Racing hard, or hardly racing?

 There's a long, steep hill to climb from "better than average" to "one of the best." Anyone who has tried to race knows this.

The rider is both driver and engine. These two functions operate separately more than you might realize. The pilot knows what should be done, but the machine doesn't always provide it.

"Scotty, I need more power!"

"She's givin' all she's got, Cap'n'! If I try to get more out of her she'll explode!"

Nothing feels better than digging deep and finding what you need. If you choose your companions right, you can have that feeling from your teens all the way to your 60s, perhaps older. It's all relative, of course. I'll be riding to work after a couple of days' rest, feeling pretty spry because I'm pushing the big ring and down around mid-cassette in the back. Then I do the math and realize I'm pushing what was my early season lowest gear in the 1980s.

The reflex to attack never goes away. The ability to do so definitely diminishes. So far, however, I have been able to exploit terrain, wind, and the scavenged draft of passing vehicles to meet the most immediate desires, like making a green light at the only traffic light on my commute, or sticking an elbow into the flow on Center Street inbound to work.

The sight of another rider sparks that hunting instinct. In an individual time trial, a competitor chases the clock, but also anyone who started earlier in the queue. In a road race, riders make their attacks and others chase. This can go on for miles. In short-course races the same thing happens on a smaller scale. The snake eats its own tail as the attackers thread through the stragglers. Officials will pull slow riders from a short course, just to clear up the clutter. I hated short courses and was usually pulled.

Racing balances a paradox: to be competitive, you have to go to the edge of everything: traction, strength, endurance, power, fear, without losing control and taking out a bunch of other riders. If you seem erratic, out of your depth, other riders might actively seek to weed you out. Sometimes, they would do it anyway just because some of them decided that you didn't belong with them. You have to risk everything without looking like you're risking anything. Push the margins of control without revealing that you're at the margins of control.

Over time I discovered that I didn't like racing as much as I liked training, and that I didn't like actual structured training as much as I liked just riding how I felt on a given day. Racing was too disciplined and becoming increasingly scientific, not to mention expensive. That's only gotten worse.

There are more than 50 distinct shapes of disc brake pad, not including ones that have already been discontinued. There are several different pad compounds, which might be described in different ways, such as: metal, metal ceramic, metallic, semi-metallic, organic, resin, or sintered. Some brake rotors can only take resin pads. But good luck finding a quality bike with rim brakes anymore. Everyone assumes that disc brakes are entirely superior in all respects. So what happens if you're out in East Bumfleck and you need a pad shape that the local shop doesn't have? Hope that Amazon drone delivery can find you? Stock up on pads and make sure they're always with you? People with electronic shifting go on trips and leave their chargers at home. You think most of them will remember to have brake pads in their kit? And that's only a fraction of the complication and expense. In general, a racer will be out there flinging around a bike that cost anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000, come what may.

As Lance had ghost-written for himself in the 1990s, it's not about the bike. But the bike is the machine that extends our capability and desire into motion. Racing eats people and equipment. You can't refuse technology and remain competitive among real racers really racing. And among the dubs and dilettantes you are even less safe. Those riders are liable to blow up at an inopportune time, like the middle of a tight corner, a crowded field sprint, or a twisty descent. Or maybe it's you who blows up.

Heart rate lags behind effort: you launch the sprint and the old ticker might not hit full bpms until you've leveled off. Pain lags behind effort: you attack that climb or push the pace because you feel good, and the legs feel like lead the next day. Each day of the commuting week gets harder anyway, because the demands of traffic management and hilly terrain make it impossible to avoid some level of destructive exertion. The commuting life is a stage race.

Riding alone, I get to choose when to let up. As soon as another rider is on my wheel, I can't slow down when I feel like it, because I might be that guy who sits up and takes out a whole paceline, or blows out of his line in a corner and sends the riders outside of him over the median.

