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#[1]Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer
[2]About Craig
[3]Books & [4]Essays
[5]Talks
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Header image for Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life
Electric Bike, Stupid Love of My Life
Reflections on eighteen months of electric bike ownership
My electric bike sings, emits a nearly imperceptible hum from its tiny
motor. I love its song. A song of peace and magic. Has money ever
bought as much delight as the delight of an electric bike?
The first time I rode one was nearly a decade ago, in Kyoto. The
electric bike I rented was huge and unwieldy, but that tug of its motor
never left my mind. I went to climb a hill and it felt as if a giant
had gently placed his hand on my back and pushed me forward. That
stupid smile has been on my face ever since.
Two years ago I rented another one. This one smaller, lighter, the
motor more powerful. I was convinced. This is the way. Eighteen months
ago, in the heart of the pandemic, I committed and bought my first
electric bike and have never looked back.
__________________________________________________________________
Indulge me — a summer afternoon: Soaring down the coast, the ocean to
one side and a strand of old pines to the other. The afternoon sun
beats down but it feels cool and there’s something irrationally
stirring — downright emotional — about the efficiency of this dumb
machine beneath my body. The motor looks too small — just a black
cylinder on the hub of the wheel. And yet it moves. It sings that song.
A subtle hum. A beautiful hum. It makes me want to ride and ride,
ridiculous distances, nonsensical distances. I don’t want to get to
where I’m going because I want the ride to last longer. I want to
linger in this space as long as possible, this space of smooth and
efficient movement through the world, gliding in near total mechanical
silence, just the sound of rubber on the pavement, wind in my ears,
breaking waves, salt, the smell of pine. This is what electric bikes
do: They drive you insane with the poetry of the world.
__________________________________________________________________
A strange trio A few of my old bikes: A mamachari, carbon fiber road
bike, and Kalavinka
[13]#So Many Bikes
All my standing life, I’ve biked. As a kid I rode a K-Mart Huffy to a
rusted nub and then managed to nab a Haro Group 1. As an adult, bikes
have been one of my few material indulgences (unwittingly,
organically). In the past twenty years alone I’ve owned some fifteen
bikes. I’ve had aluminum and carbon Bianchi road bikes. I’ve had steel
Kalavinka keirin bikes with gorgeous head badges. I’ve had folding
Dahon and Birdy BD-1s. I’ve had a handful of beloved brandless
throwaway mamacharis — shopping bikes — that have proven hearty and fun
in their own ways, and have each died uniquely. I’ve gone out of my way
to get a handmade Arrow cruiser from a builder in Ogikubo. I still have
a custom orange Moulton that I’ve modified into a single-speed city
bomber that goes remarkably fast while floating atop its simple
suspension.
And on and on — bikes. Why? Because as any bike lover will tell you, to
be ensorcelled by the bike is to crave one and only one thing: More
bike. Each new bike is like riding once again for the first time.
Exploring a city on a mamachari is different than a BD-1 is different
than a Moulton. All thrilling. The bikes change, and so, too does your
relationship to the pavement. My love for bikes has no categorical
allegiances; if it has two wheels, and pedals, I’m interested. I want
to ride them all.
A Moulton Tiny, but fast, nearly flawless as a city machine — a Moulton
with converted stem, Sugino cranks, coaster brake
__________________________________________________________________
Summers in most of Japan have never been easy. The temperatures England
flirted with in 2022 are temperatures Tokyoites have contended with for
centuries (and now contend with ones even higher). Crushing heat
coupled with suffocating humidity. A three-shower-a-day kinda summer.
Watch an Ozu film and observe the languid and supine impulse of its
inhabitants during summertime scenes — that’s not affect, it’s
survival. In Japan’s August, you simply can’t walk a block without
losing most of your moisture.
Bikes have always helped. A bicycle generates a microclimate with
minimal effort. Standing on a street corner you may be soaked, but on a
bike, the wind whooshing past, you are crisp(er) and dry(er). An
electric bike only amplifies the effect.
When I was a child I dreamt of having a personal helicopter. Powered by
my feet and a bit of magic (certainly not gasoline, oddly, thinking
back on it now). I imagined quietly gliding over the city in this tiny
contraption, floating from home to video rental shop to diner, stopping
by a friend’s house along the way. An electric bike gets me most of the
way to this feeling.
In the past eighteen months I’ve put several thousand kilometers on my
electric bikes. It feels like cheating in every best possible way. I
live in a seaside town south of Tokyo and traffic can get ridiculous,
its ancient roads sized for horses, not cars. The electric bike swoops
between and alongside these stale processions of heat and burning fuel.
Drifting behind a gas-powered scooter or moped feels like observing
some Victorian contraption — inefficient and loud and clunky and
burdensome and pollutant. And not much faster (often much slower) or
more useful than an electric bike.
