There’s one glorious reason my kids and I love our e-bike

Death machines! Unlicensed! Unregulated! Basically a motorbike! These criticisms are lobbed daily at e-bikes, the slicker and faster versions of the pushbike of yore, which have swarmed Sydney’s streets and stopped every barbecue at which they are mentioned.

Critics, of course, have a point. Teenagers pushing 50km/h on suburban footpaths as they whizz past toddlers on trikes and people on walkers are a common sight, as are bikes overloaded with three bikini-clad selfie-takers boasting not a helmet between them.

Last month, a 38-year-old driver allegedly ran over a child on his bike after a road-rage incident. Scores of riders are injured every week. Some have died. Pedestrians are rightly scared, parents rightly concerned, teenagers rightly unbothered, and governments across the country grappling with exactly how to regulate.

A minimum age for e-bike riders – the NSW government is considering following Queensland’s lead – is a good idea. A crackdown on overpowered or modified bikes (in NSW and Victoria, pedal assist must cut out at 25km/h) is another. So is enforcement of helmet-wearing. Seizing and crushing bikes that don’t meet the state’s definition of a pedal-assisted e-bike? We’ll see.

In short, there’s much to dislike. But have the haters considered how much fun you can have on an e-bike?

Before our cargo bike landed at the front door on Christmas Day, mornings at my place were a dreary, carbon-emissions-powered slog with the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack on repeat across three suburbs before I could even consider my own commute.

Over the course of an hour, I would jam my children into their car seats with an unedifying combination of threats and bribes that demeaned all of us. I would sit at traffic lights, slow to a crawl for school zones and, given the mad contest of parents on drop-off duty, end up parking closer to my house than the school gate. Then I’d burn some more fossil fuels to get to the next suburb and do it all over again at daycare.

No more! Instead of a hermetically sealed medium SUV insulating us against the world, we are part of that world on our e-bike – questioning why the local creek smells so bad (best guess is illegal industrial dumping), waving at drivers who stop to let us across the road, feeling every bump and crack along the poorly maintained local bike path.

As the weather changes and cool finally gets a grip on Sydney, we will don gloves and scarves; in summer, a quick ride to the beach after school rights all the world’s wrongs.

Riding an e-bike, says the 62-year-old man who sold me mine, is like becoming a teenager again. You fly along, the wind in your hair, so many pedestrian adult problems left in your slipstream. Traffic doesn’t exist in the bike lane. Ages does not weary you, for a motor will propel you uphill. The cost of fuel can’t touch you. And no need, whenever you run out of milk, to negotiate concrete pillars and snakes of trolleys in fumy shopping centre carparks.

The explosion of e-bikes locally has also been good for bicycle riders and pedestrians. Now drivers must always be alert to the possibility of a nearby bike, forcing them to slow down, to pay more attention.

E-biking has, of course, many limits – principally, that I forget to charge it with a monotony that would embarrass an amnesiac. And, still, pushing up even a slight incline is … punishing. If it’s rained, a slippery road is a literal fast track to your groceries, mobile phone and humiliated self splaying across the tarmac. Sitting on the back of our particular bike, if you are over the age of about six, is an undignified jam of knees into the armpits.

But for the time you’re on the bike – for me, 40 minutes of school dropping off instead of an hour – you’re flying. And there’s no K-pop.

Sally Rawsthorne is The Sydney Morning Herald’s higher education reporter.

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