This Futuristic Bike Is The Solution To All Of Your Commuting Problems
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For many urban dwellers across the country, commuting is easily the most painful window of time you experience each day. Sitting in traffic jams sucks. Waiting around for delayed trains sucks. And crawling down the street on a local bus that stops every two blocks sucks. But up until this point, if you had to cover a reasonable distance between the office and your front door, few better options existed.
Luckily, this crappy way of life is about to change, thanks to electric pedal-assist bicycles. They knock your old road bike’s top speeds out of the water, keep you feeling fresh and clean even in your fanciest work outfits, automatically build physical activity into your busy day and help keep this wonderful planet of ours healthy.
In light of New York City recently legalizing the use of pedal-assist bikes (ridden at speeds up to 20 miles per hour), we connected with the folks at Trek Bicycle and gave these two-wheelers a little test drive in Brooklyn. While we didn’t quite know what to expect at first, the experience definitely didn’t disappoint.
The Super Commuter+ 7 — the model we took for a spin from Williamsburg to Prospect Park and back — is definitely heavier than your average road bike, which provides an added sense of stability for the more novice riders out there. It looks sleek, simple and unassuming (in case you’re worried about attracting the attention of bike thieves out there). You can ride it like any other bike or you can turn on the electric component powered by a battery pack resting on the center bar. It has several pedal-assist settings — eco, tour, sport and turbo — providing increasingly powerful boosts as you go. And when they say turbo, they mean turbo. Despite those legal limits, we easily hit 25 miles per hour coming down those hills in Prospect Park. Whoops!
After this Sunday joyride, it was clear just how helpful a pedal-assist bike could be every day of the week. They allow you to commute faster and farther without getting crazy sweaty — especially in the summer sun. You can navigate any bike path (and plenty of busy roads) with ease. And even if the pedaling requires less effort than it usually would on a standard road bike, spending your journey to and from work moving outside among the elements sure as hell beats sitting in a car, bus or train for hours upon hours. (Really, we all sit enough as it is.) What’s more, the bikes are perfectly green, leaving zero carbon emissions and air pollution behind, bringing us one step further to the sustainable cities we need to be creating.
Now, naturally, these bikes are a financial investment. But hey, any quality bike is going to come at a price, right? The Trek model we rode, which is a new 2018 addition to their extensive lineup, costs just under $3,700.
But let’s think about this for a second: This bike is intended to eliminate your need for a car (and thus insurance, registration, gasoline, maintenance and monthly payments if you didn’t buy the car outright), private ride services (taxis, Ubers, Lyfts, you name it) and public transportation (and the accumulative riding fees that come with it). Not to mention, it’s the only option among this list that helps the environment. If you go this bike route with the intention of using it as your primary means of navigating the city you call home, of making it a core component of your lifestyle, it will easily pay for itself — and then some.
Honestly, after getting a glimpse of what our future commutes (and our weekend explorations) could feel like with these bikes, we’re seriously considering opening another savings account just for this future purchase. Talk about an adult investment.
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