Over the weekend, I had a great opportunity to work with some middle school aged kids and their parents. The kids wanted to ride their bikes to middle school and we spent a couple hours talking and practicing some road safety skills.

I had a great time seeing these young people who are the next generation of bike transportation advocates! In this video, I go over 4 critical areas to teach young bike riders when they’re learning to interact with traffic. And I even throw in one extra area that I noticed when watching the kids interact.

The 4 major accident areas for young riders are

1. entering traffic from a driveway without looking

2. riding on the left side of the street

3. veering in front of oncoming traffic when going left, and

4. failing to stop at a stop sign.

Leave me your comments below!

And don’t forget to join our Facebook or Twitter communities for a great resource on lifestyle biking, sustainable transportation and electric info.

-Elise

Go By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike

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If you’ve been thinking of going carfree, but have stuff or people to carry, then I’m sure you’ve been looking for options on how you can do that. An electric cargo bike is a great car-replacement vehicle for most of the trips we do to the store, to drop-off and pick-up children, to get to work and back, and to attend social outings. The cargo bike gives you the capacity to carry what you need, and the motor makes it so you don’t have to kill yourself pedaling the extra weight.

Your excuses for not biking will disappear with one of these babies! And you’ll be LOVING the $8,000* your saving a year by selling your second car!  (* According to edmonds.com, the average price of owning a car in the US is $8,000 a year, and that was calculated when gas was just $1.50 per gallon!).

In this video, I give a brief overview of the Electric Yuba Mundo, or E-Mundo. The Mundo is the “pick up” of the cargo biking world with 400lbs of cargo carrying capacity. The Cycle 9 electric mundo is designed to fit most people’s needs right out of the box. Unless you’ve got killer hills, this kit will transport you and your stuff wherever you want to go (if you DO have killer hills, ask about upgrading to our high torque version!).

Leave me your comments below!

And don’t forget to join our Facebook or Twitter communities for a great resource on lifestyle biking, sustainable transportation and electric info.

-Elise

Go By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike

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Cycle 9 will be at University Mall this Saturday morning (August 28th) from 9 – noon for the

Pedal to the Metal Fest: 

A Community Bike Festival & Sculpted Metal Bike Exhibit by New York artist, Josh Hadar

Test ride electric bikes, check out our kid-carrying cargo bikes, and ride a new Melon folding bike!

Check out the awesome ART BIKES by artist Josh Hadar and celebrate the Triangle Commuter Bike Initiative, which is creating bike routes for commuters in the triangle area! In addition, there will be a kids bike parade at 9.30 AM, t-shirts, prizes and entertainment.

For FULL INFORMATION, Please see the University Mall Events site HERE.

Hope to see you on Saturday

-Elise

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They’re the buzz word of the bike industry lately. Will 2010 be their year? or will they burn quickly as a fad and fade out as in the past? As a rider and dealer of electric bikes, I’ve watched the offerings grow from small, obscure companies, to today with a plethora of options, including major bike manufacturers jumping on the wagon. I have to say I’m pretty impressed by the offerings. Clearly the industry thinks these are going to be big and small and large companies alike are gambling big bucks on developing products and getting dealers to support them. Will they hit it big? I don’t know, but here are a few of my thoughts on the question.

My first ebike

An electric hub motor

I’ve been interested in electric bikes for many years. My first bike was a ZAP bike in the early 1990s that I shared with my significant other. It employed a roller that went against your tire to help propel you forward, and I used it to assist me on my 12 mile each-way commute across town. The roller system worked ok as long as the road was dry, and you stopped occasionally to adjust the pressure on the tire. The battery was a golf cart battery strapped to the rear rack, and if I spared it’s use to the hills only, it would last all the way to work and half way home before giving up the ghost. But it did provide just enough help for me conquer my commute, a large factor being the few extra minutes it saved me.
By contrast, today’s ebikes are so much better, they barely compare. With my current electric kit, I can easily ride 20 miles or more, keeping my speed at 15-20mph over hills, even with cargo! The kit works reliably rain or shine, and the battery is 3 times the capacity for the same size and weight as my original ZAP kit. But most importantly, the kit has allowed me to free myself from my car, addressing my concerns about peak oil, environmental degradation, and quality of life for me, my kids, and my community.

