> I have not seen any electric bicycle that offered any real advantage to a normal muscle-operated one.
Some people don't have showering facilities at work, or do not want to carry a change of clothes with them. An electric bike is less likely to produce a stinky cyclist.
This is absolutely the number one error people from non-bicycling nations make about utility cycling.
Don't want to get sweaty? Just use your gears and slow down. You don't run to the corner store, you walk. Likewise with cycling to work - it's easy to travel at a comfortable pace that won't leave you sweaty or out of breath.
Most electric bicycles only enhance your own pedaling. This makes you faster, but it won't make you sweat less as you can still exert the same force (only to greater effect). In other words, if sweating is the problem, ride slower.
This makes no sense. I've seen women in skirts blasting up a hill by my house with a kid in a bike seat that would leave me huffing and puffing at any speed. They don't even have to get off the seat.
The enhanced pedaling makes you stronger not just faster. That means less sweating.
Where is the point in cycling if you don't have to use your own muscles to ride?
Because sometimes you have the energy and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you're ok with sweating and sometimes you aren't. Some days are 100F degrees and some are 60F. Maybe you're not strong enough to maintain your speed up a hill by your house but you're ok for the rest of the trip. It might lower that one part of the trip from "too hard" to "doable" and it's one more person getting more exercise and driving less.
It's good if everyone bikes more but the whole point of a commuter bike is that the exercise part is secondary. First is getting from point A to point B daily and conveniently.
Exactly. I got in a little argument with my sister the other day about how obnoxious the modified bikes were that cruise around her neighborhood in San Juan, Puerto Rico. People attach little two-stroke engines (or whatever) that are loud and polluting. My argument was basically, just f'ing pedal. But she made the point that in the tropics, sometimes you want to avoid the sweating that comes from just a few pedals down a sunny street, and, second, not everyone can afford a scooter or moped (or ac'ed car!).
> Where is the point in cycling if you don't have to use your own muscles to ride?
In the case of the vehicle in the article, it is transportation.
For instance, I live in the Puget Sound area, across from Seattle. If I were to get a job in Seattle, my commute would consist of driving my car to the ferry terminal, paying something like $15 for transportation for me an my car to Seattle, then driving on to work. Reverse the process to come home. $30 in ferry fees for the day.
With a device like the one in the article, that could be changed to driving my car to the free park-and-ride lot near the Ferry terminal, riding the bike to the terminal, folding it up and going on as a walk-on. In Seattle, I could then unfold the bike and head on to work. Reverse the process to come home. The ferry fee for walk-on passengers is $7 in one of the directions, and free in the other direction.
In under a year, the $23 per day saved in ferry fares would pay for the bike.
A regular bike would simply not work for me for this. The hills in Seattle would be too much for me.
Some people don't have showering facilities at work, or do not want to carry a change of clothes with them. An electric bike is less likely to produce a stinky cyclist.