ebikeblog.org

Ah, ebikeblog, how I have abandoned you for months! Does anyone even remember this was here? I have not been out riding my eBike for some time – Melbourne, while a lovely city to live in, has inspired a lot of inertia as far as cycling is concerned. I guess living in the CBD has meant walking almost everywhere – why get the bike out if  I will walk there in less than 20 minutes?

But, ah – now times are a’changing, and I’m about to relocate to the most eco-friendly city in the Asia-Pacific region – Wellington.

Not only this – but Wellington is a city of many hills! So of course, a challenge for the old  eZee Torq – with a slightly ailing battery, we’ll see how she goes. Fortunately adding a bike to one’s luggage allowance gives you an extra 10kg – the eZee Torq weighs a hefty 22kg, so I’m going to need that!

Look out for (hopefully) a few more posts soon on how my ride takes the ups and downs of Welly!

Treehugger has just posted a comparison of the eBike with the eScooter – and to make it a fair fight, they’re talking low speed eScooters, not Vectrix-type dealies. To be honest it’s a bit of a no-brainer – 25kg vs over 100kg weight for a start, and vastly bigger battery packs on the eScooter. Read the verdict over here – but you can guess what I was expecting, right?

c/o the BBC: UK Supermarket chain Waitrose has begun a small pilot program with four stores for groceries purchased online to be delivered by electric-assist cargo bikes.  The bikes can carry up to 6 trays of groceries and keep food frozen for 2 hours. While the bikes will only be doing a small portion of deliveries the store makes, it’s a step in the right direction and the store will not need to purchase any new delivery vehicles for the time being – with any luck this will be the way they’ll continue to grow their delivery fleet!

Full story and video available here.

So, last week I had to do a bunch of ticket distribution as well as flyer and poster drops for an event we’re holding for NYE – Euchronia. Turns out the absolutely best possible vehicle for such a task [visiting half a dozen inner city suburbs within 3-4 hours, total distance around 25km, frequent stopping and traveling along busy commercial streets with many shops and much foot traffic] is my trusty eBike! Bit windy out [as my chapped lips attest] but the job was made easy with my eBike, and headwinds didn’t deter me in the slightest. There will be more poster runs in future, and I’m looking forward to them!

Saw this, and had to share:

Lady is the Boss – Bicycle fight!

Lately I’ve been using my eZtorq to head up to Fitzroy once every week or two. It’s a nice easy route, and faster than any other means at my disposal. Also cheaper, and just generally awesome. It’s almost a shame I don’t need to travel more often but I’m quite happy knowing my carbon footprint is as low as it possibly could be for my daily travel requirements!

We went a visiting to CERES today! It was the first outing for my eZee Torq having only just got heem back yesterday, and even with the long hiatus, battery charged fine and I didn’t even come close to running out, even going back via Merri creek and stopping in at FOE on the way home.

At Ceres, Chris had a bit of a look around the bike shed area, then we went and had a lovely lunch – there wasn’t a huge rmenu but the salad and the gluten free orange & poppy seed cake + bush chai were all great. My salad looking delicious:

But Chris looked a little alarmed by his muffin:

Got asked by one of the staff about my tshirt, and had to provide a business card, heh. Then we went wandering, and I took many photos:

I then went and bought a bunch of seedlings at the Nursery, we wandered back down past the hoardes of chilluns, and then all loaded up zee bike, we chuffed off back to the city, via the Merri trail, though the way was confusing at times and we ended up having to go up stairs at one point. Oops. Of course, we had to stop for photo ops along the way:

Here’s a pic of Chris’ Brompton Folder “at rest”:

and ready to roll [it’s really neat the way it just flips over!]

and finally here’s me and my eZee Torq [not the most flattering pic of me ever, but eh]:

And then, just when I thought we were almost in the city, we came upon the Collingwood Children’s Farm which I had no idea was there! It was delightfully green, and very traditional farm vibe, almost a little too tidy and pristine, like Switzerland (if you’ve ever been there, you’ll know what I mean). Must go back for one of the Farmer’s Markets there or the Convent next door, as well as a nice breakfast at the Cafe [nom]. I have to say, the food at Ceres will be hard to beat.

So there, that was our Adventure. It was neat. I am hoping to do more eBiking rides in future. If you can suggest any good rides in Melbourne, please do!

