E-Transport needs advocacy. We don’t have it.
There is a lot of bicycle advocacy, but that’s not the same thing. That’s because bicycling is about recreation. E-Transport is about getting around. Bicycles are about the weekend, E-Transport the working week.
You can get good trail maps from groups like Rails to Trails and AllTrails. But these are recreational trails, put the bike on the rack and drive to them trails. They’re not routes. They don’t go anywhere. Look at a map of any city with these services and you find disconnected lines, mostly out of town.
I’m not against these things. I’m for them. They do great work for recreational cyclists. But they do little for E-Transport.
I asked Gemini about this, and it wrote an essay that started with People for Bikes. People for Bikes sounded the alarm about New Jersey, but the President is from South Dakota and there was no pushback against a stupidity that treats E-Transport as though we’re automobiles.
The closest thing to an effective E-Transport lobby is the California Bike Coalition, which lobbies for bike infrastructure and better bike routes. They’re the crowd behind SB 1167, the “truth in biking” act that would define an “e-bike” as something that goes at roughly a bicycle’s speed (what e-bike people call “Class 3.”) That three-class definition is pushed by the Wisconsin Bike Federation, which sells a printed map of bike routes for $3 and trains “community cycling champions” to do “adult bike education.”
If something goes at the speed of a motorcycle, it’s a motorcycle. If it goes at the speed of a bike, it’s a bike. But talking about “classes” is a defensive action, when what we need is an expansion of our right to get around in something other than a car.
What E-Transport Advocacy Means
The last thing E-Transport needs is people in high-viz clothing and Spandex telling us what we can’t do on an e-bike. What we need are people advocating on behalf of E-Transport, not arguing against it in the name of protecting vulnerable road users. In America today, by the way, everyone is a vulnerable road user.
E-Transport is getting lost in a matrix of other causes, from diversity to transit, that don’t relate to the daily grind of getting from here to there without being run over. In Atlanta, a varied group of advocates got together a few years ago to create PropelATL, and while I admire their work the group is a jumbled mess.
They’re talking about crosswalks, about expanding transit, and about “bike classes” when what we need is enablement. The best example I can give of this stupidity is the “expansion” of the “Trolley Line Trail” across Moreland Avenue, which replaces the current traffic light with a 50-foot hike up the street to a walk light the cars routinely ignore. No one is talking to the car-centric Georgia Department of Transportation, or making them pay a price for getting everything wrong.
There are adhoc groups on social networks. Bicycle Commuters of Atlanta on Facebook are asking the right questions. They’re highlighting bike incidents, asking about insurance, pointing out trucks in bike lanes, even doing bike buses to Atlanta United games. But they’re not organized, and they don’t offer services.
E-Transport Services
I have described some of the services we need.
Cargo bikes are expensive and people want insurance. We need maps of the best commuter routes, and people demanding more support from local and state authorities. Tell us where to eat, and where to sleep, if we’re trying to go between cities, not just between suburbs?
The needs of E-Transport are different from those of bikes. It covers a wide range of products, not just e-bikes. It means recumbent bikes, cargo bikes, e-trikes, motorized chairs, scooters, and many other things we haven’t even seen yet.
Someone needs to stand for us.
