On the bike path paralleling Hwy 1 south to San Juan Capistrano today, virtually every other bike besides mine was an e-bike, and there were a lot of them.
So I stopped at the first bike shop I saw in town to investigate.
The proprietor of the bike shop told me that local surfers were the first to buy the electric vehicles in the region. The surfers wanted the e-bikes to make it easier to get their boards to the beach, he said.
Now entire families in the area are using the devices and fighting for the right to use them on paths that have long been intended for users of traditional bikes.
“It’s the sedentary lifestyle,” he said
The proprietor said that that e-bikes, as motorized vehicles, are technically banned from using the bike paths in the area.
But the e-bike owners routinely flout the law, and nobody enforces it, he said.
What starts in California eventually spreads to the rest of the country, alas. So I guess we all can expect more and more of these e-bikes on the bike paths in our own home towns.
On a related note, two young kids who were riding tandem on an e-bike in Dana Point just up the road stopped with me at a traffic light.
The kid in front asked me how fast my bike went.
“As fast as I can pedal,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, as if he hadn’t realized that some bicycles don’t have battery-assist modes.
His bike goes 21 to 22 mph, he said.
That’s almost twice as fast as I usually can pedal on the flats with a load.
Easily the most exhilarating part of today’s ride was the 8 miles of I-5 that I had to ride to get around Camp Pendelton to Oceanside, where I am meeting my brother.
He wants to go fishing on Monday. So I am taking a rest day to join him.
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