Well, I finally got back in the saddle for a couple of days: I’m still lacking a functioning ebike in Melbourne, as one was damaged in transit from Perth, and the other I am still waiting for, apparently battery is dead, been waiting a while, but because my partner is not a keen cyclist [quite the opposite, alas] I have not as much motivation to be riding.

But being in Perth alone for a week, I have got my spare bike off my friend who’d been minding it for a few months, charged up the batteries, and … realised they needed to be charged extra after being stored for a while. Let that be a warning to you if you’re getting your bike out of storage!

My next day’s ride was unfortunately marred by a breaking chain – it’s the chain drive bike, and the chain had stretched quite a lot, so I wasn’t surprised at this development, just disappointed, as I have only 2 more days here and don’t really have time to get it fixed before I leave.

I really enjoyed the couple of trips when everything was working well, but it’s been frustrating to have things pretty much constantly be wrong with my bikes. I have three: none of the now currently functional. All I want is to ride my bike. *sigh*

Here’s hoping I can get one bike sorted in Melbourne soon: I want to be able to ride out to Brunswck at the very least, it’s only 5km from where I live, and an ebike is *much* faster than the tram!

I don’t make frivolous posts often here, actually, this may be the first time. But this page on the “Starlight 78 Bicycle Lighting System” is quite hilarious. NSFW. Yes, really. Beware all the nekkid womens.

As mentioned in my last post, I decided to buy a Trikke. It arrived a couple of weeks ago, and it took me at least a week to find a day dry enough to ride it home from work – we’ve had a ton of rain here! I’m glad I didn’t just take it out for a short spin instead though, because I think without giving this little HPV a bit of time, I would have given up. I’ve now done two trips to and from the city and an afternoon’s riverfront casual riding with friends on rollerblades. It’s a neat little toy, nowhere near as efficient as good rollerblades or a bicycle, and certainly not as energy efficient as an ebike by a long shot – yet a really fun experience once you become accustomed to the very different motion; more like ski-ing than anything else, though I’ve yet to ski it definitely looks similar. It’s not got the freedom or the reach of rollerblades, at least, the smaller [and cheaper] Trikke6 I decided to go for didn’t. I imagine the bigger models may have better gliding capability – this one I got for a steal on eBay though, and may consider buying a bigger one in future, especially if I can find one cheaper than the standard $400 odd dollars…

Here’s a tiny video I just uploaded to youtube, to give you an idea what fun we had on Saturday:

And because this post has had very little ebike content, I should mention that I needed to have my rear wheel respoked by Chris a few weeks back. The spoking pattern put in initially wasn’t as strong as it could be, and the new pattern hopefully will be much more robust. The GL-2 is a hefty motor though, and because of its shape, is a bit trickier to spoke than motors with a smaller diameter. Here’s pic of Chris respoking:

I am looking forward to getting out and about tomorrow, I’ve been a lazy thing about fixing a puncture: my least favourite bike job, even though it’s not really that hard I will procrastinate for far too long if I have other transport options available.

So rode down to Fremantle today to see my accountant. Had planned to ride back via a supplier on the south side of the river and visit a friend but the accountant took so long I ran out of time.

Nearing Fremantle I rode past not one, but two, petrol powered bikes, they had stickers on them and I got the impression they may have been hired, but I was in a hurry so didn’t stop to ask. I got to Fremantle in about 4.5 AH, and in about 40 minutes from the CBD [20km distance= average speed 30kph, which means I must have been cruising at around 35 to account for traffic lights & other stops/slowdowns]. Not bad eh! 🙂

On the way home I managed to run into a guy on the corner of Barrack St waiting for the lights to change who had an old currie chain drive [I think?] on his rear wheel. Hi random ebiker if you are reading! [I gave my blog details ;)]

Not only that, but who should ride into view just as we were chatting? Chris! He had a replacement charger for me too, so it was a most fortuitous and exciting meeting – there are so few ebikers in Perth still, and it’s truly exciting meeting any others randomly. I complained about the petrol powered bikes, and lamented the difficulty of getting friends to even borrow a bike to see what they’re like. But we are agreed that electric bikes are aaaaaalmost at that critical point of becoming adopted widely in western countries 🙂 We just have to get people to try them!