I was in Denver for the first time last fall. Only spent a week but my first impressions were that public transit rather sucks but there is a fairly extensive urban trail network. So e-bikes seem like they might be a natural fit there?
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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They are a good fit here and my wife and I use ours a lot, but they are still early in traffic-calming efforts so it can be dicey actually getting to trails even on low-speed residential streets (drivers seem pretty aggressive and impatient here).
You are lucky if streets have a bike lane (but some places downtown have separated lanes which is sweet). The more common thing you’ll see is multi-use streets, which is just a picture of a bike painted on the street and does literally nothing to calm the kind of SUV/Dodge Ram drivers you’re most worried about. That said there are official bike routes pretty much anywhere in the city.
Property crime is also pretty high so I’m still nervous about bringing them anywhere I’ll be away from it for an extended period, too. (Even though to a bike thief it ends up just being a really heavy manual bike, I am not sure enough that they care.)
Some of this sentiment is probably because my wife and I have only been urban biking for about six months and we’ll figure it out eventually, I wish there were better resources to gauge this concerns from fellow cyclists and not the city.
All in all I think the city planners are doing a good job to encourage biking and e-bikes with policy and changes to infrastructure, but it still has some ways to go.
Thanks for the reply! I live in a city that's maybe 1/5th the population of Denver, but much of what you said still applies.
The city has an active transportation initiative, but it's rather piecemeal with little follow-through where it's needed. For example, they will put in a cycle track along a busy road, which is awesome. But the trouble is to get to it, you need to go through some underpass with no shoulders and hard concrete walls looming on either side that scream cyclist death trap.
Sometimes I think if even one of the city councillors actually tried bike-commuting, things would change in a hurry…
Property crime is also pretty high so I’m still nervous about bringing them anywhere I’ll be away from it for an extended period, too.
Buy two different kinds of locks. Many thieves master 1 or 2, maybe 3 locks but not much beyond that. So if you pick two different locks most of them will be stifled enough to move along to someone else’s bike. More importantly: the best security is a good insurance policy.
(Even though to a bike thief it ends up just being a really heavy manual bike, I am not sure enough that they care.)
The battery and motor alone are typically ~$1k new.
“There are about 160 of these incentive programs across the U.S. ”
nice. Bicycle rebates are common outside the US but I would not have thought they would attempt it inside the US.
Though w.r.t Denver, in principle it’s flat enough they should be offering rebates for muscle bikes as well. I wonder if they figured too few people would be willing to make the perceived sharp change of peddling their lazy asses around.