This isn’t your grandma’s electric bike!
A Cobble Hill cycle store is peddling a new battery-powered bike that is a far ride from the illicit motorized delivery bikes that plague the borough’s streets, according to an employee. For one thing, they’re totally legal, and for another, they actually look cool, he said.
“A lot of people don’t want to buy an electric bicycle because they’re ugly or for old people,” said Brent van Assen, a Prospect Heights resident who manages the Van Moof store on Baltic Street near Court Street. “Most of the time people don’t know it’s an electric bicycle until you tell them.”
The city made most electric bikes illegal in 2004, but Van Moof’s version is permitted because it requires the user to do most of the work to power it and does not depend solely on the motor to operate, according to a rep for the police department.
The high-tech rides have a small motor in the front wheel hub that gives riders some extra oomph as they pedal, but switches off after the two-wheeler reaches 21.5 miles per hour.
The bikes — which cost between $2,000 to $3,000 — come with a touch screen, where riders select how much assistance they want while riding. Van Assen claims that the motor is barely audible and people on the street wouldn’t be able to pick out an electric bike from a traditional bike.
“The sound that you hear is the sound of the tires against the road,” he said.
There is still some extra leg-work involved — it takes six hours to recharge the battery to full capacity, he said. But once it is juiced up, it lasts for 75 miles — enough to ride over the Brooklyn Bridge and back 38 times.
That is just as well, as Van Assen says many of the people who come in looking for the souped-up cycles are commuters who need some extra help as they pedal over bridges and hills on their way to the office — or moms who want a leg-up while carting around their youngsters.
“A lot of people who commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan and think the bridges or distances are too much are looking at them,” he said.
Try out an electric bike at Van Moof [269 Baltic St. between Court and Smith streets in Cobble Hill, (347) 227–7477].
