Reply to How is driving your kids in traffic on an electric bike any different than having them on a motorcycle?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Just wondering lately, as I have witnessed so many parents with their toddlers on their electric bikes driving in rush hour how it is any different than having them on a motorcycle? At least on a motorcycle, people wear more than a bike helmet?[/quote]
It drives me nuts that parents will - 
not drink coffee while pregnant
or eat cold cuts
or sushi
or drink
and make sure their breastmilk is filter from forever plastics 
will get the uber expensive crib that monitors breathing
But have no problem with their toddler being on an ebike
[/quote]

There's a simple explanation. It's performative, not safety, behaviors. [/quote]

Yes. What all the thinks PP lists have in common with riding around with your kids on an cargo e-bike is that they are all things UMC people can do to project that they are educated, left leaning, urban, and cosmopolitan.

I say this as an educated, left-leaning, city person. There are also other reasons to do all of those things, but there is an inherent hypocrisy that a lot of my peers ignore because living a certain lifestyle/projecting a certain images matters more to them than adhering to any actual values system or even logic.[/quote]

I don't know. I was annoyed by the look of these until I tried one and then realized how easy they make life. I'm truly not trying to signal anything. I do use it to take my son to school, on very slow city streets, averaging 12 mph. It's much faster than driving -- when driving i regularly get caught in a line at a red light and sometimes have to wait for a few light cycles, but ebikes can always go to the front of the block so you never get stuck. And you can park anywhere. and it feels much safer than my child biking himself, though we do that, too.

the commute is 1.5 miles

ebike commute: 7 minutes
car commute: 15 minutes
him biking himself: 20 minutes.

[/quote]

PP here. I wasn't talking about someone using one of these for short, reasonably slow commutes on residential streets with bike lanes. I'm talking about people cruising down Georgia Avenue in rush hour traffic with preschoolers on the back of their bike and then condescendingly tsk-tsking parents at their school who allow their kids to watch Paw Patrol or eat processed foods. They are doing something objectively dangerous with their kids daily, and proudly, while judging other parents for doing much less dangerous things. But since bike commutes, screen free parenting, and organic food all convey a very specific lifestyle, it's viewed as consistent and they feel comfortable looking down on other parents and believing they've somehow figured it out.

I've encountered parents who are judgmental about other parents food and screen habits and then ALSO judgmental of people who drive their kids to school or don't want to drop several thousand dollars on an e-bike that they will only be able to safely use for short local trips (so parents who don't feel comfortable going 25 mph down Georgia Avenue to their kids' school/daycare several miles away). Because it's not about safety or the best interest of the kids. It's about focusing your spending and your interests on parenting choices that scream "urbanism" or "European" because you are deeply insecure and need the validation that comes from feeling Dutch for 20 minutes a day.

I say all this as someone who cares about the quality of my kids' food, restricts screens, and prefers biking/walking to driving for both health and environmental reasons. I still find a lot of the "e-bike advocates" in DC to be hypocritical aholes who view their e-bikes as status signifiers and gleefully ignore perfectly rational objections to them (safety, limited use, the necessity for most families to maintain a car anyway because e-bikes are not appropriate for all commutes or needed transportation purposes).

Once I was at a parent event at my kids' school and a group of parents were talking about how we could incentivize more families buying cargo e-bikes to reduce the number of cars dropping off kids. I said, "what if instead we advocated for better public transit options serving the school?" and people told me that was "unworkable" because WMATA would never listen. They honestly believed that trying to convince a diverse population of parents to all spend 4-8k on cargo bikes that many would have to commute through areas with dangerous traffic was more "workable" than asking WMATA for better bus service near the school. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.[/quote]

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