Chalo said:
They do it for a moment, with all their senses alert, attention focused, mind and body primed to react.
For all the good it would do them, if something went wrong.
Whatever, it's your ass and no one minds if you do that kind of thing. Like ... say, sailing. Once I talked to a guy who had sailed alone from Seattle to the Hawaiian Islands in a relatively small boat, maybe less than 30 feet, and was on his way to Australia. People do it - I don't know, maybe lots of people - hundreds! But that is, by many orders of magnitude, not what 30 foot sailboats are for, and if you went around insisting that sailboat owners are fools for not leaping to invest in technology that will be needed to deal with the rigors of crossing the Pacific Ocean, they'd rightly say you're nuts. That guy, my hat's off to him - good guy. If you're riding a bicycle at 60 MPH, sweet - enjoy. For the average person, it's nuts - if you need to get from point A to point B that fast, don't get a bicycle, and if you're shopping for your electric bicycle, don't expect it to be designed for that.
For that matter, it would be unfortunate if that practice somehow became a significant reality for electric bicycles. Legal ramifications, insurance, but also just the promise of the bicycle as a somewhat human scale transportation technology that can be operated by human power. We had bicycles like that until the electric motor came along, and they turned into motorcycles? I hope not. The majority of electric bicycles here in Seattle are curb rentals from "Jump", one of those big time disruptive business ventures that has somewhat foundered on the impracticality of the concept, but the problem is not that they're gutless. That's fine - people ride those things all over the place, and there's plenty under the hood to make bicycling tolerable for people who haven't developed a lot of bicycle muscles, endurance, tolerance, whatever it takes to get there purely on your own. (Seattle is not flat country.) The motor cuts out at 10 or 15 MPH. That's what electric bicycles are about - maybe the low end of the range, but my point is that it's an essentially hybrid technology that's called "bicycle" because it still is, a bicycle.
