Green Bike is here!

Green Bike is a Giant (brand name) Suede (model name) electric-assist bicycle. I call it Green Bike because it’s green (in color) and its environmental credentials are second only to those of conventional bikes. The electric motor provides about two-thirds of the juice and recharges for a few cents. I provide the rest of the juice and recharge for a buck or two, unless I’m feeling like steak or lobster. (But have you ever seen a lobster riding a bike?)

Over the coming weeks or months, I’m going to be posting now and then on my daily experience using an ebike for commuting, errands and recreation. For now, I’ll just say that the photo above is a brief history of my personal transportation over the last six months. The Diesel truck was purchased almost entirely to pull my wife’s horse trailer and our small travel trailer. It gets about ten miles per gallon around town, and I used it more than I wanted to get to my part-time job teaching a couple of classes at Klamath Community College, to go shopping, and to run errands.

When gas prices spiked late last winter, I started riding my motorcycle, a Honda VFR 800. It’s fun to ride the bike, and I admit I felt a little show-off pride when students would admire my zippy sport bike. Still, the Honda gets only about 30 mph around town, and I didn’t like riding it short distances and using the clutch so much for stop and go driving. I’ve always ridden motorcycles for recreation, not transportation.

So I was looking around for options. I thought seriously about a scooter but rejected those because they cost more than I wanted to spend. I also think they’re unsafe because they’re not fast enough to keep up even in city traffic.

As often happens these days, snooping around on the web led me to what I wanted. I’m feeling a lot like PeeWee and looking forward to my Big Adventure. At the moment, I think I might be the luckiest kid in the world. A month or two into winter, though, we'll see what happens when Green Bike tries to make it in Real World.

Stick around for more about how an ebike works and how things go. Right now, I’ve got some errands to run.