A rider ahead presents a different prospect. It's fun to chase them down -- if you can -- but then like the proverbial dog, what do you do when you've caught the car? When I see another rider on my commute, I'll close distance to see if I know them, but if I don't it gets awkward. If I've caught them, it's because they're going slower than I want to go. To maintain my pace to work, I need to pass them. But then I look like the old fart on a heavy bike trying to prove a point. I'm not, really. I'm just trying to be on time to work, or get home for a shower and supper. 

A couple of weeks ago, I chased down a rider on 28, thinking it might be a guy I know whose commute sometimes coincides with mine. When it turned out not to be, I still hung back there because he was a sparky racer type maintaining a decent pace. But then we hit a little jumper of a hill, and the guy stood on the pedals and dogged right out, rather than shifting down and pushing into it. Over the crest on the flats beyond, he didn't really pick it back up. On the next little drop, aided by the draft of a passing pickup, I sling-shotted around him.

"Late to work!" I said on the way by, to excuse the maneuver. I figured he would counterattack or get on my wheel, but when I finally could glance back he was nowhere. It seemed odd, since I was riding those high-to-me gears that are low to anyone young and in shape. Maybe he was just being nice to the elderly. No time to muse, I had to keep going to work. It was true.

As I noted in the previous post, I pay attention to the feedback from my body. You hear all the time about people who "died doing what they love." That can be poetically beautiful, but what I really love is remaining alive; getting home to a nice supper and some snuggling with the cats. Hanging out with my spouse when she's in town. I got lucky in the genetic department, but I know better than to think I'm immune to aging. I know other riders who were looking good until they developed issues that seem to stem from pushing too hard for too long. That urge to attack will lure a committed athlete to dig too deep and scrape something down in there that doesn't heal.

I keep hoping there will be time later to plan the purposeful "last hike" or other exit strategy, when I feel more like exiting. But one never knows.

Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

 The problem with bike commuting into my golden years is that I can't be sure from day to day whether I feel slow and weak because I just needed more sleep or if I just broke through one more rotted floorboard on the way to the grave. I can check my stats, which I have logged faithfully since 1988. They already show an unsurprising decline from when I was 32 to my present advanced state of decrepitude. But within that steady descending staircase are shorter and longer plateaus. The drops are not uniform. Sometimes I experience a bit of rejuvenation.

Twinges in my chest could be from my remaining feeble attempts at upper body conditioning, or from stacking three cords of hardwood in 90-degree temperatures. Or it could be gas. Cramming down breakfast before hurrying out the door leads to re-swallowing the last mouthful for the next 14 miles.

This time of year, riders around here get to sample the traffic of more populated places, as the summer influx makes this area one of them. It demands more combat readiness to be able to claim space and manage motorists where things get thick and fast.

The worst hill on my route home is the traffic circle at Route 171. On the way to work in the morning, I get a little boost from gravity to speed me around and out the bottom. On the way home I pay for that. The grade is mild. As just a hill it would present no more than an annoyance. But with motorists squeezing past me it demands an explosive effort to stomp through it.

The entry/exit chutes to the circle on Route 28 are curb-lined, narrow lanes. By law, I should be free to ride through them in my rightful place in line. By normal motorist custom, I get passed wherever I am. If I want my place I have to race for it. I try to get as many of them ahead of me as I can before we're committed to the tight space, but they can really jam me up when we get to the circle itself and have to either defer or play chicken with other vehicles coming through from 171 or 28 southbound. It's worse if I have to slow to a crawl or do a track stand while drivers either bull through or screw up the traffic flow by trying to be nice to me. Sprinting from a near stop will give me sore legs the next morning. Pushing a big gear brings those hints of a chest pain and the feeling of trying to accelerate an old car with bad compression. You can almost see the cloud of oil smoke behind me as the engine grumbles impotently.

