Where do the children play?

I can relate. Nice article. We had that same debate and ended up moving to the countryside. Surprisingly, it worked out well. + real forests. With today’s e-bikes, even hills or longer distances aren’t really a blocker for kids anymore. In the end, it feels like the bigger factor is how you organize daily life, not whether you’re in a city or in a rural area.

Whitewashing motorcycles as e-bikes scares me more than anything else for the next generation.

Limited to 25 kph they seem fine (if only just, and a helmet is a good idea at that speed) but violations and disabled limiters are common

>With today’s e-bikes, even hills or longer distances aren’t really a blocker for kids anymore

Unlike public transport, with an e-bike, the chances of getting a puncture or a malfunctioning battery increase with usage. Plus, there is also the very common bike theft and road accidents if you live in a country where bikes need to go on the road (like the UK)

It doesn’t take much time to fix a puncture with a tiny kit the size of a matchbox. There are also tubeless tires with liquid sealant.

An e-bike with a dead battery becomes a heavy bike.

Theft and accidents, okay, but the first sentence is just fearmongering.

We haven’t had a malfunctioning battery in ~40 000km of ebike use in our family. We have one that failed to charge due to age. The number of times we ran out of battery due to forgetting to charge can be counted on one hand. The number of flat tires is in the single digits - modern general use tires are really sturdy, especially if you combine them with sealant.

Legal e-bikes are fine. The ones you are complaining about are probably illegal, not that there is any real enforcement.

Serious Q: What is the fundamental difference between a legal and illegal e-bike. This largely is differentiated by the location but I don't know what illegal e-bike means.

Maximum power output and maximum (assisted) speed are generally legislated. In the UK, an e-bike is up to 250 W and 25 kph. More than that, it would classify as a motorbike and you'd need a license (not particularly onerous). The bike itself is often built differently to accommodate the different power profile.

As a pedal cyclist, I feel that's a reasonably sensible limit as much faster than that you should be more experienced as a cyclist to control the bike and anticipate the conditions.

In addition to the other answer you got. E-bikes are pedal assist, so illegal ones usually have throttles in addition to more powerful motors. This depends on the region though.

> It doesn’t take much time to fix a puncture with a tiny kit the size of a matchbox.

That's a dependency. Now you need to remember to have that kit with you. This is like solving the short battery life in phones with a portable battery charger. You still have to remember to charge the charger beforehand and bring it with you. Small kits are easy to lose sight of that by the time you need them so you don't know where they are.

Tubeless tires are sadly not compatible with most bikes. I am not trying to be downer, this is just my experience (losing the kit and finding out that the bike I bought is not compatible with tubeless tires). I do agree though that bikes are definitely the way to go. But I wouldn't rely on them too much, especially on the electric components. Humans have a tendency to aim for convenience above all and being stranded in the middle of nowhere with dead phone and a bike with a dead battery in winter is not fun

Must have been a high end bike because the ones I have used have had multiple punctures within a year and running out of battery in the middle of trip has happened several times which is not great if you live in a hilly area

The bosch drivetrain is pretty much bog standard on the german market and available on almost all price classes and Schwalbe Marathon/Big Apple tires are aren't exactly restricted to the higher price classes as well.

Now, if you're riding Mountainbike or Gravel tires, your tradeoffs are different - they sacrifice puncture resilience in favor of less weight.

The “high-end”-ness of a bike and the likelihood of punctures are completely orthogonal. You can get a low-end e-bike and just put decent tires on it. Since weight is less of an issue with e-bikes than acoustic bikes, it’s common for people to choose heavier tires like Schwalbe Pickups that offer very high puncture-resistance.

> That's a dependency. Now you need to remember to have that kit with you.

You put it on the bike and don’t worry about it. This is less onerous than remembering your bus pass or cars keys.

People have been stashing a puncture repair kit in a small saddle bag since the nineteenth century. The kit just sits there until it is needed, potentially for years. To depict this as a big stress and risk is a real reach.

E-Bikes are sold & regulated in "classes" (at least where I live in the US).

A class 1 e-bike is pedal-assist and stops assisting beyond 20mph (mine, for instance, tapers off starting probably around 15 mph).

A class 2 is the above, plus a throttle.

A class 3 is anything that assists over 20mph. The "basically motorcycle" set exists here.

In the United States, throttle-only ebikes that go up to 20 miles per hour (Class 2 ebikes) are legal pretty much everywhere. They're required to have functional pedals, but no pedal assist function is required.

Your class 3 definition is inaccurate. Class 3 is limited to 28mph and cannot have a throttle, only pedal assist.

Anything that doesn't fall in one of those classes is a motorcycle that is not street legal and can only be rudden of private property (unless you can convince your DMV to give you registration as a motor vehicle.)

This can vary somewhat from state to state, but most states have adopted or are moving to adopt these classes.

> To depict this as a big stress and risk is a real reach.

Yet here we are, living in a world where most parents would NOT let their kids travel around unsupervised even though it has been going on for longer than the 19th century. People have also been making fires for far longer than that. Both of these are depicted as big risks. You might find it a real reach or not but the overall point is that we don't live in a 19th century world anymore and our worldview is for better or worse different.

Try ask parents who can't barely make ends meet to get a puncture repair kit for their kid. You know the kit will be a cheap 5 star rated one from Amazon/Temu and the second it gets needed it won't work as it is meant to. This is reality

Man, your post is just so out of touch. Puncture-repair kits are cheap, you can find them from hardware stores for just a couple of euro even in countries seen as expensive. And those kits work just fine regardless of how cheap they are, because the tech is so simple and unchanged since a century ago: rubber patch, chunk of metal to work as a tire lever, tiny piece of sandpaper or other abrasive, rubber cement. As long as that rubber-cement tube stays unopened, that kit will last years inside a saddle bag.

I spend a lot of time traveling the world by bicycle (hence the HN username), and I have bought cheap Chinese puncture-repair kits around the developing world, whether in China itself, Central Asia, or Sub-Saharan Africa. They have always served me fine.