Yesterday i finally whip up the courage to try commuting with bike, i planned the 40km round trip to visit my mom and go grocery shopping on the way back, planned the route with as much residential street as possible, and that was a fun experience! While there’s a lot of “woah, ebike”(where i live a proper ebike is rare, even though mine is converted) and “you travel from that small town? That’s insane!” from stranger, what’s not fun is the ride on some stretch of the road.
I live in a small town outside the city, a lot of the road going out of the town is pretty much 1 lane each way, no cycling facility for the whole country(Malaysia), the road shoulder is narrow to non-existent(the line is basically bordering between road and grass/dirt) if not filled with potholes/cracks/sketchy road maintenance/bump made by tree root, and motorist often driving very fast even on narrow road. Luckily more often than not they does give me a lot of space when they’re passing(thanks to motorcycle culture), but those who don’t is very discouraging for the whole experience, mostly it’s the one riding moped that pass me too close for comfort with 30/50kmph faster than me(no thanks to motorcycle culture).
I planned to do it often, first by doing a no-car sunday, then slowly switch to commuting to work(also 40km round trip), and eventually cut down car use to only just a day or two a week or only on long distance travel, but this experience kinda made me second guess the whole plan. It’s also quite tiring, i can still feel the fatigue today.
So how did you guys that do the commute able to keep going? Any advice on that end?
All of what the other two commenter’s said + the following:
The last one makes the difference in Munich between riding my normal bike and my ebike. With the mirror you see them coming, making it less uncomfortable when they pass + they automatically keep some more distance as they don’t want to hit the mirror.
Finally, depending on how fast your bike goes, look into tuning it to higher speeds? Mine is an s-pedelec and goes 45km/h, that means in city traffic I am able to swim with the traffic and not get passed often (this will probably trigger some debate and is a suggestion you should think about carefully, as it has other implications)
Ooo that mirror trick might be handy.
Also unfortunately(or fortunately), we can only have class 1 ebike legally on the street, but i guess it kinda makes sense because at that speed it’s better to get a moped