Smokee Robinson
All Star
Citygrounds is your best bet for buying online , other than that go to your local bike shop instead . Sunday , Kink, Haro, and SE are all good brands too
Official Coli Bike/Cycling thread
Westbama Heartthrob
Irregular Zero
Good looking
NASA-inspired airless bicycle tires are now available for purchase
Two years ago, we heard how the Ohio-based Smart Tire Company was developing shape memory airless bicycle tires. Well, the resulting Metl tires can now be purchased via – you guessed it – a Kickstarter campaign.
newatlas.com
NASA-inspired airless bicycle tires are now available for purchase
By Ben CoxworthSeptember 13, 2023
The Metl road/gravel tire, pictured here without its replaceable tread
Smart Tire Company
Two years ago, we heard how the Ohio-based Smart Tire Company was developing shape memory airless bicycle tires. Well, the resulting Metl tires can now be purchased via – you guessed it – a Kickstarter campaign.
The never-go-flat tires were created in partnership with NASA, which had already applied the same technology to tires for its planetary rover vehicles ... after all, it would be pretty difficult to fix a flat on the surface of the Moon or Mars. And no, they're not literally airless. They're hollow – so they have air in them – that air just isn't pressurized, nor is it required for the tire to hold its shape.
At the heart of each Metl tire is a Slinky-like spring that runs all the way around the tire. That spring is made of a shape memory nickel-titanium alloy known as NiTinol, which is described as being strong like titanium yet also stretchy like rubber.
Importantly, when NiTinol is placed under pressure, it initially deforms but then goes back to its original shape. This characteristic allows the Metl tire to gently compress and rebound, providing a smooth ride just like a pneumatic tire.
The spring is encased in a poly-rubber material which forms the tire's transparent sidewalls and replaceable tread. According to the company, this setup incorporates only half as much rubber as a regular tire. Additionally, while the tread may have to be replaced roughly every 5,000 to 8,000 miles (8,047 to 12,875 km), the main tire should reportedly last for the life of the bike.
The Metl tire can be mounted on conventional rims Smart Tire Company
For this commercial introduction of the technology, the Smart Tire Company is offering a road/gravel tire in size choices of 700 x 32c, 35c and 38c. The 35c model is claimed to weigh 450 grams (16 oz), which is around the middle of the weight range for comparable pneumatic tires.
And we're told that while this first version of the tire will be of a fixed firmness, future models may allow users to increase the firmness by pumping in more air. So they'll be semi-pneumatic, but they will still never go completely flat.
Assuming the Metl tires reach production, a pledge of US$500 will get you a set of two – getting them retreaded should cost about $10. Complete aluminum or carbon fiber Metl-clad wheelsets are also available for pledges of $1,300 and $2,300, respectively. Potential backers should note, estimated delivery isn't until next June.
Sources: Kickstarter, Smart Tire Company
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24920809/STC_GreenTire1.png)
Bike tires made from NASA’s bizarre shape-shifting metal are now available to buy
No more bicycle flats, forever.
www.theverge.com
Bike tires made from NASA’s bizarre shape-shifting metal are now available to buy
/
These airless Metl tires are made from nitinol, a shape-memory alloy that ‘stretches like rubber but is strong like titanium.’ Warning: Kickstarter.
By Thomas Ricker, a deputy editor and Verge co-founder with a passion for human-centric cities, e-bikes, and life as a digital nomad. He’s been a tech journalist for almost 20 years.Sep 14, 2023, 7:10 AM EDT
If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24920809/STC_GreenTire1.png "A green prototype of the METL tire with the tread applied. You can see the coil of nitinol through the transparent tire.")
A green prototype of the METL tire with the tread applied. You can see the coil of nitinol through the transparent tire. Image: The Smart Tire Company
The Metl bicycle tire is the first consumer product we’re aware of to use nitinol, a NASA-developed shape-memory alloy made of nickel and titanium that can be trained with heat to remember its shape. Compared with traditional bicycle tires, Metl tires will never go flat and will last a lifetime — at least that’s the promise made by The Smart Tire Company, the former Shark Tank contestants now hailing from Akron, Ohio, which is also home to the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.
Just be careful: the tires are being sold via a crowdfunded campaign on Kickstarter and that brings along risk, which I’d rate as high for something as cutting edge as this from a small startup.