__________________________________________________________________
A Vanmoof and a BESV My friend's S3 and my BESV (the X3 looks like a
slightly smaller version of the S3)
[14]#Electrics
I own two electric bikes. My first purchase was the strangely named
BESV PSA1 — which is a smaller wheeled (20"), rear-wheel drive machine,
with mostly off-the-shelf components allowing you to customize it to
your liking. ^[15]1 And then, because I was so enamored by the BESV —
so seduced by its small motor of umph, so wanting more and different
electric bike experiences — I went and picked up a front-wheel drive
Vanmoof X3 — the smaller-wheeled brother (24") to Vanmoof’s (quite
frankly) giant S3 — just a few months later.
I love them both like damaged brothers, because both of these bikes are
flawed in frustrating ways.
The electronic brain on the BESV is as dumb as they come.^[16]2 The
settings reset each time you turn the bike on. The acceleration curves
feel unrefined — herky-jerky, you might say. Its app is the worst app I
have on my phone — badly designed, nearly functionally useless, clearly
engineered without love. And yet. Despite these flaws I put hundreds of
kilometers on this thing in the first month. The front and rear
suspension turn every road to glass, and are even fine for dirt trails;
I find myself hunting down paths through parks I’d never otherwise
think about. Suddenly every hilly road is a thing demanding to be
explored. Up up up the little machine yells, and you follow its
command.
Guests who stay at my studio are given the BESV to ride. We take it
down the coast. It never fails to amaze. One friend felt compelled to
pet it upon dismount, saying, Good job, buddy, so quick and deep was
the affection for the thing.
The Vanmoof is much smarter — the brain and software within it are
refined, the app good, the acceleration curves smooth — but the bike is
all custom components, and they aren’t the highest quality at that. The
automatic shifting mechanism on mine failed twice in the first two
months, requiring shipping the bike to the Vanmoof store.^[17]3 The
seat post bolt broke off in the post. The original plastic pedals felt
cheap and flimsy (pedals are one of the few things you can swap for
your own). The aluminum frame is too stiff for the speed the bike
generates — it can feel like you’ve been rattled to death after a bumpy
road. (And stiffness mitigation by lowering tire pressure seems to only
increase possibility of puncture.) But, more than all that, the design
of the bike has a dangerous fundamental flaw: The bottom bracket is
simply too low.
Of all my many, many bikes, I’ve never had a pedal bottom out. On this
Vanmoof X3? Dozens of times. Most critically during a turn at speed —
the pedal hit the pavement, jumped the bike sideways, and sent me
flying. It’s the only bad crash I’ve had in decades. So I’ve had to
modify the way I ride — no pedaling into or out of turns, hyper
awareness of deviations in lateral road slope — because, despite all
this, I can’t stop riding this stupid thing. It sings — that hum. It is
joy. I reach for it daily and it takes me around the peninsula and
makes me happy to be alive.
__________________________________________________________________
BESV @ Lee's Bread, Oiso I've written about three electric bike rides
for Papersky Magazine: Misaki, Oiso, and Yokosuka.
Allow me to share a dirty secret: More often than not, at midnight I
can’t repress the impulse — I have to take a bike out. Out the bike
comes and together we head into the empty streets of my town and hum
our way all over, visiting temples in total silence. There are no cars.
Often no people. It feels illicit — this slipping around town, this
sliding into temple parking lots in the shroud of the night, looking at
their old beams, feeling ten years old and grateful for both the
ability and awareness to be doing just this very thing at this very
moment.
__________________________________________________________________
I’ve long since posited world peace could be achieved if you bought
everyone in the world a bike, but now I want those bikes to be
electric. I want everyone to feel this silliness, this punch-drunk
stupidity of pure love, this sense of cheating the rules, the norms,
this sense of ever-present delight. At our worst, humans mindlessly
consume, sear the earth and each other, fill our bodies with poisons.
At our best we invent electric bikes. Batteries have gotten more
efficient, motors smaller and more powerful. The last decade has
brought great efficiency to these machines, and the next ten years will
only double down on these gains. Electric bike numbers are up, year
over year over year. Tremendously so. Those who know, proselytize. We
can’t help it. The charm is too great. The game non- zero sum. The more
people who know, the better the world. It’s a wild notion, this sense
of goodness to be had if you just reach out for it. Goodness with no
real downside. Like solar panels or wind turbines, electric bikes are
machines that buoy the spirit and the earth.
__________________________________________________________________
Buy the best electric bike you can within your budget. Stretch if
possible. Usually, the more you spend the lighter the machine, the more
powerful the motor, the longer-lasting the battery. Depending on which
country you live in top speeds will differ. In Japan the bike’s are
capped at 24km/h. In America, 32km/h. Some places only allow for
pedal-assist — meaning the motor only works when pedaling. Others allow
throttles, blurring the line between bike and scooter. Laws will change
in the coming years as more people adopt the machines and cities
themselves adapt. This is just the start. Ten years ago it was fairly
rare to see an electric bike around Tokyo. Today, it seems as if every
parent hauling their kids is doing so electrically.
