No one parodies Hacker News comments as well as Hacker News commenters.
This is a piece about one guy's emotions and feelings about the rise of e-bikes. He's not policing anything. He's not setting government policies. He's lamenting that bicycling, especially in NYC, was once an activity for people who had to physically struggle with it and who got some viceral return from that and now it's just another form of commuting alongside cars, taxis and the subway.
He's not telling anyone not to buy an e-bike. He's not saying they don't belong on the road. People have written the same pieces about automatic transmission in cars and all other sorts of automation. Of course e-bikes will continue to grow. But riding one will never be the same as doing it all yourself.
The attitude in the article reminds me of a passage from George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier:
"Everyone who has travelled by primitive methods in an undeveloped country knows that the difference between that kind of travel and modern travel in trains, cars, etc., is the difference between life and death. The nomad who walks or rides, with his baggage stowed on a camel or an ox-cart, may suffer every kind of discomfort, but at least he is living while he is travelling; whereas for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner his journey is an interregnum, a kind of temporary death. And yet so long as the railways exist, one has got to travel by train—or by car or aeroplane. Here am I, forty miles from London. When I want to go up to London why do I not pack my luggage on to a mule and set out on foot, making a two days of it? Because, with the Green Line buses whizzing past me every ten minutes, such a journey would be intolerably irksome. In order that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no other method should be available. No human being ever wants to do anything in a more cumbrous way than is necessary."
For someone to whom the effort required to be a bicyclist was a badge of honor, an electric bike is the equivalent of that annoying Green Line bus, I would think..
I get your point, but I think it's somewhat ironic we currently have this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15045531 just a few items below the current on on the frontpage.
This is a piece about one guy's emotions and feelings about the rise of e-bikes. He's not policing anything. He's not setting government policies. He's lamenting that bicycling, especially in NYC, was once an activity for people who had to physically struggle with it and who got some viceral return from that and now it's just another form of commuting alongside cars, taxis and the subway.
He's not telling anyone not to buy an e-bike. He's not saying they don't belong on the road. People have written the same pieces about automatic transmission in cars and all other sorts of automation. Of course e-bikes will continue to grow. But riding one will never be the same as doing it all yourself.