The oil problem

As bike commuters, we generally understand the benefits of biking versus driving. We know that biking is healthy for us. We know that driving uses lots of resources. We know that our resources are finite and our environment is being polluted. But when I really started looking into the numbers, I was shocked. You see, through a friend I learned about the problem of Peak Oil. Peak Oil is the concept that at some point the world will have reached the peak efficiency of oil extraction worldwide. That means that all the easily extracted oil will be used up, and the stuff that’s left will be more difficult, costly, and time consuming to extract. Many geologists argue persuasively that peak oil is at hand, but that we don’t realize it in the marketplace yet. And the recent disaster in the Gulf of Mexico just underscores that drilling for oil is risky and has lots of associated costs.

BP's Deepwater Horizon (Photo: US Coast Guard)

Once you dive into the consequences of a future of more expensive and declining supply of oil, all kinds of scary facts start popping out – oil is required for the production of plastics which are critical in the health care industry. It’s heavily embedded in the production and transport of our food supply. It’s used in the pharmecudical industry, and will be required to manufacture and deploy solar panels, wind turbines, busses, bicycles and all the other elements of an alternative energy future.
Yet, here we are, burning up oil by driving around. Over 60% of the US oil supply goes to transportation, much of it personal and short distance. The internal combustion engine uses only 20% of the energy contained in gasoline while the rest is wasted in inefficiencies. And most of the energy consumed in driving is to propel the car – a big, heavy, metal box – not us or our stuff.
Clearly, we need to change our paradigm about transportation if we’re going to have an effect on this problem. And the sooner we can do that, the better off all of us will be. Once I realized this, I thought the best place to start would be with myself. I’ve always been a casual biker, recreationally and for transportation. But I had a problem if I was going to ride my bike more, and it came in the shape of 3 small people.

The kid problem

You see, I had 3 small people under the age of 5 to take care of and not only did they need to be transported, but I needed to have the energy to deal with them. After a lengthy internet search, a cargo bike was selected to transport them. But I didn’t live super close to town, and there were some big hills in the way. I didn’t think I could do it. I could barely pedal the bike up the 1st hill out of the driveway. This is where the electric assist kit transformed this into a realistic solution.
With my kit, I can pedal the bike even with 3 kids or a week’s worth of groceries, over 12 miles of hilly terrain. I can do it every day and it doesn’t take forever or leave me sweaty and exhausted. It’s become a realistic and competitive alternative to the car. And in fact, it’s become the preferred option most of the time as everyone enjoys riding the bike more than riding the car, especially Mom!

Electric Madsen bike = no car today

Setting up this bike actually was a life changing experience for me, so I started a bike shop to help other people realize their own dreams of using their car less and their bikes more. Electric assist has been a big part of this. We help a lot of people like myself who want to electrify cargo bikes. But we also help a lot of commuters with distances of over 3 miles to go. Some people are even riding 20 miles each way, and the electric assist just makes this commute much faster and more do-able. Instead of bike commuting one day a week, they’re doing it 3 or 5 days. We’ve also helped people with disabilities, people who are out of shape, and people who just want to have more fun riding their bikes. It’s been a pleasure watching all of these people dust off bikes and leave their cars in the garage. In my book, anything that enables people to do that is worth doing.
Would it be “better” if these people were able to bike under their own power without the assist? Maybe. But consider again this fact. The energy used by a typical electric bike is about 15 watt-hours (wh) per mile. The energy used by a typical car is 1,580 wh per mile. That means that you can ride your electric bike for 20 miles and use less energy than it would take to drive your car 0.25 mile. That’s a pretty startling statistic.

The adoption of electric bikes

Over the past 20 years, electric bike technology has made huge strides to where it is generally reliable and easy to use. This is not to say that everything out there is quality – there are still a lot of low quality and low powered bikes out there. But companies manufacturing the bikes and kits have started paying attention to what consumers want and I think we’ll see considerable weeding out of the stuff that is not worth it.
One of the biggest barriers to electric bikes in the marketplace that I see today is actually the reluctance of independent bike shops to take them on. Your local bike shop employees are probably dominated by hard core bike enthusiasts who wouldn’t consider an electric bike for themselves, and so are not very interested in selling them. I’ve also seen considerable reluctance on the part of mechanical staff to be interested or even willing to work on electric bikes, simply because it’s something pretty different than what they’ve seen before. The door has been left open for new specialty shops focused on electric bikes to pop up, and also for big-box retailers to get into the market. These retailers, in combination with the internet, have served to grow the market considerably. As the products increase in quality (and thus decrease in maintenance and support), and as consumer demand grows, I think local bike shops will come around. This would be a great thing, because local shops will always be the best place to get the service and support that bikes of all types need.
So, will electric bikes become a big part of the bike industry? My answer is, I sure hope so.  The potential they have to encourage and enable people to ride more is huge. Both hard core riders who commute longer distances or are aiming for the car-free lifestyle, and for casual riders who would ride more if it was easier and more convenient. And riding bikes is good for our souls, our communities, and our planet.

