Monday, June 13, 2016

There are limits to imagination

The photographs were taken on May 29th in Nuuksio.

Today on the way home riding the bicycle there was a lady, quite a few years older than me, whom I passed at one point, but she caught up with me several times when I stopped a traffic lights or when I slowed when going uphill. It took me some time to realize that she had an e-bike and that explained her speed. Or perhaps the bicycle just looked like an e-bike.

(Posting title is from the poem Heroic Simile by Robert Hass.)

2 comments:

Markus said...

Oh I know that surprise, Juha - those bikes meanwhile look unspectacular so you really don't recognize them at first glance! But that's a good development, boosting non-car traffic in the cities. I'd only wish that the space for bicycles in the street would grow accordingly.

Juha Haataja said...

Indeed. I would expect that when the prices come down the interest to e-bikes will grow quite a lot. It would offer lots of benefits, such as better air quality (less cars on the streets), better health and so on. But there is already a problem of space on the streets, and that will get worse if not taken into account in urban planning.