[rdubz]

(post author here )

"Better bike infrastructure" and "a bit of pedal assist" are both good things that we need more of.

Even in the best possible future, I believe cycling in US cities will involve some amount of mixing with cars for the rest of my natural life (unfortunately!), so I'm not sure "completely bogus if…" is fair.

And anyway, a little extra speed is still useful because it's transportation.

Here's a fun thought experiment: define "places I can go" as "the locus of points within 1hr bike ride of a train station." If e-bikes let me go 50% faster (say, avg 15mph instead of 10mph), that multiplies the accessible area around each train station by 2.25x! I can go more than twice as many places now!