Breath control is critical to quell those alarming coronary symptoms. Breathe freely. Gear down enough to keep from grunting. Old people die on the toilet because they hold their breath and strain. The same hazard stalks the aging rider who tries to push the anaerobic threshold. I suppose my daily overdoses of caffeine don't help. The circle requires a near-anaerobic sprint to make sure that I clear it without some pushy bastard who zoomed up behind me crashing on through because I don't belong on his road. It's only a dozen pedal strokes, maybe 20, to get to the exit chute and a widening shoulder. Breathe. Breathe. Keep just the right amount of load on, so the heart doesn't backfire like a clapped-out sports car that's seen its best day. Ease back up to speed because the next stretch is unaccountably fast. Enjoy all this while it lasts.

Cadence signals to the motorists whether you are a healthy beast they should respect and avoid or a wounded creature caught out in the open. I imagine Phil Liggett describing my condition: "He can't push a big gear anymore. Notice how his shoulders are rolling and he can't hold his line." Maybe he'd say something about a valiant effort by a rider who has had a long career. That would be nice.

A smart cyclist uses terrain at any age or stage of fitness. The older you get, the more it matters. I know my commuting route very well. Don't push the climbs too hard. Recover on the descents, or use them to accelerate into the traffic flow. Save energy for the places where you know you'll need it. That's the same at any age, just at a different average speed. My commute is a road race, not a criterium, but it has its urban element in Wolfe City. I need the ten or eleven miles of warmup to feel fully ready for whatever traffic is going to throw at me that day.

On the way out of town, I get one good bit of gravitational assistance from the parking lot down a hundred yards or so to the sharp bend in Mill Street. I need to control the lane on Mill Street, because it's too narrow for a car to pass me safely with oncoming traffic. Of course this never prevents any motorist from passing me anyway. So it's a sprint out of the gate to get to Bay Street, where I can fall back to a better pace to warm up properly. The route out to the highway starts with a series of climbs, often with motorists pushing past. They need a whack on the snout in a couple of places, but for the most part I can just let them run.

E-bike riders have been leaning forward in their chairs through this whole essay, raising their hands and going "Ooh! Ooh!" The thing is, once you accept the assistance you become dependent on it. I don't mean surrendering to the atrophy already consuming you. I mean the bike itself will be miserable to pedal without assistance. I have considered an e-bike since way before they were fashionable. I've watched the technology evolve. If I did get one, it would be a mid-drive cargo bike. Might as well make it worth its weight. But I can't afford one. It's old muscle or nothing. Just hoping to get away with it one more time.

"Consult a professional bicycle mechanic"

 Another tubeless tire victim came through a while back. He said he'd had the tires mounted at a shop where he lived. The staff there assured him that the process is simple and reliable. A few days later, the rear tire was losing pressure within hours. Now he was away from home, trying to enjoy his trip.

With tubeless tires, the problem never seems to be the simple one you want it to be, like tightening the nut at the base of the valve stem. It's almost always the rim tape. Rim tape is the fatal weakness of the whole ridiculous system.

When I removed the tire, the rim tape was wrinkled and detaching. This had been professionally installed by a confident technolemming who fully believed in the technology. This was the A game of a committed disciple. It's nice to see that even the true believers can screw the pooch this badly.

Wrinkly

Floppy

And the sealant mess looks like the floor of a triple X adult theater at closing time.

I had estimated a price to throw a tube in there before I saw that the rim tape couldn't be saved. I knew it would be compromised. I didn't anticipate that it would have floated loose completely. It didn't make a huge difference to the price, but it added a bit, as well as requiring more comprehensive cleaning and drying to get new rim tape to adhere properly.

The only way to make a reliably airtight rim is with a fully sealed floor. This requires novel approaches to spoking. The majority of players in the tubeless sector rely on tape. The sealant in its fresh, liquid state actually attacks the adhesive of the rim tape, as seen here. Any flaw in the tape job provides a starting point for the sealant to start weakening it. In addition, rims seem to be coming with shallower center sections now, as well as really tight tire sizing. This means that anyone mounting a tire might take advantage of the absence of an inner tube to use tire levers to pry the casing onto the rim, only to cut the rim tape.