A good strategy: Find a local bike shop that will let you try out
several electric bikes. Some have front-hub motors, others rear-hub
motors. Others, the motor sits in the center, between the cranks. Each
has a subtly different feel. Going up a hill, a front-motor’d machine
may skip or slip as you pull back on the handlebars, but on flat land
will feel more like being tugged through the world.
Sure, electric bikes aren’t cheap. But I believe they’re a rare object
to be well worth the cost. This in spite of their annoying flaws, their
often bad software, their defective geometries. Because they open the
world. Whatever world may have been nearby, an electric bike brings it
nearer. This is worth more than you might estimate. These bikes sing
their little songs and the smile on your face makes you look like a
village idiot, but what a wonderful idiot to be.
__________________________________________________________________
A summer night: Biking home alongside a river. The air is thick with
humidity and cicadas vibrate wildly in the distance. The moon is out.
My choices: straight home along the shimmering moonlit river, or take a
detour, up into the dark mountains, doubling the distance. To my
surprise, I choose the mountains almost every time. More! That tiny
child who fantasized about helicopters yells. More of this, whatever
this is. More more more. And so I feed that impulse, an impulse
generated and nurtured by the electric bike. Into the shadow mountains
we go, up, pushed by the hand of that giant, always present, always
ready to help. It is a ridiculous thing. A thing of peace and magic. An
owl hoots. The smile has never left my face.
__________________________________________________________________
[18]#Noted:
__________________________________________________________________
1. I upgraded my BESV to an SRAM drivetrain and Paul brake levers and
Klamper disc calipers, some MKS pedals, and a set of Brooks grips
and saddle and it feels wonderful through and through. These Paul
Klampers are mechanical. The Vanmoof uses (generic?) hydraulic
brakes. After thousands of kilometers, my conclusion is: hydraulics
feel nice, but they are fussy (and perhaps Vanmoof’s chosen
components are sub-optimal) and difficult (?) to tune on your own.
In the end, I just don’t think they’re worth it. Too “delicate.”
The Pauls feel as fresh today as the day I put them on, whereas the
hydraulics have required much bikeshop tuning over the course of
the last eighteen months. Were the Vanmoof more flexible, I’d
happily swap out for mechanicals. This lack of flexibility is a
bummer because, unlike an Apple iPhone, for example, where the
components tend to be best of class (think: modem, CPU, camera
unit, etc), the physical components on a Vanmoof most definitely
aren’t — nor do they offer the option to pay more to get better
components. [19]↩︎
2. Oh, how I wish this thing was open source, hackable — because it’s
so close to great. Sadly — and I don’t know how else to frame this
— it feels like the engineers behind the software don’t ride bikes.
At least not this one. The software flaws are so fundamentally
obvious, that anyone who had a) access to the code, and b) rode the
bike, couldn’t NOT fix these obvious issues. What I really wish,
though, is that I could slap the Vanmoof brain onto the BESV body
and, well, then we’d be in Electric Bike Elysium. [20]↩︎
3. I’ve since learned — the drive train of the Vanmoof is not to be
“ridden” like a “bike” but rather, “feathered” like a delicate sand
castle — assume the gears could explode at any moment and apply the
least amount of pressure you can; the motor is strong enough to
take care of most of the rest. In this way, the Vanmoof feels more
like a moped that uses “pedal assist” as a suggestion than a pure
electric-assist bike — a smart way to get around motorcycle laws in
most countries, which I assume is the main point. Not to say you
don’t get a workout on the Vanmoof, you do, but not nearly as much
as the more classically committed BESV — which really does require
you to pedal.
Maybe this is a good place to bring up the question: Why not just
get an electric scooter? I think it mainly comes down to
flexibility and philosophy. With a pedal assist bike (even if the
pedaling required is minimal) you simply have more flexibility in
parking, in riding, in “lightness” of transportation, than with an
electric scooter. Also: Insurance costs, maintenance, and higher
base cost. And philosophically, being able to still use the bike as
a “bike” without power feels like an aspect of these machines we
shouldn’t be so quick to toss aside. [21]↩︎
This essay, published September 2022. Thoughts? Email
[22]me@craigmod.com.
[23]Craig Mod, his head, floating at the bottom of the article
[24]Craig Mod is a writer and photographer based in Japan. He's the
author of [25]Kissa by Kissa and a MacDowell, Ragdale, and VCCA writing
fellow. His essays and articles have appeared in Eater, The Atlantic,
California Sunday Magazine, Wired, Aeon, New Scientist, Virginia
Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Morning News,
Codex: Journal of Typography, and elsewhere. He writes newsletters, oh
yes, [26]newsletters: [27]Roden & [28]Ridgeline.
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