So let’s face the facts. Getting around in cities is terrible.

If you’re lucky, you pay obscene amounts of money to own, maintain, fuel and park a 4000lb car whose main purpose is to haul your feeble, doughy body to and from your workplace. Then you crawl along the road at 8 miles an hour, listening to radio ads and belching toxic gas into the atmosphere.

And if you can’t afford that, you’re condemned to transit hell.

If the word “bus” doesn’t instantly conjure memories of close encounters with florid lunatics, you probably don’t live in a large American city.

It’s not my favorite way of waking up in the morning.

Being crammed into a sweltering underground tube with a bunch of pissed-off strangers is only slightly better. And I’m not a germophobe, but I suddenly find myself wondering if somebody is going to cough Coronavirus directly into my open mouth whenever I’m in a confined space with large numbers of people.

Sure, you could find a shared scooter – no, not the one somebody smashed and chucked in a hedge, one of the working ones! But unless you live and work right in the center, you probably can’t count on that every day. Especially at 8:30 and 5:05 when everyone else has the same idea. Same problem with Uber – congestion pricing is not your friend.

So sharing isn’t going to fly, and unless something radically changes, it seems unlikely that our government is going to solve the traffic or mass transit problems any time soon.

Enter the electric bicycle.

It’s like a regular bicycle, except riding it doesn’t suck half the time.

Imagine a magical city in which every place you want to go is down hill. You can now confidently ride to work without being drenched in sweat. You can get anywhere faster than you would in a car, and park right in front like a rockstar when you arrive. You can load up a saddle bag with groceries or strap a couple kids to the back without developing those weird calf bulges like that roadie in your office who waxes his legs.

If you want to get a workout, you still have pedals – push a bit harder and ride in a higher gear. But it’s not mandatory. You can just spin the cranks or (jurisdiction permitting) twist the throttle.

It’s simply the best way to get around a city. Discover what Europe and Asia already know: you need an ebike.