Tubeless makes everything worse, but the fad has not run its course. And like all diseases, it will never be fully eradicated. All we can do is treat it when it flares up and inoculate against it as much as possible.

Car culture chains the United States to dirty energy

 No other country on earth was as smitten with the automobile as the United States. The oil industry itself originated in Pennsylvania, but the love affair that has driven us to cling to oil addiction took a while to get rolling. Like the bicycle, the automobile began as a luxury item. Unlike the bicycle, rank and file consumers held off until Henry Ford devised a production method to bring costs down. The Ford Model T put the automobile in reach of ordinary workers. A thriving industry took American industrialization into the fast lane.

After the Second World War, the American hotrod drank deeply of cheap gas while forging an image of freedom and daring and mechanical creativity. American cars were big, with big engines. Speed limits crept higher and higher, allowing these beasts to gallop across the miles of wide open spaces in the American interior.

When the first gas crisis hit in 1973, it didn't serve as an early warning that we should try to detox from petroleum. Worldwide, economies just retooled to accommodate the rising price and manipulated supply. Fuel prices pushed upward ever harder on the cost of living, but people paid it. The United States instituted a 55 mile per hour speed limit, which brought the average cruising speed down around 65 on most highways for a while, but that has been rescinded in most places now. Good luck finding the road less traveled nowadays. If you do, it probably goes somewhere very obscure, or the stretch isn't very long.

Emission controls have improved the smell and cleared up the worst of the brown haze that hung over any populated area. Improved fuel economy standards help a little with the environment. Only steadily climbing wages and salaries keep up with relentlessly inflating prices. Consumers focus only on whether they can afford to fill the tank, not whether they should push hard on elected officials to shift to energy sources that don't carry the vast liabilities of petroleum.

Gasoline equals freedom of movement in the American mind. That means oil. Electricity means convenience and entertainment in the home and in rechargeable handheld devices. Who really cares what fuels the power plant? Coal seems so 19th Century, and yet it still fuels about 19 percent of electricity generation in this country. Natural gas fuels more than 40 percent. Straight-up oil fired power plants account for one to three percent of energy generated. Combined, that's more than 60 percent.

Renewables account for 21 percent of energy generation. Biomass is considered renewable, but it still involves combustion, requires energy in the machinery used to harvest and process whatever is being burned, and contributes to the environmental impacts of commercial forestry.

The most visible connection Americans have to petroleum use is their vehicles. For more than a hundred years, generation after generation has grown up with engine noise, clouds of exhaust, crashes, and increasing traffic congestion. We're obsessed with the price of their fuel.

Electric vehicles have become a common sight, but their drivers have to plan carefully to make sure that they can recharge as needed. Recharging takes a lot longer than a quick pit stop at a self-service gas station. An electric vehicle represents a conscious choice to accept inconvenience. The inconvenience may seem trivial if you live where you can charge at home and never venture far, or have access to charging at a place and time that coincides with work or another interval when you wouldn't need to go anywhere anyway. But what if you need to make an unexpected trip in the middle -- or near the beginning - of the time you had set aside for charging?

We live by the car. We may die by the car. Our dependence will continue to help politicians who enable it, and even glorify it as a defiant expression of liberty. It's really nice to be able to hop in a speedy vehicle, protected from the weather and relatively secure, to arrive fully rested wherever you're headed. I get that. As much as we all hate the downsides of their ownership and use, generations have accepted the costs in order to have the benefits. The majority has spoken over and over. A sizable chunk of them will throw in behind some nightmarish politicians rather than risk losing access or having to pay higher prices for their fuel. It's freedom juice.

