E-Bikes Are a Scourge on Every Major City
Not as bad as cars, but still very annoying.
When a hangover is in full effect, it is oddly stylish and cheesy in roughly equal measure, cheap in ways that more or less rhyme with a weekend warrior’s negligible ambitions. Against all odds, I made it to the fifth location this past Saturday night. In the crisp glow of the following morning, I am down horrendously. A severe head pain is filling or at least cluttering my dumb precious Sunday. One painful part of getting older is bumping up against not just the finitude of what you can remember and do, but how much of it will invariably wind up as a discombobulated stroll along the sidewalk on a cursed quest for Riptide Rush Gatorade. The sunglasses are on because the vibes are tremendously off. During these types of excursions, I am left alone to stew in my own internal monologues, collecting prickly self-doubts and donkey-brained observations, like end-stage Howard Hughes sorting and saving his own toenail clippings. It’s hard to talk about my own POV in a way that isn’t morbid—or at least a desperate probe into something more profound—because my mind is somewhere between going and all the way gone, and some of it is just reflexive of The Broader Circumstances.
It’s not enough that the Sysphian rigors of surviving a hangover in your 30s is crushing my very spirit, but trying to keep it together as I am greeted with my biggest pet peeve mostly points back to the question of how a person should try to behave in public. When I see a cyclist on a sidewalk—especially right next to a dedicated bike lane—my internal rage ranges from telling 13-year-olds to shut up online in defense of Mac Jones to beating these people senseless with a crowbar Sopranos-style. The idea that there’s some other, easier, happier way to be that could simply be opted into is kind of a classic as far as existential fallacies go, and it’s much more gratifying to indulge in a fantasy of me extending my right arm to clothesline them in the jaw as they zip by. I think about the importance of consequences until it dances right up to the line of some real MSNBC behavior, but I stop short of it by settling for refusing to move out of their way out of sheer retributive pettiness.
In a city where traffic laws are apparently traffic suggestions and the crosswalk is no longer a safe haven from impaling and twitchy SUV drivers, shrewd jaywalking was a great option to get around in a way that was timely, sensible, and adventurous. The beauty of playing IRL Frogger is it’s a game you can only lose once. Now the rise of e-bikes and mopeds has turned this fun activity into a nightmare. Looking both ways before crossing the street is like watching Mad Max Fury Road with severe budget cuts. There are people riding these suped-up bikes in full body armor delivering a three-roll sushi combo as if they were piloting the bus on Speed. Heaven forbid if they dip below 50 miles per hour, some ham-faced monster won’t receive their yellowtail scallion within 45 minutes of their order—and they will literally implode over the most milquetoast delivery transgression.
It deranges me beyond any reasonable measure to think about how many of these e-bikes are Uber Eats or DoorDash employees delivering $7 McDonald’s orders to gluttonous sloths. It is especially infuriating because most of these deliveries are under a mile away and these people literally chose a Quarter Pounder over any food in their house. Fast food is quite possibly the dumbest thing to order for delivery because its shelf life is approximately 15 minutes after leaving the deep fryer and its texture turns into Spongebob dying of terminal cancer; also, fees and tips double the initial cost of the meal. Literally 50 years of MBAs and efficiency experts doing everything they can to streamline the process of getting Big Macs from fryer to face as quickly as possible and people choose to get it delivered and complain that it’s cold and late. This whole dynamic just litters the city with these goddamned e-bikes.
If you’re riding an acoustic ride-share bike—the ones without assisted pedaling—you’re a guppy swimming with the sharks. And these e-bikes have made outdoor dining into an anxiety-ridden ordeal. I still enjoy eating on street patios, even if most of them look like a tee-ball dugout at an underfunded public school. But whenever I have to cross the bike lane to get into the restaurant to pee, I now have to look both ways in fear, feeling like Simba in the wildebeest scene.
spicy take(out)! going nuts trying to decide if this counts as woke or based or just hung over.