Longtails to Long Tailpipes

My massage therapist now rides a big black Yuba Mundo cargo bike, or longtail, like the one in the video above. While I was on the table he raved about the financial advantages of ditching his car, skipping the bus and cycling around town. He had even let his Zipcar membership lapse. He likes riding in an upright posture, because it takes stress off his arms, which are his tools. He's been riding all winter, which has been mild, but I do see people riding in the snow. I haven't been willing to try that, even though Dmitry Orlov says it is common enough elsewhere:

Around the world, for over a century, people everywhere have used the bicycle to get around in every kind of climate and weather. There are year-round bicyclists in the Sahara, as well as in Edmonton, Alberta. Bicycling year-round is very much a solved problem everywhere. Here in Boston I know dozens of people who commute by bicycle year-round, and I see hundreds of people out on bicycles, every day, at all times of the year.

And yet with just about any random group of people I encounter the idea of bicycling through winter is regarded as very strange: somewhere between suicidal and heroic. (The fact that driving a car is far more dangerous, and suicidal on multiple levels, does not seem to register with most people.) What can I say? To each his own. As for me, I am perfectly comfortable riding a bicycle year-round.

Yuba is a big bike for a taller person, while Surly's Big Dummy is available in four sizes. Here's an enthusiastic ten minute video on all sorts of cargo bikes. 

For an extra 1500 dollars, you can get the Yuba Mundo with electric drive, which probably makes sense for hauling a load. Like a lot of folding bikes, my Xootr Swift can be fitted with a Bionx kit, and Currie offers conversion kits for conventional bikes. I've debated adding electric drive to a bike. It's a tempting thought to ride to work without sweating, but I also worry about going too fast too easily with only ordinary brakes for stopping. I've read reports of thousands of e-bike and electric moped accidents in Asia.

Several years ago, I test rode a TidalForce M-750, which is based on the Montague Paratrooper folding bike. The M-750 had a powerful motor and good brakes, and frankly felt more like riding a motorcycle. I couldn't imagine pedaling its 75 lb dead weight uphill with a dead battery, though. 

In a very long article on EV World, A Battery and a Pair of Wheels, Ed Benjamin considers electric four wheel bad, electric two wheel good:
 

Electric cars are still a tiny, and struggling business. Though rapidly becoming successful, electric cars are exactly the tiny, short ranged, and boring in concept, vehicles that have been presented for decades. While I think they are overdue, they are not very creative. And they do not own any transportation niche (yet).

And they have a cultural problem. They represent a reduction in utility for the user of a fossil fuel vehicle. While there may not be a real problem in accepting the reduced utility – it is not human nature to go in that direction. So in North America, (which is really the only totally-car culture) EVs will struggle for a while yet.

For very large parts of the human race, the gas-powered car is not, and never has been their primary transportation. For most humans, to walk, to ride a bike, take the metro, or ride an electric bicycle is their daily travel method. Owning a gas-powered car is regarded as an expensive and not very practical luxury by most humans.

EV World editor Bill Moore is long on electrics of all types, and was perplexed by a study of vehicle emissions in China making the rounds on energy blogs. I first saw it on Green Car Congress, and it focused on the huge amount of fine particles in the Middle Kingdom's atmosphere. Moore contacted Chris Cherry, the lead author, and concluded:

As to the question of the environmental impact of electric cars compared to gasoline, the issue really isn't how dirty electric cars are, they aren't because they produce zero local emissions, compared with ICE-age models. The problem is how dirty China's electric power grid is.

This is essentially the long tailpipe argument with rebuttal. EV proponents hate long tailpipe because it ties their clean new devices to the source of power. Their rebuttals always presume greater efficiency in the use of power, which is certainly true of electric bikes, and cleaner generation of power, which given approaches like fracking cannot be predicted with certainty.