There is a common perception with electric bicycles that the rider will pedal less hard to go the same speed. But there is an alternative: they could pedal the same amount and go faster.
I kind of view IDEs like that. You can use it as a crutch, or you can take the energy you would have used thinking about the things the IDE is now doing for you and focus it elsewhere.
To extend that analogy, I choose a regular bicycle because I ride for fun and exercise, not speed. But if biking were a serious mode of transportation for me, I would get one that gave me the most assistance possible so I could go faster and farther.
IDEs are similar. If you want to be as efficient as possible and get as much done as possible, you want an IDE. But if learning and exercising your mind is the goal, you’d be better served with a text editor.
There has been a great surge of ebikers among people working in food delivery services around Prague last year. Before that most of the guys used regular bikes.
Now imagine your job being to get from point A to B. 99.5% of all the devs I've seen that insist on "VS Code" struggle so bad it's laughable, and yet when you point it out they turn it into some sort of IDE pissing contest.
veering off-topic, that's one of the problems I have with electric bikes - they stop being bicycles and become another kind of vehicle - a faster vehicle that needs longer stopping distances and now has a highe r fatality rate when colliding with a pedestrian.
We see this in London cycle lanes. Some cycles are doing a commute, some are trying out for the olympics, some people are doing 25 on a electric scooter and these are alien - hard to predict because they don't obey our intuition about physics. A guy on a scooter does 10mph tops and puts his foot down a lot.
What blows my mind is that in New York, we've decided to deal with this by requiring speed governors on pedal-assist bicycles to limit them to around 20mph... while they're required to share the street with cars that are free to travel at almost any speed.
The key difference is whether a motorcycle driver's license is required. The electric bicycle manufacturer can choose to forgo the speed governors and be subject to motorcycle safety/licensing/etc regulations.
Traffic rules basically give drivers a way to deal with other vehicles going different speeds. So a the driver of a scooter going 20 mph and the driver of a car going 40 mph can share the same road, just like a driver of a truck going 40 mph can share the road with the driver of a car going 60 mph.
(They've also done some more motorized cycle and electric content lately. A recent video showed how to rebuild an old motorcycle's frame into an electric motorcycle using a kit.)
An e-bike that goes 60kph seems a bit out of the ordinary. Most are limited to 25kph or 45kph. But even 45 is still fast with only a bicycle helmet though
I see, your own peddling can make them go faster. Ok these things should be illegal!
Nitpicking, but in the world of regulations, electric assist tapers off until around 25-30 km/h, at which point you start carrying the entire bike anyway, plus the dead weight of the battery and the motor.
I wonder if this simile could be extended to programming. Being hindered by not being able to choose your own tools?
Not everywhere. Australia supports both the European pedelec classification of 250W with a 25km/h cutout and a local one of 200W with no speed limit (which can be hand-throttle in some states but must be pedal-assist in others). New Zealand just has a flat 300W with no speed limit.
I live out in the country in Australia. I’m planning a velomobile with an auxiliary motor for both touring and local use, and with this combination I expect and hope to attain an average speed of over 50km/h for the ~39km trip to the nearest town for church and groceries on Sundays. (I currently tend to average 22–24km/h on my recumbent tricycle with no motor, the trip typically taking 1h35–1h50m, with an estimated average power output of 120W. 200W is quite a lot to add!)
In the US, class 3 electric bicycles can assist up to 28 miles per hour, or around 45 km/h. I might be able to ride 28 miles per hour on a regular bicycle, but I can't do it for very long.
Are they regulated like non-electric bikes? In Europe, I believe the main difference is insurance and license, which are required for e-bikes with motor-supported speeds > 25km/h (at least in some countries, not sure how uniform it's handled).
As far as I know there is no jurisdiction in the US where you need either a license or auto insurance for a class 3 electric pedal assist bicycle. I think you generally ride them wherever regular bicycles are ridden.
I kind of view IDEs like that. You can use it as a crutch, or you can take the energy you would have used thinking about the things the IDE is now doing for you and focus it elsewhere.