https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/88q54x/america-has-an-e-bike-problem-that-cant-be-solved-with-more-e-bikes

On Wednesday, The Atlantic published an article by Ian Bogost (a writer, game designer, and Director of Film and Media Studies at Washington University of St. Louis) about e-bikes. The gist of Bogost’s take is that he bought an e-bike, which is a bigger, heavier bicycle with a motor and battery, and feels weird about it. He says e-bikes have an “identity crisis” because they do not fit within any neatly defined buckets in American transportation and therefore don’t pass on any identity to their users.

The article was widely panned on Twitter, mostly by the usual pro-bike, pro-active streets, anti-car constituency. To be clear, I am a member of that constituency; I bike and walk and take public transportation everywhere (I do not tweet, though). However, I broadly agree with Bogost’s general point about e-bikes, but for entirely different reasons.