E-bikes will kill the bike industry as we know it

 We're witnessing the beginning of an evolutionary shift in the bike industry and in popular bike usage. Where people used to talk about the dangers of riding on the streets, now they talk about the dangers of sharing the sidewalk with numbnuts on e-bikes. But that's not what will kill the bike industry. The sheer ease of riding a smokeless moped, combined with the popular misconception that you can neglect them they way you used to neglect your meat-powered bike, have driven sales at a phenomenal rate.

In our shop just this year, a few callers asking about bikes we carry have asked about gravel bikes, and dozens have asked about e-bikes. Then we've had a smattering of calls for kids' bikes. Maybe one or two for technical mountain bikes. Repair business is steady, but it's only enough to overload our understaffing. If we had one more mechanic we would worry about paying them. General retail, mostly clothing, used to cover a lot, but those sales are flat, too.

Yesterday I was working on the firewood piled in my driveway when I heard the buzzing of tires on the road out front. Two riders on fat-tire e-bikes blazed past at full throttle, pulling close to 30 miles per hour. Bareheaded, in shorts and tee shirts, they flashed past, headed north. The only sound was their buzzing tires and Dopplered conversation. Nothing could go wrong. They were only riding bikes after all.

In more congested traffic situations, grim accidents are piling up, but only grumpy outside observers blame the bikes themselves. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. E-bikes don't cause crashes. Unprepared riders on e-bikes cause crashes.

Yes, the mass and speed of the bikes make the crashes worse, but they only combine with the lack of street smarts among the riders.  Bad riding habits lead to more dangerous situations. The motor assistance just makes it easier to get there. People will ride the e-bike who would never consider riding the rapids of a busy street on a bike powered entirely by themselves.

I see riders on e-bikes on the street below the backshop windows. Most of them have bikes with a throttle option, which appears to be their default. Looking across the bay toward the train station where the rail trail terminates, I can see many other moped riders. They jet up effortlessly to a cruising speed a purely pedaling rider would train hard to achieve and maintain.

I pull out of my driveway and warm up at maybe 10-12 miles per hour. The smokeless moped rider hops on and spurts away at 20. Who would put up with the snail's pace of a bike without a motor? What do they gain in the short run by giving up the power assist? There is no long run. People flit from place to place and thought to thought. If the bike is cheap transportation, and a few dollars more gets a faster machine requiring less effort, who will bother to work harder?

Demand for bicycles was already falling fast as the 21st Century began. The decline accelerated, with only a brief plateau when 2020 brought a surge of demand coinciding with a dearth of supply. The bike industry was struggling after its profitable bender through the 1990s. E-bikes will end up being a bigger category than mountain bikes were at their height, but the profits won't go to traditional bike companies unless they seriously retool into motor vehicle companies. How much money will be left over for the far less popular non-motorized bikes?

Legend has it that bike manufacturers in the 1880s and '90s were surprised by the high level of demand from working class people to buy what were considered luxury items. The manufacturers hadn't recognized yet that they had created a revolutionary transportation device that needed very little maintenance for the amount of mobility it provided to people formerly limited only to shoe leather. The same calculation drives the market in e-bikes now.

Change happens faster and faster in the technological world, but pedal-powered bikes won't disappear overnight. Especially if laws and regulations restrict the age of riders on motorized bikes, pedal power will remain the child's first experience on a two-wheeler. However, I have already had to deal with motorized balance bikes for a couple of richie rich little kids whose parents want them to have the latest greatest thing. On private property, anything goes. Buy your 12-year-old a Lamborghini and let them blaze around your private race track. Meanwhile, out in the slums, kids may have to settle for the time-honored ritual of learning to wobble along under their own power until they're old enough to get a real grownup vehicle that doesn't require them to sweat.

My parents, and other adults born between the world wars, recount their experiences riding bikes. Very few people carried the habit into adulthood in the United States. In the 1950s and '60s, the bike was just a step on the way to becoming a driver. You could even buy an accessory for your bike that looked like a motor and made varoom noises. No one knows what the future holds for our species. Maybe we cover the planet with our sprawling cities, through which we dart on our motorized little bikes. The only wide-open spaces will be the ones utterly inhospitable to life. Nature will consist of cockroaches, rats, bacteria, and viruses. So will our diet.

