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.
Nice, does it depend maybe on the terrain as well (NL is flat, but I was in southern towns and they were a bit hilly).
Anyway, I 100% agree that safe infrastructure is a necessary condition for bike usage. But I look at Rome for example and I can’t imagine elder people biking (even if there was infrastructure) without ebikes, due to so many hills - let alone smaller towns in the inland.
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.
Nice, does it depend maybe on the terrain as well (NL is flat, but I was in southern towns and they were a bit hilly).
Anyway, I 100% agree that safe infrastructure is a necessary condition for bike usage. But I look at Rome for example and I can’t imagine elder people biking (even if there was infrastructure) without ebikes, due to so many hills - let alone smaller towns in the inland.