Mile Markers #2: The E-Bike I Should Have Had

One sunny morning, I take my son to summer camp – on an e-bike.

“Do you want to carry your backpack, or do you want me to?” I ask.

This is a logistical concern: When I sling his backpack over my shoulders, it bulges behind me, crowding the passenger seat. But the bag is also heavy with snacks and water and fifth-grade miscellanea.

“I can carry it,” he says.

We push the bike out of the garage, lock the privacy fence, and mount our respective saddles. I push forward, and the pedal-assist kicks in. We drift down our residential side-street, then cross a busy avenue, onto another residential side-street. The houses whisk past. The air smells of mown grass.

My son leans toward my elbow and shouts questions and comments. How fast are we going? Was that a bird that just flew past? Watch out for the manhole! Is that construction over there? What is that backhoe doing?

We zigzag through the neighborhood and arrive at the local arts center. I park a few feet from the main door, flipping down my motorcycle-style kickstand. A moment later, my son is checked in, and a counselor escorts him into the building.

But just before the door closes, he whirls around and calls, “CAN WE TAKE THE E-BIKE BACK?”

I beam. “SURE THING!”

I stay there for a moment, as cars park in the lot and kids topple out. I watch additional SUVs waiting their turn, or circling the block in search of street parking. Most days, I am one of them. I live in the suburbs, and an e-bike commute is a rare luxury. As my son grows older, I’ll have many more chances to do exactly this, or – better yet – we’ll just ride traditional bikes to our destinations. I daydream about this constantly. But this is unusual. Now, at this moment, I can only cherish this fleeting opportunity.

But 20 years ago? I think. Why the hell couldn’t I have had an e-bike then? How much better would my twenties have been? Why did this technology arrive so late? Life would have been freaking awesome.

Back In My Day

I can close my eyes and remember every apartment I ever rented in Pittsburgh – all five of them, plus three dorm rooms and a townhouse. I can picture the scuffed walls, the nicks in the door frames, and the cloudy windows. I can see the plastic crates piled in closets and corners, because I never knew how long I’d live in a place, and unpacking felt so useless.

Pittsburgh bike share

I remember every neighbor, from the beloved to the terrifying. I remember every office and store I ever worked in. Give me any location, and I can retrace my route there, in vivid mental pictures, in any season or time of day. Nearly every street corner and crosswalk provokes an anecdote. I can conjure up specific porches and fire escapes, back alleys and even rooftops. I remember hundreds of friends, the places we went, the haunts we frequented, and the dens we lounged around.

And I remember trying to get around – without a car. The shelters I huddled under, waiting for a Port Authority bus to round the corner. The Yellow Cabs I called, using a special hotline, though they always seemed to ghost me. The bridges I crossed, on foot, often in the rain. Airport shuttle rides that never seemed to end. The buses that came late, broke down, or never showed up at all.

I remember a thousand conversations that went like this: “Hey, where are you headed after this?”

“You need a ride?”

“If you don’t mind?”

“Sure.”

This ritual sickened me – always begging people for a lift. Yet my friends knew how impossible that city was to navigate, in the years before Uber and Lyft. The buses stopped running, sometime before midnight. Bike-share programs were a pipe-dream, back then. When I couldn’t bum a ride, I walked, sometimes miles, through any weather imaginable. This happened scores of times, the late-night trudge home through old industrial neighborhoods, and I still marvel that I was never mugged.

I could have done things differently, of course. Traded a major in journalism for a major in marketing. Gotten a “real job,” instead of trying to hack it as a freelance writer. Then I could have afforded a car, overcome my fear of driving, moved to the suburbs, gone to bed at a reasonable hour. I chose to live in the city and scrape by. I knew the challenges of staying in Pittsburgh, and I stuck to it, because I loved it so much.

And an e-bike would have changed everything.

Pittsburgh bicycle infrastructure

Timing is Everything

I also biked, of course. I’ve always had a bicycle, even when I owned little else, and I first explored the Steel City by pedaling its twisting streets. This was no cake-walk; shoulders were rare, bike lanes were non-existent, and drivers openly resented me. Urban Pittsburgh is blanketed over a river-valley, and the hills are punishing. Everyone grumbles about road conditions, especially in the spring, followed by anarchic construction in summer. But the city was compact and scenic, and magnificent rail-trails lined the rivers. The parks were beautiful and webbed with bike-ready paths. In many ways, fertile groundwork was already laid.

Yet what if modern e-bikes had been available, anytime between, say, 2000 and 2013? Before I got married, before I became a father, before I was a middle-aged suburbanite, what wonders could a Lectric or Rad Power bike have done?

Could I have afforded a $1,200 bike? Absolutely.

Would I have ridden it everywhere in city limits, zipping from apartment complex to Carnegie Museum to the Quiet Storm coffee house in a matter of minutes? You betcha.

Might a maximum speed of 40 kph have kept pace with surface-street traffic? No doubt – and at rush hour, I would’ve buzzed through miles of Oakland gridlock, passing hundreds of idling cars.

Could I have locked an e-bike to almost any sign post? Would I have carried groceries from nearby supermarkets in my panniers? How much bus fare could I have saved, let alone time and stress, if a fully charged e-bike had been waiting to whisk me away? How many extra miles would friends not have driven, because I could pedal home myself?

And that’s not all. A pair of fat tires would have bounced deftly over cracks, potholes, puddles, shattered glass, broken sidewalks, and fallen branches. A battery-powered headlight would have guided me through the night, even down unlit streets. Front suspension would have kept me stable over cobblestone and crushed gravel. All this, and no paperwork to register, no premiums to pay, no loans to settle, no gas to pump, no annual inspection to schedule, no nothing.

Pittsburgh

It could have been glorious.

But my young adulthood came at the wrong time. I was decades too early. The lifestyle I wanted is perfectly possible now, in the 2020s. Gen Z can do what I couldn’t, and no longer can. At least not for a few more years.

Do We Have to Drive?

The afternoon takes a bad turn, and I need run an errand. In an instant, I must reshuffle my schedule. I won’t just pick up my son and come home; I’ll pick up my son and drive miles away, to settle some unexpected business. Time is ticking, and my only option is to drive.

My car takes twice as long as the e-bike would, and I resort to semi-legal parking. At the art center, my son is waiting. He steps out the front door, looks both ways, and frowns.

“Where’s the e-bike?”

“I couldn’t bring it. Sorry about that.”

“We have to drive?”

“Yeah. And it’s actually worse than that – I have to do something before we go home.”

“We have to drive to that, too?”

“I’m afraid so.”

He mopes, but he also surrenders. What choice does a suburban 10-year-old have, but to be carted from place to place, across abstract distances? Our commute is no longer fun or special; it’s just an air-conditioned routine, a thing we have to do, before the afternoon ends, and everything devolves into dinner and Netflix.

As my son buckles in, I discreetly check my weather app. Sunny skies, reads the forecast. Hot and summery. Just right.

“But tomorrow,” I say, “how about I drop you off and pick you up?”

He brightens. “On the e-bike?”

“Exactly.”

We can’t always ride around on two wheels. But I love that he wants to. Riding an e-bike was once unthinkable; nowadays, it’s a treat. And when my son is grown? When he reaches his own roaring twenties? Maybe it’ll be normal. Maybe he’ll live exactly the way he wants to.

Robert Isenberg is a writer and filmmaker based in Rhode Island. His latest book is “Mile Markers: Essays on Cycling.”