You’re also looking at a pledge of $500 for a pair of blue or clear Metl tires (weighing 450g with an equivalent size of 700x35c) that are “DIY easy install” onto most common road or gravel bike rims. That’s about 10x the price of good bicycle tires, with prices exceeding $1,300 when opting for a pre-assembled bundle that includes aluminum rims, or $2,300 if you prefer carbon rims.
Here’s a Verge video that provides a deeper dive into nitinol and its NASA origins (and future):
Despite their memory-metal construction, the tires do provide grip thanks to an integrated all-weather tread that offers “medium low” rolling resistance, according to the campaign. The tread is rated for up to 8,000 miles with retreads priced at $10 per tire. The Metl bicycle tires are said to offer a “lightweight, smooth ride, with superior handling and durability” that can also “increase traction” compared to typical air-filled tires.
Estimated delivery of the Metl bicycle tires is listed as June 2024. As of right now, the campaign already has 128 backers, earning triple its goal with 28 days still to go. Stretch goals (if the campaign earns enough) include making wider Metl tires for e-bikes and mountain bikes, and more road/gravel sizes and tread patterns.
Got myself a vintage Schwinn World. Never rode a bike with this sort of frame or drop bars. 3 rides today and its fun but taxing. Gonna do what I can to get better because I finally see how tucking the body for aerodynamics makes a giant difference in speed. Bike got my ass and legs burning like a mf and I only did 6 or so miles today!
(The picture is not of mine, it is just an illustration.)
Yeah, your torso is acting like a parachute when you sit up straight.
It's a fact. It was crazy how much faster I could go with a slightly higher cadence, but I don't have the stamina for it yet. I've been E-biking so I could cheat my ass off on rides, but my startup speed especially when tucking body, elbows, and knees into the bike were insane. Once I get used to these wonky ass friction shifters, the game gonna be different.
To excel at engineering design, generative AI must learn to innovate, study finds
A new study reveals the pitfalls of deep generative models when they are tasked with solving engineering design problems. The MIT researchers say if mechanical engineers want help from AI for novel ideas and designs, they’ll have to refocus those models beyond “statistical similarity.”
news.mit.edu
To excel at engineering design, generative AI must learn to innovate, study finds
AI models that prioritize similarity falter when asked to design something completely new.Jennifer Chu | MIT News
Publication Date:
October 19, 2023
PRESS INQUIRIES
Caption:
MIT engineers trained several AI models on thousands of bicycle frames, sourced from a dataset of full bicycle designs, shown here color-coded by bike style.
Credits:
Credit: Courtesy of the researchers
ChatGPT and other deep generative models are proving to be uncanny mimics. These AI supermodels can churn out poems, finish symphonies, and create new videos and images by automatically learning from millions of examples of previous works. These enormously powerful and versatile tools excel at generating new content that resembles everything they’ve seen before.
But as MIT engineers say in a new study, similarity isn’t enough if you want to truly innovate in engineering tasks.
“Deep generative models (DGMs) are very promising, but also inherently flawed,” says study author Lyle Regenwetter, a mechanical engineering graduate student at MIT. “The objective of these models is to mimic a dataset. But as engineers and designers, we often don’t want to create a design that’s already out there.”
He and his colleagues make the case that if mechanical engineers want help from AI to generate novel ideas and designs, they will have to first refocus those models beyond “statistical similarity.”
“The performance of a lot of these models is explicitly tied to how statistically similar a generated sample is to what the model has already seen,” says co-author Faez Ahmed, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “But in design, being different could be important if you want to innovate.”
In their study, Ahmed and Regenwetter reveal the pitfalls of deep generative models when they are tasked with solving engineering design problems. In a case study of bicycle frame design, the team shows that these models end up generating new frames that mimic previous designs but falter on engineering performance and requirements.
When the researchers presented the same bicycle frame problem to DGMs that they specifically designed with engineering-focused objectives, rather than only statistical similarity, these models produced more innovative, higher-performing frames.
The team’s results show that similarity-focused AI models don’t quite translate when applied to engineering problems. But, as the researchers also highlight in their study, with some careful planning of task-appropriate metrics, AI models could be an effective design “co-pilot.”
