Fuck Cars. Long Live E-bikes

I don’t like registering, paying taxes for, maintaining, or driving cars. Quite honestly they’re trash. They’ve become un-repairable and un-bearably necessary for modern life. I’m unfortunate enough to live in the middle of nowhere and with a fiance who needs a car to work, so I don’t get a choice, I’m going to have to figure out getting another one but we’ve already been without for at least 3 months and I’m starting to lose the sense of pain it causes to have to rethink your life without a car.

For medical help, we have a federally funded health clinic about a block away. For food and groceries, there’s a pitiful family-run never-open shop over by the river and a Dollar General and Family Dollar on the other side of town, not to mention a few restaurants and a subway. We also have a pharmacy, a salon and even two lawyers and a therapist (probably says something about american mental healthcare, but I digress).

The expected costs of having a vehicle are high enough, let alone the unexpected repairs that will inevitably arrive and the expected costs that you forget about and they creep up on you, like balding tires. We were both driving budget Nissans, mine was a 1999 Sentra and hers a 2018 Versa. Mine was lost to a distributor failure that may or may not have been an issue further up the chain related to the timing, at least it isn’t known from the behavior of the car when it failed, just losing power and dying. I told the mechanic the car wasn’t worth it and I was wrong but it’s scrapped and no longer can I re-neg, they have the title and it was payment for the diagnosis. Her car was totalled in an accident after I had pushed her to stop paying for comprehensive coverage because she had paid the car off and left her too-far-away job.

But there was a saving grace. I learned that comprehensive coverage might be something to think about, I learned that I have to restore the redundancy of having two cars even though I work from home, but most all I learned one thing that I already had a hunch about from the last car dying on me when I was single;

Everyone on earth should have a bicycle (preferably an electric one).

I bought my Freesky E-bike around June of 2022 just before I met my fiance. I was coming out of a difficult part of my life, only recently having been able to network my way into the corporate world of software work, and I had also had an 01 camry I bought from a family in desperate need of the money slowly blow out the last of its head gasket and die.

I thought about how previous experiences buying and registering and switching vehicles was a true hassle and I decided to research where electric bikes were at in their development for general public purchase. To my surprise, and now lack thereof, they were having their moment in the sun. They took off like gangbusters as people looked for ways to get outside but socially distance. To my pleasant surprise they are mostly unregulated in the rural areas I’ve ended up living in and they’re fast enough (20-25mph) to kind of hold their own on car-oriented roads without also being too dangerous like motorcycles.

I bought one and when it arrived the connectors had somehow been un-seated. The bike spent a couple weeks in my living room after I put it together and only when I went to disassemble it to return it did I accidentally fix it. With it working I cancelled the return and parked it outside, and ever since then it’s been a reliable form of transportation. It’s repairable and customizable. I’ve added a phone holder, a milk-crate for groceries, even handlebar covers for cold weather. I’ve replaced the seat, the kickstand, the seat post and a seat post shim with it. I’ve had to tighten many bolts and nuts after initial assembly and I’m not afraid like I am when I have to work on a car. The stakes are lower, repairs and customization are straightforward, and best of all the materials for upgrades and replacements are mostly universal because, well, it’s a bicycle.

I remember when SSDs were too small to be really useful and too costly to replace storage for normal computer users. We replaced our hard drives with hybrid raid-like systems where writes were buffered through SSDs as a cache and the frequently read files would be kept in the faster storage as well.

I’d like to think we could do this but with electric bikes and cars. We won’t, people will want to drive their cars instead because they can, they’re faster and they’re about the same when it comes to safety except they have the illusion of being much safer, what with being surrounded by steel.

The carbon footprint I’ve had during the last quarter has to be lower than any single quarter since I turned 15 1/2 or whatever it was when I got my permit. I love that and I’m going to continue to try to lower my footprint, as large as it must be. I don’t know if it’ll ever actually matter, but it just makes too much sense. I see so many cars, going on such short trips. Everyday.

Get an electric bike. They make a tremendous amount of sense. Even when they arrive broken and you gotta fix it, they’re great.