Independence Day

Main Street was blocked off. Spectators already lined the road to watch the parade. I rode up to the police officers at the Central Avenue intersection. It's a grand name for less than a hundred yards of street.

"Can I get through to Nordic Skier" I asked, gesturing toward Main Street.

"On that?" one said, indicating my bike.  "Sure!"

I thanked them and excused my way through a thin spot in the spectator crowd. I hate being the entertainment, but I had no choice. Hundreds of people waited on either side of the car-free street. I threaded carefully through the random wanderers popping out to take pictures of their friends or searching for a place to squeeze in.

At Mill Street I negotiated passage back through the spectator wall to ride around into the back parking lot of the shop.

Once upstairs in the workshop I had time to look out from the elevated vantage of the backshop windows at the automobiles stuffed into every possible spot, and the bands of parade watchers still streaming in. I spared only occasional glances at the parade once it started. Most of the time, I worked on repairs and contemplated the absolute saturation of the parking facilities. You could not have stuffed another car anywhere, in any direction I could see.

Even on the ride in I had enjoyed the cyclist advantage. Motor vehicle traffic stopped on Center Street at least a quarter of a mile from Main Street. I don't know where people hoped they could go, or how many -- if any -- were just passing through and had lousy timing. Traffic wasn't stopped completely. I had to ride carefully, threading the Death Slot to the right of them at times, and flowing with them in the short breaks where they could move forward.

Usually at the end of the parade, traffic both wheeled and on foot streams the other way, a tide going back out with Fundian energy. The high water mark of humanity and their vehicles surges strongly on the ebb. Within an hour, parking areas in town can be nearly deserted as everyone disperses to whatever other fun they have planned. They'll be back for fireworks at dusk, but I'm long gone by then. This year, however, the parking eased up considerably, but a lot of foot traffic remained. We sold three bikes, did multiple quick repairs for riders only here for the day or the weekend, and had to stop repeatedly to host browsers among the clothing racks, or ring up sales.

This stands in contrast to the previous month or two in which we sold no bicycles at all, and had many ominously uninterrupted days. I don't know why this particular Fourth and its attendant weekend was so busy, but the fact that it lined up so neatly, with the Fourth on Friday, might explain a lot. We're not used to seeing heavy traffic anymore, so a day that would not have impressed us in the 1990s now seems like a big deal.

Summer brings more vehicles, many piloted by people who live where they have to drive more aggressively just to survive. This leads to some increase in close, fast passing, but also a more subtly dangerous tendency for drivers to stop suddenly to wave their fellow motorists out of side streets and driveways. Those drivers nurture the fantasy that we're all nice to each other in this theme park rendition of a country town. A rider needs to be ready to stop short as well as sprint, and read the body language of the larger vehicles. It's our little urban experience embedded in the months of small-town riding.

At the end of the day, I pedaled serenely out my usual route. Evening hazards dwindle rapidly as I pass the driveways of a couple of eating and drinking establishments on the way to the back route out to Route 28. On the Fourth, the evening commute fit into the lull before fireworks traffic.

Motors and mass: ebikes make crashing more expensive

 With ebikes rapidly becoming the vehicle of choice for workers who can't afford a car, these heavier, faster bikes attract riders who still think of them as just bikes: simple, unbounded by many rules, and relatively cheap. The bikes cost more up front, but the purchase price and the price of electricity are the big expenses. This isn't true, especially if you need someone else to work on it for you, but it's a popular perception of bikes in general.

Ebike riders ride them like they ride any bike. Some riders are more vehicular about it than others. Interacting with traffic, some ride at the edge of the lane. Some try to ride on the sidewalk when they can get away with it. Some take the lane and operate like a motorist.

