[lclarkberg]

It’s great to see this thread. Ebikes are a complex topic. I don’t know if anyone’s still listening, but I’m both an avid ebiker and and an avid cargo biker and I can offer my own experience. I live in Ithaca New York. It’s very hilly here, so a practical cargo bike pretty much requires an electric motor. Of course I get still get the occasional athletic (as opposed to utility) bicyclist telling me I’m “cheating” until they see I am carrying a 100-pound child and four bags of groceries on my bike.

Regarding CCrew’s post about whether an ebike is more or less environmental than a solely human-powered bike, the answer is not so simple if you take into account the calories burned by the human. Here’s an analysis that shows that the ebike is more efficient in certain scenarios.
http://www.ebikes.ca/faq.shtml#quiz8

Regarding ronwalf’s post about limiting the speed of an ebike electronically: this is common. My bike is limited to the legal speed of 20mph by the Cycle Analyst computer on my handlebars. I really like this and I wish I had one for my car! In fact, I wish everyone had one for all of our cars. Most ebikes’ speeds are limited out-of-the-box by their low power. I’ve doubled the power of my bike so that I can climb hills, and the ability to go fast is an unfortunate by-product of that. So I need the Cycle Analyst to limit my speed. Most ebikes wouldn’t even need that. You can read more about my bike on my blog at:
http://bikeforth.org/about-my-bike-2/

Regarding whether ebikes should be allowed on trails: I think we need to restrict the behavior, not the type of vehicle. If someone is riding dangerously certainly restrict that behavior. I wonder if people are imagining some hairy ebiker tearing up the trail at 30mph. My own experience is that ebikers are car-lite dads like me, or administrators like my wife who need to commute up the hill to Cornell without getting sweaty, or kids like mine who have a few hills to traverse on the way to school.

[Author]

Posts