This article originally appeared on CommuteByBike on June 2, 2010

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A little friendly competition – the electric Madsen with 150 lbs of cargo versus the lightweight road bike. Short video today for your enjoyment…

I’m sure there are many road warriors out there who will appreciate that the electric bike is not ALWAYS faster. (However, I’d love to see them tote the 3 children and still be that fast – different strokes for different folks).

-Elise

Go By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike

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I had the opportunity recently to listen to a talk and discussion about peak oil and climate change here in our local town . The talk was interesting and a good presentation of the topic, but also interesting was the reactions of people in the crowd. Here’s what happened:

It’s a serious issue that we shouldn’t take lightly, but it’s also easy to feel overwhelmed and get into gloom and doom mode. I found my way to take action on this issue, both personally and through starting Cycle 9. What about you? Is Peak Oil something that motivated you to ride more?

What are people in your areas doing about sustainability, climate change and energy use?

Here are some links to :

General information about Peak Oil

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil

http://www.energybulletin.net/primer.php

and the Transition Town Movement

http://www.transitionnetwork.org/

-Elise

o By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike

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Batavus Diva

The lowest maintenance Diva you will ever know!  With 3 speed Shimano Nexus hub gears and a fully enclosed chain ring, this bike is designed for hassle-free commuting.  The wider tires allow the Diva to carry heavy loads around town, while the aluminum frame lightens things up a bit.  The cushy seat and upright design make for a comfortable ride.  The Diva also features built in lights, fenders, and racks.  Is this diva high maintenance and demanding?  No.  Sexy and stylish?  Yes.

Cross Old Dutch style with modern biking technologies and you get the best of both worlds with the Fryslan.  Attractive and versatile, the Fryslan’s 5 speeds and aluminum frame allow travel over longer distances and up hilly terrain.  Like the Diva, the Fryslan has a fully enclosed chain ring, internal hub gears, fenders, rack, and an internal lighting system.

Batavus Fryslan

If your city commute is sprawled or hilly, the Batavus Breukelen may be up your alley.  The Breukelen has all the great commuter features of Batavus’ other bikes, but with 7 speeds, a lighter frame, and a sleeker style.

Batavus Breukelen

The award-winning design of the Batavus Utility Bike, or BUB, was inspired by a bent paperclip.  And like that little, practical, no-frills office necessity, the BUB’s form follows the function – a great, durable way to get around town.  The handlebar design allows for a front basket, and racks can be added.  Beautifully crafted, modern, and urban, the BUB is a city-slicker’s cycle.

Batavus Utility Bike

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In a recent copy of our local paper, the Chapel Hill News, I read a column about a woman who biked on a stationary bike at the gym while imagining she was a kid riding on the street. Why didn’t she actually ride on the street? Listen to find out….

You can find the original column on the Chapel Hill News site here

What do you think? Have you run into people with this much fear? What’s your response? Write a comment below.

-Elise

Go By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike

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Part of my ride home is over dark country roads with no overhead lights, so having a bright headlight is key. We recently got in new ebike headlights that are powered directly from your ebike battery and are SUPER bright. Check out this new video showing the new light.

You can find this light in our online store at under the Electric a-la-cart section

Ride On!

-Elise

Go By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike

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Most bikes that are sold these days come with saddles that are really not all that comfortable. They might be fine for casual riding, but for riding regularly, a comfortable saddle can make a huge difference!

I recently ditched my so-so saddle for a new one that looks very promising. But besides just the saddle itself, getting it adjusted correctly is KEY for a good fit! A poorly adjusted saddle can lead to neck and back, terribly sore butts and less riding.

In this video, I show how to adjust your saddle yourself and talk about what to look for. I also show my new Selle Royal saddle which comes with an actual comfort guarantee (don’t like it in 120 days? bring it back!)

Ride on!

-Elise

Go By Bike is a daily video series that talks about how to be green by riding more and using your car less, including electric bikes, electric kits, cargo bikes, bike safety, and getting motivated to bike

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