Electric Commuter

The great thing about school starting again is that all the undergrads come back from Christmas break with a variety of hardy little viruses, one of which I now play host to. I woke up Wednesday feeling like absolute crap. While it certainly wasn’t the most fun riding in to work the last couple days, while ill enough that I couldn’t really do my job once there, it wasn’t the painful process it would have been unassisted. Indeed, I’m sure the light exercise did me some good. And again, at no time did I have any desire to drive my car, nor did I have an excuse to.
I think the repeating theme here is replacing a heavy, inefficient means of transportation for a light, fast, highly efficient one. The option of a vehicle like the Snugg commuter literally makes my car irrelevant for all but the most extreme cases such as trips over 40 miles…or if I need to carry more than two other people.

It’s been great fun riding this rocketship around Bozeman the last couple weeks. But, this weekend I’ll be returning the Snugg to John and Wiley. Sometime early next week they’ll hand it over to another local commuter who will be blogging here about the bike, and try to push the limits of the design in a real world situation. I must admit I’ll miss it. I will especially miss having all that available speed, particularly when it comes to keeping up with (and passing) traffic.

In the last 24 hours the Snugg has twice saved me from making a bad decision. The first time was last night. I had just gotten back from Bridger Bowl, Bozeman’s local ski area. I was telemark skiing all day, and I was tired, and I mean the kind of tired that makes sitting on the couch kind of a chore. Whilst getting some much needed steak and potatoes prepared I get the text, there’s a little get together, am I coming? Well of course not, I’m sitting on my butt in front of the T.V. I’m certainly not riding a bike across town. To top it off, there’s a fifteen mile an hour headwind the whole way. If I do go, I’m driving my car. Then, it occurs to me, there’s an electric bike in my garage, it’s not like I actually have to work really hard to get anywhere. So, after arriving at Molly’s in fine style by passing a couple Suby’s on my 28 mph sprint down Main Street, I promptly had a few beers and feel asleep on her couch instead of my own.

The second time the Snugg kept me from behind the wheel of my car was this morning. I woke up, showered, dressed, went downstairs, and opened the garage door to this.

Hmmm…that doesn’t look like a lot of fun, maybe I’d better put on another layer.

Now I consider myself a fairly dedicated cycling commuter, but that much fresh snow is a lot of work to ride through, just laying down enough power to keep the front wheel tracking straight is quite the effort. And remember I’ve got to do it with the sore quads and hangover that are my reward from the previous day’s activities. Nonetheless owing nothing to my strength of will, I swung a leg over the Snugg custom Surly Cross Check and headed off through a veritable blizzard. The bike performed flawlessly on my trip to work, the steering was a little squirrely in the packed snow ruts, but the power of the electric assist kept my momentum more or less forward. On a normal bike, I would have simply spun out as I lost forward momentum and the front wheel tracked off to the side. With the Snugg I could simply maintain upright balance and let the motor power through. It required some agile steering, but it was doable. Tragically, my judgment was not so well dialed and I headed out without my usual facemask…cold.

Now that I’ve had the Snugg prototype for a few days, and put thirty or so miles on it, I have some thoughts. These thoughts, fortunately, are quite contrary to some preconceptions I carried into this experiment. One of those preconceptions, given the weather of late, was that I would not be working much on the bike, and would therefore feel cold. Another was that riding something with a motor would be the equivalent to riding a scooter or a small motorcycle, which while not completely antithetical to my philosophy about transportation, still not my first choice. I am after all a cyclist, not a motorcyclist.

Fortunately neither of those concerns turned out to have any merit, essentially for the same reason. This bike feels like exactly that, a bike. When I take off in the morning I have the exact same feeling as if I were riding my xtracycle, I’m riding a bicycle to work. The only change is that it is much much faster than a conventional bicycle. Now granted, I could if I chose, put it in a low gear and pedal the modicum rate that would engage the motor, and therefore let the motor basically push me down the road at around 20 miles an hour. But the emotion evoked while riding the Snugg commuter is the same as while riding a good downhill section, or home from the bar with a brisk tailwind. That extra sensation of speed is so exhilarating that I find myself pedaling much harder than I normally would unassisted. Now, instead of increasing my cadence to catch and pass another cyclist that has turned onto the road a block ahead, I am trying to chase down that Escalade, and more often than not, I catch it. Because now I can maintain a speed for several blocks that is greater than the speedlimit in most instances. I therefore arrive at my lab every morning, slightly out of breath, sweating just a bit (even this last week with temps in the single digits, that’s well below zero for the Canadians and Europeans out there), and with a small smile on my face that I lack on the few and regrettable days that I drive my car. Cuz I just rode a bike to work, I just did it in about half the time it would normally take.