“This is about how AI can help engineers be better and faster at creating innovative products,” Ahmed says. “To do that, we have to first understand the requirements. This is one step in that direction.”
The team’s new study appeared recently online, and will be in the December print edition of the journal Computer Aided Design. The research is a collaboration between computer scientists at MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and mechanical engineers in MIT’s DeCoDe Lab. The study’s co-authors include Akash Srivastava and Dan Gutreund at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.
Framing a problem
As Ahmed and Regenwetter write, DGMs are “powerful learners, boasting unparalleled ability” to process huge amounts of data. DGM is a broad term for any machine-learning model that is trained to learn distribution of data and then use that to generate new, statistically similar content. The enormously popular ChatGPT is one type of deep generative model known as a large language model, or LLM, which incorporates natural language processing capabilities into the model to enable the app to generate realistic imagery and speech in response to conversational queries. Other popular models for image generation include DALL-E and Stable Diffusion.
Because of their ability to learn from data and generate realistic samples, DGMs have been increasingly applied in multiple engineering domains. Designers have used deep generative models to draft new aircraft frames, metamaterial designs, and optimal geometries for bridges and cars. But for the most part, the models have mimicked existing designs, without improving the performance on existing designs.
“Designers who are working with DGMs are sort of missing this cherry on top, which is adjusting the model’s training objective to focus on the design requirements,” Regenwetter says. “So, people end up generating designs that are very similar to the dataset.”
In the new study, he outlines the main pitfalls in applying DGMs to engineering tasks, and shows that the fundamental objective of standard DGMs does not take into account specific design requirements. To illustrate this, the team invokes a simple case of bicycle frame design and demonstrates that problems can crop up as early as the initial learning phase. As a model learns from thousands of existing bike frames of various sizes and shapes, it might consider two frames of similar dimensions to have similar performance, when in fact a small disconnect in one frame — too small to register as a significant difference in statistical similarity metrics — makes the frame much weaker than the other, visually similar frame.
Beyond “vanilla”
An animation depicting transformations across common bicycle designs.
Credit: Courtesy of the researchers
The researchers carried the bicycle example forward to see what designs a DGM would actually generate after having learned from existing designs. They first tested a conventional “vanilla” generative adversarial network, or GAN — a model that has widely been used in image and text synthesis, and is tuned simply to generate statistically similar content. They trained the model on a dataset of thousands of bicycle frames, including commercially manufactured designs and less conventional, one-off frames designed by hobbyists.
Once the model learned from the data, the researchers asked it to generate hundreds of new bike frames. The model produced realistic designs that resembled existing frames. But none of the designs showed significant improvement in performance, and some were even a bit inferior, with heavier, less structurally sound frames.
The team then carried out the same test with two other DGMs that were specifically designed for engineering tasks. The first model is one that Ahmed previously developed to generate high-performing airfoil designs. He built this model to prioritize statistical similarity as well as functional performance. When applied to the bike frame task, this model generated realistic designs that also were lighter and stronger than existing designs. But it also produced physically “invalid” frames, with components that didn’t quite fit or overlapped in physically impossible ways.
“We saw designs that were significantly better than the dataset, but also designs that were geometrically incompatible because the model wasn’t focused on meeting design constraints,” Regenwetter says.
The last model the team tested was one that Regenwetter built to generate new geometric structures. This model was designed with the same priorities as the previous models, with the added ingredient of design constraints, and prioritizing physically viable frames, for instance, with no disconnections or overlapping bars. This last model produced the highest-performing designs, that were also physically feasible.
“We found that when a model goes beyond statistical similarity, it can come up with designs that are better than the ones that are already out there,” Ahmed says.
“It’s a proof of what AI can do, if it is explicitly trained on a design task.”
For instance, if DGMs can be built with other priorities, such as performance, design constraints, and novelty, Ahmed foresees “numerous engineering fields, such as molecular design and civil infrastructure, would greatly benefit. By shedding light on the potential pitfalls of relying solely on statistical similarity, we hope to inspire new pathways and strategies in generative AI applications outside multimedia.”
Westbama Heartthrob
Irregular Zero
Ended up getting a brand new kink whip
Heard good things, so i made the move on it
Loving it so far
280 million e-bikes are slashing oil demand far more than electric vehicles
E-bikes and scooters displace 4x as much demand for oil as all of the EVs in the world.
arstechnica.com
280 million e-bikes are slashing oil demand far more than electric vehicles
E-bikes and scooters displace 4x as much demand for oil as all of the EVs in the world.
