Spend enough time reading the news and you’d be forgiven for thinking e-bikes are society’s newest menace. Every week seems to bring another headline about reckless teenagers weaving through traffic, riders flying down sidewalks, battery fires, or politicians introducing bills to crack down on electric bicycles.
Those stories are real, and coming up on two decades of covering the e-bike industry, I’ve written about many of those issues. But with that experience, including riding hundreds of e-bike models and countless thousands upon thousands of miles on electric bikes around the world, I can’t help but feel that we’ve lost sight of the bigger picture.
