I went biking in NL last summer (great vacation!) and I was completely amazed by the number of elders biking using ebikes. Ebikes absolutely make cycling available to a vast range of people who wouldn’t or couldn’t bike otherwise.
I do have and use a traditional bike, but I will consider in the future a (cargo?)ebike.
A good counter-example is Copenhagen. There, almost nobody uses ebikes in the city. (It would not be faster because there are so many bikes on the road. There is a bridge across the harbour where at rush hour times there pass more than two bikes per second, that’s over 5000 vehicles a hour.)
What made the difference was good, safe bike infrastructure. And NL has this, too.
In practice, e-bikes open up cycling to more people and for more trips, likely making them far more net positive than regular bikes.
And this is coming from someone who bikes like mad on non-ebikes
I went biking in NL last summer (great vacation!) and I was completely amazed by the number of elders biking using ebikes. Ebikes absolutely make cycling available to a vast range of people who wouldn’t or couldn’t bike otherwise.
I do have and use a traditional bike, but I will consider in the future a (cargo?)ebike.
A good counter-example is Copenhagen. There, almost nobody uses ebikes in the city. (It would not be faster because there are so many bikes on the road. There is a bridge across the harbour where at rush hour times there pass more than two bikes per second, that’s over 5000 vehicles a hour.)
What made the difference was good, safe bike infrastructure. And NL has this, too.