THE CONVERSATION - 11/18/2023, 7:09 AM
Enlarge
RyanLJane via Getty
155WITH
We hop in the car to get groceries or drop kids at school. But while the car is convenient, these short trips add up in terms of emissions, pollution, and petrol cost.
Close to half (44 percent) of all Australian commuter trips are by car—and under 10 km. Of Perth’s 4.2 million daily car trips, 2.8 are for distances of less than 2 km.
This is common in wealthier countries. In the United States, a staggering 60 percent of all car trips cover less than 10km.
So what’s the best solution? You might think switching to an electric vehicle is the natural step. In fact, for short trips, an electric bike or moped might be better for you—and for the planet. That’s because these forms of transport—collectively known as electric micromobility—are cheaper to buy and run.
But it’s more than that—they are actually displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present, due to their staggering uptake in China and other nations where mopeds are a common form of transport.
How can that be?
On the world’s roads last year, there were over 20 million electric vehicles and 1.3 million commercial EVs such as buses, delivery vans, and trucks.But these numbers of four or more wheel vehicles are wholly eclipsed by two- and three-wheelers. There were over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheelers on the road last year. Their sheer popularity is already cutting demand for oil by a million barrels of oil a day—about 1 percent of the world’s total oil demand, according to estimates by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
What about electric vehicles, you ask? After all, EVs have been heralded as a silver bullet for car emissions and air pollution in cities, as their tailpipe emissions are zero. If charged with renewable power, they get even greener.
But to see them as an inarguable good is an error. They are cleaner cars, but they are still cars, taking up space on the roads and requiring a lot of electricity to power them. Their batteries make them heavier than a traditional car and draw heavily on the extraction of rare earth elements. While EVs are overall much greener than internal combustion engine cars, battery manufacture can undermine some of the gains.
On the plus side, petrol cars cost about AUS$0.14 per kilometer in fuel, or about $1,820 in fuel annually for the average car doing 12,000 km. Maintenance averages at $910 a year, bringing the total to $2,730 for a petrol car.
By contrast, charging an EV would cost around $480 for that distance. Maintenance of $240 takes annual running costs to $720. So EVs are much cheaper to run. But they are expensive to buy.
What advantages do electric mopeds and bikes have?
The electric transport revolution is a great chance to rethink how we move through our cities—and whether we even need a car at all.Cars, after all, often have only one occupant. You’re expending a lot of energy to transport yourself.
By contrast, electric mopeds and bikes use a lot less energy to transport one or two people. They’re also a lot cheaper to buy and run than electric cars.
If you commute on an e-bike 20 km a day, five days a week, your charging cost would be about $20—annually.
In Australia, electric bikes are very rapidly going from a hobbyist pursuit to a serious mode of urban transport. Over 100,000 e-bikes were sold here last year.
Of course, you’re unlikely to use electric mopeds or bikes to drive from Sydney to Melbourne. Their real value is in short-hop trips—the school run, the milk and bread run, or even the commute—where they take roughly the same time or shorter than a car.
Smaller electric options like scooters and skateboards also offer a way to overcome the last kilometer problem that plagues public transport systems. This, in short, is the inconvenient distance between your home and the station or bus stop. Being able to cover this distance fast can be a game-changer for public transport.
If taken up, electric micromobility can cut urban emissions. A study of e-scooter riders in the United Kingdom found these trips produced up to 45 percent less carbon dioxide than alternatives.
US researchers estimate that if e-bike trips expanded to 11 percent of all vehicle trips, transport emissions would fall by about 7 percent.
As petrol prices increase and battery prices fall, the cheaper running costs of electric vehicles and even cheaper running costs of electric mopeds, bikes, and scooters will keep eating away at the demand for oil.
Global oil demand is now projected to peak in 2028 at 105.7 million barrels per day—and then begin to fall, according to the International Energy Agency.
Electric vehicles will play a role in cutting oil demand. But it may well be that electric micromobility cuts demand faster, given how fast these cheaper, more plentiful options are being taken up.
What does this mean for me?
