579a walking and writing

Sorry it's been a while since I've written a blog post. For about the past month, my mind has been occupied with ebikes. There's another exciting Bike & Battery coming, maybe even two or three or four or five posts worth.

This morning I started writing that post, for the second time. It's long and convoluted, and goes into many possibilities in the exciting world of ebike purchase. 

However, I have yet to actually purchase an ebike. Honestly, I'm more of a walker. Living in a place where I can spend most of my time walking is very important to me. This is how I've structured my life. 

The truth is an e-bike is a band-aid over a century's worth of oopsies called car-centric thinking. America went all in on the car in the 20th century, and now we're stuck with the results. Suburbia. Sprawl. Life sucking traffic. 

The e-bike is a hail mary attempt to get out of all of this. And it's not even that great of a solution. For a big part of the country it's really only a 6 months of the year possibility. We're going to need a lot more innovation in the e-microemobility sector to really get people out of cars. Yhe e-bike is a good start. The bicycle itself has been winning the war on personal mobility for the past 100 years. There are way more bikes in the world than there are cars. 

But for me? I'm a walker. I moved to a small town of 2500 people. One stop light. We're two blocks from Safeway and maybe five blocks from the hardware store. What do I need any bike for? 

In the Bay Area I could see replacing some of Deb's gardening business transportation with an e-bike. Really she only needs a handful of tools to do her work. 

But for me? Will, occasionally I haul some tools around for jobs, more than my current bike could handle. But really I'm interested in the mountain retirement lifestyle economy arising in this area. Electric mountain bikes are going to be part of that future.

And in other notes: Two other trends having to do with the transportation.

Some major auto manufacturer, or more likely a new electric truck maker needs to come out with a utility bed on their pickup truck here in America. Around the world the utility bed is a very popular option for a ute or pickup truck, whatever you want to call it. These beds sides and tailgate fold down to turn the back of the truck into a flatbed. Here in the heartland, bubbas are loving the utility bed. That is a hot commodity. If you have a flat utility bed on the back of your F-350 or Ram 2500, you are the man.

And in another note, here's a weird and yet hopeful thing I'm observing. Really we all have. You know all those people driving huge trucks? Well they have another vehicle at home that they take out on a trailer sometimes, or straight out of the driveway, that's actually a piece of micro-mobility. 

These tiny, light weight new cars are called a UTV or side by side. They are these sort of hopped up ATVs / dune buggy things, you see them all all the time these days. How many people that drive these huge vehicles like driving these utvs because they're smaller and lighter and more fun? 

Think of it as a gateway drug to maybe even smaller lighter vehicles.