Hi. I’m Casey.

Over the last few months John and Wiley have been producing a dedicated commuting bicycle with the added benefit of an electric assist. I’m sure they designed it well, and gave a lot of thought to various aspects of their bike, but how does this thing perform in the real world? Well, to find out they’ve turned to various friends and acquaintances who ride, and when I say ride, I mean all the time. We ride to work. We ride for fun. We ride to the bar, to the store, to get a six pack, to the bike shop, to the other side of town just cuz. We go mountain biking in the middle of January because we NEED to. We’re not athletes. We’re not training for anything. We would just rather ride a bike. We don’t even hate cars (I own a ‘94 toyota 4runner, it gets me to the trailhead), we just think it’s absurd to drive less than 10 miles every day. Mostly, we LOVE bikes.

Tonight, I was the first to take possession of the Snugg electric bike prototype, or as I have begun to affectionately refer to it in the cockles of my heart, ‘this bad-a$$ mutha’.

Over the next few days I will be putting it through its paces on the mean streets of Bozeman…ok, they’re actually quite pleasant, but this time of year the road conditions are unpredictably snow covered to say the least.

My daily commute involves riding surfaces ranging from well packed snow and ice

to relatively “clear” tracks cut through the snow by the continuous pressure of not-bike forms of transportation.

Bozeman doesn’t deem it a necessary expenditure of funding to plow you see, and this time of year temperatures have been dropping well below zero.

These roads are a pretty good representation of the conditions I and my friends experience in our daily commutes. So check back in the days and weeks ahead for impressions of the Snugg electric bike. Several dedicated practical cyclists in the Bozeman area will be riding the bike and posting here about their experiences while we expose this bike to the harsh proving ground afforded by the northern rockies in January.

For an initial impression, until I put some real miles on this thing, it’s faaaassssssst.

Note: This entry is cross-posted in the Practical Pedal Blog as well.

My commute is only 4-miles round trip, but it begins at 4 a.m. And because its been snowing here for the last few days, that means I am on the road before the plows have scraped the streets. The bank sign on Main street read 16 degrees. There are no bike lanes because hey, that plowed snow has to go somewhere, right? So I ride in the middle of the lane.

At 4 a.m. my ride is amazing. No cars, the silent crunch of snow, a city still sleeping. But when I ride back home at 9:30 a.m., the streets are a bit different. Traffic wakes up and cars once again dominate the roads. But on the electric bike, I still take the middle lane. With the studded tires, I can do 25mph on a plowed street with more traction that most cars. Off the line I’m definitely faster. The cars spin wheels, the trucks fishtail, but the electric bike takes off. My stopping distance is better as well. And because most drivers are sensibly driving slower than they would on clear roads, the 25mph speed is more than enough to allow me to remain in the center of the lane (the center wheel rut, actually) where there is good traction.

Next week, when we hand the electric bike over to Casey for his eight mile commute, I’ll be switching back to a regular bike. This will change the game a bit. I’ll have to find an alternate route because I won’t be able to keep up with traffic on the main thoroughfares. I’m working on some a.m. commute photos, but that requires getting up even earlier, so I make no firm promises.

We’ve built the bike, designed the controller, installed the motor, molded the controls and now, after months of testing, we’re loaning out our prototype electric Surly Cross Check to a few bicycle commuters. In return, they’ll be giving you daily reports from the snowy streets of Bozeman, Montana.

Here are the quick specs:

• Surly Cross Check frame
• Full Fenders (Planet Bike)
• Nokian 700 x 35mm studded snow tires
• Brushless DC hub motor
• Custom-designed “snugg-fit” interface/motor controller designed here in Bozeman by Snugg Bicycles.
• 40-mile range
• 25 mph top-speed
• Lithium-polymer batteries

We’ll be choosing a few daily commuters to put this thing through its paces. So stay tuned.