again.

But there's another problem. E-bikes may not be so clean after all. Because 95% of China's e-bikes use lead batteries, they emit more lead into the atmosphere than other forms of transportation, according to some studies. They also rely on electricity that's mostly made by coal-burning power plants.

Then suddenly, in December, the central government dropped a bombshell: tough new nationwide restrictions. There was heated debate. Sales at Luyuan Group, one of China's biggest e-bike makers, dropped 50% in December from November.

"Officials are getting the statistics wrong, they're not looking at them scientifically," said Ni Jie, Luyuan's founder. A former economics professor and electrical engineer, Mr. Ni has given his wife the company reins so he can focus more on industry lobbying. He argues electric bicycles are safer than bicycles or motorcycles and will soon start using cleaner, lithium batteries.

After intense public outcry in the media, the government backed down just weeks later. "In essence, a lack of respect for public opinion and for the reasonable and scientific decision-making process was to blame," for the government's behavior, said an opinion piece in China Daily, the state-backed English language newspaper.

Now, the industry associations are trying to figure out new guidelines before the central government steps back in. In the meantime, people are back in the shops.

He Chenyan, a 23-year-old telecommunications engineer, offered this advice as he tested out different electric bikes in Hangzhou. "These limits don't matter," he said. "The traffic police won't bother with us. They'll focus on real motor vehicles like cars and motorcycles."
A nearby saleswoman offered another solution: After getting a new bike registered with police, a simple adjustment to the motor pushes the maximum speed back up to 20 mph.


"Any slower and you might as well ride a bicycle," she said.

- Sue Feng and Kersten Zhang in Beijing and Ellen Zhu in Shanghai contributed to this article.
Write to Shai Oster at shai.oster@wsj.com


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