neptronix said:
I agree with this 100% especially the whole bit about building things. People are so incredibly lazy these days.. you can still blow a factory bike away in every aspect with a DIY build that just requires you learn how to solder and ask for help if you are stuck.
( all i knew about electronics was how to solder when i came here.. )
When i see people drooling over factory bikes, i just get sad. ES FB had a lot of that going on. Even the DIY culture was slowly dying out there despite our best efforts to stem the tide.
I do miss the days this place was the big tent.
Yep.
I remember in 2012 someone said on ES words along the lines "I just want to help spread the word on ebikes and get more people using them".
I first came to ES looking for help on choosing a motor/kit, as far as I know ES is still the best place for help with a kit.
In Melbourne, I now see FAR more ebikes that regular bicycles. There are now so many ebikes around inner Melbourne it's ridiculous.
In fact, I can safely say there are more people on ebikes than I
EVER thought could be possible, in Melbourne.
^I can't stress this statement enough.
Melbourne is now over 5million people, for what is supposed to be typical a 1st world "livable city", this is a large number, as far as I am concerned, for my research, nice livable cities have smaller populations or at least wider streets to move around.
One of the KEY issues for Melbourne is the streets are typically quite narrow, I would say on average the typical suburban street in the USA is at least TWICE as wide as the typical street in Melbourne, (I have spent MANY MANY hours comparing streets (via google maps Streetview) from many cities in the USA and most USA city streets are just so much wider/smartly built. Wide streets look great especially when they are curved, because you can look down the clear wide street and just grass/trees/house on the horizon, so that tweak fixes the one flaw a wide street has.
Aside from wider streets with trees actually looking far nicer/practical, and its just easier to get around, I actually now see Melbourne as a bit of a shithole after looking at so many cities in the USA via google streetview, I very much stand by that statement with conviction, please note that I have lived in Melbourne my whole life so I am allowed to claim that, with conviction.
Most people on ebikes in Melbourne are on factory build ebikes, kits are probably 10%.
I think I will wait, find a good spot, on a good time of the day and video-record the typical scene of ~10 people on ebikes waiting at a set of red-lights.
Part of the ebike take up in Melbourne is just not overcrowding, but the incredible popularity of UberEats/Deliveroo for people getting food delivered, the ebike is perfect for this, as its very difficult to park a car in inner Melbourne, especially around food establishments. Most of the people doing this are migrants, most UberEats ebike riders are Indians, Indians are in fact the largest single group of new migrants that come to Australia every year (at about 100k per annum), I think its mostly because they will work for next to nothing and don't complain, and big business constantly lobbies the government for the cheapest people who don't complain.
Most of these UberEats ebikers are just doing it to make money and of course, plenty of news reports claim its "slave wage labour', and these ebike delivery people aren't really interested in a nice custom ebike build, its just about getting the job done reliably and as cheaply as possible.
I actually have seen a few Indian food-ebikers riding around on a flat-battery on a direct drive motor, they basically have to stand-push pedal to move at a decent speed.
I know some people have a vision in their minds of a green ebike utopia city, fact is I have seen countless ebikers riddling incredibly recklessly and being very annoying to pedestrians. I think if Melbourne wasn't so engaged with crime and other problems in the city, then ebikes would of been banned in a similar style as what happened in New York. Thanks to Melbournes bigger problems dangerous ebikers is nothing to worry about on the scale of things, and I dont ever see that changing.
If you want to know the typical story of the week in Melbourne dealing with its surge in migrant population over the last ~10 years it's like this
https://twitter.com/9NewsMelb/status/1133645557522583552
And the ever-growing divide between people is remarkable, here is a story in Melbourne Chinese convenience shop owner who placed this "sign" on his store window.
https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/black-teens-not-allowed-racist-sign-left-on-melton-melbourne-milk-bar-window/news-story/ddbf47cc560e8cb25a62e17ad6f2f24a
The other remarkable thing is the local government broadcaster (ABC-
Melbourne) almost never reports on crime, at least on the radio/TV broadcast which is still where 90% the public still get their news. It's basically a scandal in its self.
Watching ABC Melbourne nightly broadcast news bulletins is like watching news of a different city, it's news for the city you wished it was rather than what it actually is.
This is similar to what someone from Russia termed "Hypernormalisation" in the midst of the USSR collapse, where everything is failing and it's just half-mad, but you continue on and pretend everything is normal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation#Etymology
https://youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU
Factory ebikes are become a lot cheaper over the last 2 years, about 5 years ago my local bicycle store had a really nice major brand ebike for $5000AUD $4kUSD (good battery location, quality brakes) this price is now looking a bit ridiculous for a typical street legal ebike.
But now I can see an ebike that at least "looks" like similar quality for about $1200 in local stores, and would almost certainly be found for less via searching.
If I was in the market for a new ebike, even though I know just about everything I would ever want to know about building an ebike, some of these nicely designed/built factory "value" ebikes would be tempting. This has been the second wave that is destroying the DIY scene, well-conceived from the ground up quality designed factory ebikes that aren't expensive, I am seeing a lot of such ebikes in the bicycle shop windows now. I think traditionally a pro-bicycle shop should wouldn't feel respected putting ebikes at its front window, but I see it all the time now, I guess bike-shops are just following where the money takes them.
On the future of ES argument...
The traditional web-form is still the most practical/logically place for DIY ebike discussion, most social media sites are designed from cramped text like Twitter.
Even though with Facebook you can type a large amount of test in a single post, most people wont look beyond the first sentence in a reply where the rest of the text is hidden.
The attractiveness of the major social media sites like Twitter and Facebook is the extreme forced simple structure.
For most people they just want something simple.
Wikipedia is similar in that way as well, because every single page is structured in the exact same way, most people will go to Wikipedia for their information because it's the same structured style every time.