The riders who stay to the right (in the US) expose themselves to the dangers of the Death Slot, stuck against the curb, the ditch, or a line of parked cars. On a pedal bike it's bad enough, but on an ebike the danger is magnified by the mass and speed of the bike.

A rider dragged the carcass of their massive ebike to us last week after a crash that destroyed the front wheel, damaged the fork, and dislodged the left crank arm. The bike has two-wheel drive: hub motors in both wheels. It has fat, 26-inch tires. It's from a company with a strange name written in a nearly undecipherable font.

We heard from the motorist who hit the bike, who described the accident in a way that minimized the motorist's responsibility. We heard from the rider, who described the accident as a pretty typical right hook by the driver. The motorist said that they would pay for repairs "out of the goodness of our hearts, even though the accident wasn't our fault." I didn't say what I was thinking right then, but I did not believe that they were blameless. However, the rider made a serious error at the time: They did not file a formal accident report. The rider and the driver just came to an oral agreement at the scene, when neither of them knew the full extent of the damage and potential costs.

Because so many little companies have jumped into the ebike market, there are dozens of brands with weird names, pumping out superficially similar products with sketchy customer support. Customer support is pretty shabby even from major brands in the bike industry. It's even worse from cheap ebike brands.

That ought to true right out, don't you think?

In addition to the obviously ruined rim, the brake tabs on the fork leg are bent, and so is the brake rotor. The more I looked at the bike, the more things I found. Unfortunately, I can't be sure how much is crash damage and what was simply poor quality control at the cheap ebike factory. For instance, the rear wheel seems to sit closer to the chainstays on the impact side, indicating that the frame got bent as well as the wheel and fork, but I never saw the bike before the crash. The wheel could have been that way to start.

The bike weighs about 80 pounds, so I can't exactly sling it around. With the front wheel smashed like that, I can't wheel it around, either.

As the potential cost of repairs mounted, it fell short of the supposed $900 price of the new bike, but still looked to surpass $400, maybe even $500, with shipping and labor. The driver will likely balk at that amount unless they're either super benevolent or secretly acknowledge that they're at fault. We as a shop don't want to take it on, because we've already gone through a couple of long, expensive slogs this season. Barely breaking even is a bad business model. I feel really bad, because the rider is a worker once again getting screwed by someone else's carelessness, but they did contribute some negligence by riding in the Death Slot. I recall my chess match with an insurance adjuster when I had a serious encounter with a motor vehicle years ago. We negotiated a settlement because I needed money and was willing to barter a little, but I only had the leverage I did because police came and everyone filed a formal report. I had 'em by the insurance, and by the officer's report that the occupants of the car were fundamentally at fault.

As I researched repair options, I also found companies that offer bike insurance, particularly ebike insurance. This rider got a lot of bike for their $900, but this accident may have wiped it all out. They have no safety net. If they can't get the bike fixed for an amount that the motorists will cover, they lost their shot to apply legal leverage because they didn't get a police report to create an official narrative. They're left with a pile of scrap metal that a single human can barely drag around.

So: if you have an ebike, especially if you use it for transportation, insure it. Otherwise, be prepared to lose everything, because drivers will always have the better story. If you ride any kind of bike in traffic, obey the rules as much as possible, so that you have a solid basis if you do get hit. Avoid the Death Slot. I ride to the far right a lot on stretches where I get along better if I let traffic flow past me, but in town I stay out of it. Especially with a powerful ebike, get out there and claim space. Otherwise, crap like this happens.

If you have an insurance company, you have a corporate entity with accountants and lawyers who will be looking for ways to take that money out of your antagonist. Granted, they'll take it out of you as well, if they have to. But at least you have a contract with someone who is supposedly on your side. Your ebike is much more of a vehicle than a pedal bike, even if it costs far less than a top of the line pedal bike. With power comes responsibility and expense.