Aside: The Camberville E-Bike Lending Library

2023 November 16

This is a good week for a bit of a fluffy post: I’ve been really busy with the first full week of DASCH photographic plate scanning, restarting after a 2.5-year hiatus and nearly an entire year of preparatory work! More on that soon. In the meantime, something non-academic: an extremely stereotypical “E-bikes!” post. I have approximately zero novel observations to offer, but I at least want to make sure that any e-bike-curious people in the Boston area know about the Camberville E-bike Lending Library.

The lending library is a free, not-for-profit operation run by basically one person, Christopher Schmidt. As far as I can tell he just loves e-bikes and wants to make sure that anyone who wants to try one has the chance, and he’s doing a great job of that! Through the library I was able to borrow a RadBikes RadCity 3 for a whole week. I believe that there are bike shops that will let you borrow one for a few hours, but it felt super helpful to be able to try it out over a longer period of time and feel out the best route for my commute, etc.

Pretty much everyone that I’ve ever interacted with who’s tried riding e-bikes has been an instant convert. No suspense here: me too. It’s worth emphasizing, though, that really my only use case is commuting, and my particular commute turns out to be a nearly perfect fit for the e-bike lifestyle.

The quantifiables are as follows. My baseline is a bus commute, taking the 71 from Watertown to Harvard, with ~10-minute walks on both ends. I budget about 45 minutes to get in, not counting how I might delay my departure to sync up with the bus schedule. Overall, it’s OK, but it takes longer than I’d like and unpredictable delays from traffic and MBTA snafus can be unpleasant. For instance, I generally try to head home from work either before 4:45, or after 6:30, because rush hour out of Cambridge is just that gnarly.

For reference, Google Maps tells me that a door-to-door drive in light traffic would be something like 17 minutes. At rush hour, the drive can take 30 minutes or more, and the overall experience is deeply unpleasant: long stretches of stop-and-go traffic that put you and everyone else in a bad mood.

With the RadCity on my preferred route, my commute came in at 22–25 minutes in cold but dry weather, with traffic being basically a non-factor. One discovery that had nothing to do with the “e-” part of the bike: I really didn’t appreciate the quality of some of the new(-ish) bike infrastructure near me. The Watertown-Cambridge Greenway takes the subjective feeling of my bike commute route from “not worth it” (I’m only willing to bike down Mt. Auburn St. when it’s completely empty, and even then it’s not exactly pleasant) to “simply delightful”. I can get onto the Greenway from my house using safe-feeling residential streets, and I can get from the Greenway to the CfA along the comparably safe-feeling bike lanes of Huron Ave. I’m really glad that Watertown and Cambridge are investing in this kind of infrastructure — and really angry at John Forester and the vehicular cycling ideology, who probably set American cycling infrastructure back decades while also getting a good number of people literally killed. That’s not hyperbole.

As for the “e-” part of the bike, it was pretty much exactly what I expected. Yes, the motor can help you get up a hill or maintain speed on a straightaway without having to put any real effort in. And, yes, it can be incredibly helpful! Not literally but emotionally it felt like both directions of my commute were gentle downhills — pedal as hard as you feel like, old chap, we’ll make good time. The battery can also power bright lights that make nighttime biking feel comparatively safe.

Now, I follow professional cycling enough to instantly associate bikes with suffering, and there’s a large part of me that can’t shake the feeling that this is all, somehow, cheating. But while I wouldn’t want to say that a feeling can be wrong … stepping back, it’s as close to that as feelings can get. In some circumstances, it matters where a bike’s power is coming from, and in other circumstances, it doesn’t. When it doesn’t, let’s not judge, not even ourselves. There’s nothing more to be said.

All in all, I got exactly what I wanted out of my e-bike borrowing experience — it really helped to have plenty of time to get a feel for what it would be like own one. Since I know a lot of e-bike evangelists, the bigger revelation for me was less about the experience of riding one and more about the infrastructure that Watertown and Cambridge have started building. For my particular commute, the electric support turns the bike from a nice mode of transit to the hands-down best one. As things currently stand, I’m not sure what could beat the combination of the segregated bikeway — allowing me to sidestep rush-hour congestion — and power support — removing the “man I really don’t feel like grinding up this hill right now” factor. (No, it won’t be the best option in the middle of a blizzard or if I need to pick up some 2×4’s on the way home, but I’d guess that the bike would work well for something like 90% of my commute days.) So, big thanks not only to Chris for operating the Camberville E-bike Lending Library, but also to the politicians of Watertown and Cambridge for making the paths.