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I’m a flatlander who was born and raised in Florida. A comment from reader “Jon’s Thoughts,” however, made me realize how much electric bikes (ebikes) are important to enabling more biking in hilly and mountainous places. He wrote:
“In the past we lived on a hill that made a regular bike a pretty strenuous trip, suitable for a good workout but not great for a casual trip to the store. The ebike definitely reduced the number of car trips for us. I suspect that there may be a number of folks living in hilly terrain that have reduced car trips with an ebike.”
I just took a brief trip to Western North Carolina. While I have been there several times and spent one summer in the mountains of North Carolina, I forgot the extent of the hills and mountains there. Just driving up and down, up and down, up and down was challenging. Biking — for me and most other people — would be out of the question. Ebikes must make biking a real option all of a sudden, and bring the opportunity to bike for transportation purposes to whole regions of people.
