Kansas City is a terrible biking city. Kansas City is a terrific e-biking city.
Our biking infrastructure is poor and losing pace with peer cities. (I can’t prove this, but since this is an opinion piece, I don’t have to.) Certainly, our off-road trails are nothing to brag about. And our on-street network of protected bike lanes–the only thing that helps a standard cyclist much–is modest and shoddily maintained. If you’re on a standard bike, riding around our metro is dangerous and unpleasant.
Sadly, none of this will change soon, despite the efforts of City Manager Brian Platt to squeeze as much biking infrastructure as possible out of the city budget. At least the conversion of our four- and six-lane arterial streets to three lanes slows traffic enough to yield some benefits for the standard cyclist. Still, riding about town on a standard bike is courageous.
You’ll need to hug the right side of the road as cars zoom by, forced in many cases to play Russian Roulette with the doors of parked cars that could fly open straight into your path without notice. You’ll be at risk at every signaled intersection, as you struggle to come up to speed while the cars are doing anything but looking out for you. All the while, you’ll face annoyance from drivers for whom your presence on the road might delay them for a few seconds.
If you’re lucky enough to find a protected bike lane, it will likely be strewn with debris, especially in the fall, while the odds of finding lanes to where you want to go are slim.
But hop on an e-bike and you inhabit a different world. You are now in an e-biker’s paradise. And really for two basic reasons: power and speed of the bike.
With the bike’s power, you are free to take any road because Kansas City’s hilly topography is neutralized. You can zip up the steepest, longest hill in town.
The bike’s power will allow you to accelerate at an intersection just like a car–moving you quickly out of the danger zone and keeping you from becoming an obstacle to cars. They are happier and your odds of survival just went way up.
If you pick the right roads, you will be able to cruise at (or near) the speed of auto traffic, which is far safer than being eclipsed by cars traveling at several times your speed. You can ride in the middle of the traffic lane rather than over near the parked cars. You may find that cars rarely feel the need to even pass you. You might even start finding yourself sitting among the same set of cars at several intersections as you keep pace. (I speculate this improves the behavior of motorists who find they can’t necessarily escape you.)
And picking the right road is easy–Kansas City may lack bike paths but it has an abundance of streets with very little traffic that are pleasant to ride. Even many of our arterial roads qualify. Enjoy tree-lined routes, take your pick.
Kansas City has never been a walkable city–and won’t be–but it is a streetcar city. It grew according to one of the nation’s best streetcar networks, and with an e-bike, you own you’re very own personal streetcar. It covers distance at the same rate, making your radius of operation roughly 10 miles. Draw a circle with such a radius from your home and see just how much of the city this covers. You’ll find that you can cover much of the city, easily.
e-biking in Kansas City 