If you’re looking to go electric, it’s worth taking a close look at your transport needs. If you live in an outer suburb or regional towns, you may find the longer range and larger capacity of an electric car is better suited.But for many people, it’s likely you’ll have a range of options. You might have one electric vehicle for longer trips, or group trips, as well as an e-bike for the school run or groceries.
Muhammad Rizwan Azhar, Edith Cowan University and Waqas Uzair, Edith Cowan University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Hijo de luna
Superstar
Good to be back outdoors
E-Bikes Overtake Buggies for Some Amish - This E-Bike Life
In some Amish communities these days, e-bikes are beginning to outnumber buggies on the roads. Horse-drawn buggies, long a symbol of the Amish lifestyle, are finding less use as more people in Amish communities adopt electric-powered bicycles. In small Amish towns across America such as...
thisebikelife.com
E-BIKES OVERTAKE BUGGIES FOR SOME AMISH
In some Amish communities these days, e-bikes are beginning to outnumber buggies on the roads. Horse-drawn buggies, long a symbol of the Amish lifestyle, are finding less use as more people in Amish communities adopt electric-powered bicycles.
In small Amish towns across America such as Sugarcreek, Ohio, Napponee, Indiana, and Kalona, Iowa, e-bikes are gaining in popularity as a practical means of everyday transportation. In the Amish faith, members do not drive cars and trucks, so they have traditionally relied on horse-drawn buggies for commuting to work, shopping, and other local errands.
E-bikes are changing this tradition.
“It’s a lot quicker to jump on your bike and go into town than it is to bring your horse into the barn, harness it to the buggy, and go,” said David Mullett, owner of E-Bikes of Holmes County, a popular bike shop in Holmes County, Ohio. “It’s a lot quicker and you travel faster too.”
A member of the Old Order Amish Church, Mullett has seen phenomenal growth in the popularity of e-bikes among the Amish in Holmes County, Ohio, which rivals Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, as one of the largest Amish settlements in the world.
“Back when I started the company (in 2016) only a small percentage of the Amish community were riding bikes in this area,” Mullett said. “Since 2017 to 2018, it really grew in our community.”
FROM PUSH SCOOTERS TO E-BIKES
Traditional Amish push scooter. Source: amishamerica.com
Not all Amish ride bicycles of any type, let alone electric-powered ones. It depends on local church teachings. In Lancaster County, for instance, bike usage is confined largely to push scooters, a bike design unique to the Amish that resembles a full-size bicycle but without pedals or gears. Most local transportation there is still by horse-drawn buggies.
“Some (Amish) are starting to use e-bikes here,” said Randy Martin, owner of Lancaster Bicycle Shop. “It varies quiete a bit from one district (of the church) to the other.” He confirmed, however, that most Amish there still use push scooters, if they ride at all.
Mullett explained why some Amish are using e-bikes while others are not.
“There are different denominations of Amish. Some don’t have any sort of bicycles. Each church can make their own set of guidelines. Just because one church has it doesn’t mean the neighboring church has allowed it. That’s not just for e-bikes but for anything.”
COMMUTING TO WORK
While many cyclists enjoy their bikes for recreation and fitness, for the Amish the e-bike is a practical choice for daily transportation.
“Commuting to work is probably the No. 1 way that electric bikes are being used,” Mullett said, nothing that he commutes by bike to the bike shop. “Some people are commuting eight to 10 miles, some only one or two miles, but they jump on their bike and go. With a traditional bike, that would never have been considered.”
An e-bike is faster than the traditional buggie and cheaper than hiring a non-Amish motorist to drive them to work, a common practice in Amish communities. They are allowed to ride in cars that they neither own nor drive.
“They would have had to hire a driver or the place of work would have had to hire a driver to bring in their employees,” Mullett said. “That still happens, but there are more people who commute to work every day on e-bikes.”
RIDING TO WALMART
Another common use for electric bikes is for shopping. The local Walmart store in Millersburg, Ohio, has covered parking for e-bikes and buggies that includes charging stations for bikes. Many Amish cyclists use trailers to carry groceries or use specially made storage bags like these Carry-All Pannier Bags made locally and sold in Mullet’s shop.
“We sell a lot of trailers for kids, child carriers,” Mullett said. “Women can go shopping and take their kids along and put the groceries in the trailer as well for the commute home.”
