March with Fast Lane Biker Magazine

Paradigm Shifts

Two years ago, my grandson got a job, moved into his own place, and bought a Rad Power e-bike for commuting to work; a daily 14 miles round trip. Tough kid. When he started this adventure, he bought the Rad Power Radrover; a fat tire full sized bike that is about as robust looking and riding as a small dirt bike. Two years in and a few dozen crashes on the ice and snow, he turned the Radrover over to me to repair and replaced it with the Radmini.

We spent the day hanging out with our grandson and just before we left the Cities for home, I took a test ride on his new e-bike. I am hooked. Everything about riding this not-even-a-little-bit-small-feeling electric bicycle was like the things I love the most about motorcycles. The fat tires are incredibly stable, resilient, and sticky even on a 28^oF day with a little ice and snow on the ground. The power is instant, quiet, and predictable; although e-bikes are almost universally limited to 20mph getting there was as fast as it needed to be to get me moving in rush hour residential street traffic.

When I lived in the Cities and commuted from Little Canada to downtown St. Paul (for 13 years) I probably would have rarely, if ever, rode a motorcycle or car to work if I’d owned a bicycle like this. I had a 5.5 mile one-way commute via freeway and a mile or so added to that by city streets and the Radmini has a 20 mile range at 20mph over the toughest terrain at 20mph. If you pedal or have a fair amount of relative flat and wind-free territory to travel over, that range approaches 40 miles. There were a few moments when I made it up to 30mph on the city street routes, either on the bike or in the cage, but the 20mph limit would have been more than offset by traveling on the rarely-used bicycle trail routes that were available to me. Downtown parking would have never been an issue and I could have taking my employer’s parking allowance and used that money somewhere else. Anywhere else.

The disc brakes are terrific, although the damn levers are bicycle-traditionally on the wrong side. The electronic controls are ergonomically laid-out and easy to see and use. The bike isn’t light, at about 64 pounds, and is almost exactly the same total length as my WR250X (67”) The “standover height is 28”, the max I can cope with without getting gelded on a quick getoff. The riding position is very dirtbike-like; comfortable, upright, relaxed, and well-balanced. The performance is just amazing. 0-20mph is about as quick as the tires can handle and you have to be slightly forward on the bars to keep from popping a wheelie on a full-throttle take-off. That surprised me, more than once. The frame geometry is excellent, at least as far as I could tell in a 2-3 mile test ride. U-turns are easily executed inside a single lane and high speed (remember, that means 20mph) handling is solid, predictable, and very stable feeling (probably thanks to the long wheelbase).

As far as security is concerned, I could have rolled the bike into my office, folded it up and stuffed it under my cube’s desk, charging the battery while I worked (5 hours from depleted to fully charged), and never once worried about theft or vandalism like I had to with both the cage and the motorcycle in the parking garage where both occurred fairly regularly.

Cost of operation is fairly well documented (with some noticeable miscalculations) on Rad Power’s website blog in the article EBike vs. Car: by the Numbers. I disagree with the exponential rise in cost the author applied to car maintenance expenses, but the bottom line is still going to be close to the same. I regularly encourage my grandson’s bike replacement expenses by showing him the spreadsheet I keep on my pickup; which is freakin’ terrifying and/’or depressing. I did a similar comparison with my cage vs. motorcycle costs a few years back, the numbers were a little surprising but nothing like EBike vs. cages; at least a factor of 10. You can get a bike, ride it, fix it, and beat it up for less than the cost of a year’s car insurance. The times are changing fast.

Looking for Summer

There appears to be no break for the morally ambivalent (that's me). After a viciously long and irritating winter, I thought the worst was behind me back in late March. I broke out the WR250X and started riding to work everyday. Then, last week winter revisited Minnesota and the bike has sat parked next to my disabled Escort ever since. Yesterday was a good day, but I had people to haul and things to carry and was stuck in the cage. Today, the weather report predicted more snow.

Once again, I need to be reminded of why I live in the Great Frozen North. Somebody help me out here. I can feel my resolve dissolving and my willpower vanishing. Warmth, twisty roads, and a population density somewhere under 10 people per square mile is calling me. Practically screaming at me, in fact.

What A License Means

Last night, I was in a non-motorcycle related meeting with three other middle aged guys and after the meeting broke up we all ended up congregated around my motorcycle, the WR250X. All three of the meeting participants had motorcycle licenses and used to be motorcyclists. Two of them still owned non-functional motorcycles. This would be an example of the "180,000 Minnesota motorcyclists" often cited in pro-motorcycling propaganda.

All three of those guys are competent, intelligent men who would probably be decent riders if they rode. However, they make a solid case for changing the idiotic state of national motorcycle licensing. Nothing about having passed a remedial riding test 5 to 50 years ago says anything about a rider's current capability. That's true for any driving license, but considering our outrageous mortality and morbidity rates it's particularly true for motorcyclists.

The subject of motorcycle technology was the reason for the little post-meeting parking lot gathering. All four of us had a stake in our opinions. The oldest guy was an English ex-pat retired physician with a nationalist penchant for all things Brit, especially mechanical things. When I described the WR's fuel injection, he eulogized the "great British carburetors" and their superiority over all things Japanese. Having experienced the wonders of SU (MGA & MGBs), AMAL and Villers (Triumph & BSA & other assorted marginally functional Brit bikes), I'm less than convinced that the Brits can build anything that can hold fluids of any viscosity. The other two guys weren't particularly ethnocentric, but they are of the "old bikes are best," anti-electronics crowd. I am, obviously, all for as much modern tech as I can get my hands on, afford-ably.

I also ride my motorcycles (except the Sherpa which is just not interesting after the WR). At the end of the shade-tree mechanics' meeting, I realized that possessing a motorcycle license is as much an indicator of motorcycle-capability as having health insurance protects me from bankruptcy if a life-threatening disease were to strike. None of these guys would try to pass himself off as an expert motorcyclist, but they would all feel confident in their ability to ride a motorcycle because they all possessed a license that gave them the legal right to ride. If motorcycling were in some what like driving a car, that might not be catastrophic. But motorcycling provides at least 100-times the opportunities for disaster as driving a car. Our licensing system is dumb and needs to be reworked.