Electric Bike Kit is Ordered

This weekend, despite removing 15" of snow from my driveway, the calendar convinced me that the weather will be changing in 4-6 weeks to something that's more suited to riding atop a bicycle. And, given my stated intent to get my *electric* bike built "this winter", I needed to get off my butt and at least get the parts ordered.

So, I ordered the 600W hub motor kit from We're Electrified. It's initially going on the cheap Target bike ($100 or so). That's to help establish a baseline. That this project can be done and works with a clunky cheap bike, ridden by a guy who's never likely to be much smaller than 200 pounds. It looks like the total cost for the project will be about $500. The bike was $100, the kit $350 and the shipping $50 (lead batteries aren't cheap to ship).

Once it's built, I'm going to be using a plug-in electric meter to track the kilowatt hours required per mile traveled. That's for a couple of reasons.

1. To know exactly how much this replacement commuting option costs and saves over driving the truck.
2. To be able to properly size a solar charging solution, rendering the commute powered by the sun.

It'd be easy to over or under estimate the size of the solar charging setup. I want it to match my actual commute fairly well.

Beyond the electric bike, I want to also get a gas moped of some sort. Either a "traditional" 49cc moped or something more "bicycle" styled like one of these or these. I'm also intrigued by this 3 wheeled electric vehicle. That kit, my electric bike and a gas bike would cost less than $4500, and provide a variety of options, ALL of them greener than my current truck. The point being a continuum of transportation options.

I'm still going to keep the pickup, because it's paid for and is useful for hauling cargo. However, I'd like to have it shift to occasional use (which has the side effect of it lasting longer) to be replaced by lighter options rather than trying to have a single vehicle for all of my needs. That "all-in-one" approach is what's led to so many SUV's on the road in the United States. Since we believe we can only have our one vehicle (per person of course), we insist that it can take care of everything we might possibly need.

As a result, instead of renting a van, the 1 time per year we need to transport a group of 7 adults somewhere, we drive around 364 other days of the year by ourselves in an 8 passenger SUV. Instead of considering an electric vehicle that will cover our needs for everything except for 2 trips to Grandma's a year (and renting a car for the long trip), we turn it down because it can't drive more than 150 miles in a day.

So, I'm taking a stab at incremental improvement. I'm not going to pretend that I'll somehow find myself willing to take up full human-powered cycling. I've tried that in the past and didn't get very far. I think the key is to treat this as something where you work toward improvement *over your current situation* instead of worrying about comparing to the ideal, you are making things better. Success needs to be anchored to the appropriate benchmark. And, that benchmark needs to be *your* starting point, not the perfect end point.

And with every gallon of gas not burned, you save 19 pounds of carbon dioxide from getting dumped into the air. If I replace 105 round trips to work, that's a literal ton of CO2 that stays out of the air.

Now, I just have to figure out how to get a decent MP3 speaker setup strapped to it by the time I'm ready to roll.