Three-wheel versions of electric bikes, often called e-trikes, are another popular option. They are ideal for carrying cargo or for riders who aren’t as confident about balancing a bike.
HOW THE AMISH CHARGE THEIR E-BIKE BATTERIES
Traditionally, Amish homes and businesses did not have electricity. This raises the question of how do the Amish keep their e-bike batteries charged? The answer is that many homes and businesses in the same Amish communities that approve of e-bike use also have adopted solar power and natural-gas generators. Mullett’s bike shop, for instance, has all the modern trappings that use electricity including computers, printers, lights, and power tools. The store is totally off the grid, something that is important to Amish families, but it is not lacking in electric power. It has 24 solar panels on the roof, a natural-gas backup generator, powerful lithium batteries, and twin 5,500-watt inverters.
E-bike charging stations are common in Ohio’s Amish Country.
Many homes, shops, barns, and offices in Ohio’s picturesque Amish Country have similar electric systems, which has helped transform Amish life in recent years. Not only are most of his customers able to charge their e-bikes at home, but Mullett said many employers and other locations in the community provide charging stations.
“A lot of businesses are doing this (charging stations) as a favor for their customers,” Mullett said.
As an aside, Mullet noted that Amish communities are probably the “greenest” communities in America with their absence of gas-guzzling autosmobiles and widespread use of solar power, bicycles, and buggies.
SAFETY ISSUES
As with buggies, safety issues are a paramount concern to the Amish who ride e-bikes on roads shared with cars and trucks. Most roads in Ohio’s Amish Country are two-lane rural roads and do not have wide shoulders. Due to the hilly terrain, many of the roads are twisty and do not provide good visibility when motorists come over crests.Adding to the problem is that when e-bikes first became popular many Amish did not have experience riding bicycles, so safe riding techniques had to be learned. Mullett said Amish community leaders and county government officials have cooperated to teach safe-riding habits and to make the roads safer. Wide shoulders suitable for buggies and bikes are being added to many roads.
“Safety vests and helmets are both gaining in popularity,” Mullett said.
At the same time, helmets pose special problems for Amish women. They grow their hair long and keep it wrapped in a bun covered with a cap. For this reason, most bike helmets do not fit Amish women. Mullett said he has talked with some helmet manufacturers and encouraged them to build helmets suitable for Amish women, so far without success. For now, far more men wear helmets than women.
THE FUTURE OF AMISH BUGGIES
Now that e-bikes have arrived in many Amish communities, what will happen to the traditional horse-drawn buggies? Mullet said he doesn’t foresee the end of buggies but thinks the popularity of e-bikes will continue to grow.“Horse and buggies will probably always be a part of the Amish community, but bike transportation is becoming more popular than the horse and buggy in the denominations that have allowed it,” Mullett said.
Even with families who ride e-bikes during the week to work and shop, Mullett said they typically still take the buggy to church services on Sundays. Buggies are also better for longer commutes and for those people who, for various reasons, do not enjoy riding a bike.
E-BIKES ARE PART OF A CHANGING LIFESTYLE FOR THE AMISH
E-bikes may be the most visible change, but they are just one indication of a significant transformation in the everyday life of Amish people. Coupled with the use of power tools in their shops, solar power in their homes, and other modern innovations, daily life for the Amish people is changing perhaps more now than it has at any time in the past century or more. It’s still a very distinctive, faith-based culture that rejects much of the materialism and secularism of the broader Western culture, but change is still occurring.Just as horse-and-buggies symbolized Amish life in the past, the e-bike is the symbol of changing times in many Amish communities today.
LESSONS FOR THE REST OF US
Ironically, the Amish may now be ahead of most of the rest of American society when it comes to their embrace of e-bikes for routine, daily transportation. This is the way of e-bikes are increasingly being used in Europe and in parts of Asia. Not just for fun and recreation, but as a practical, serious means of transportation for short, everyday errands. Think about the benefits to public health if more people followed the Amish example and hopped on an e-bike for quick errands to the drug or grocery store. Imagine how much we could improve the environment if more of us rode e-bikes for short trips versus cranking up a gas-guzzling SUV or pickup truck?There’s much we can learn from the Amish lifestyle, and that definitely includes their integration of e-bikes into their everyday lives.