It was nighttime, a soft summer night, and I was standing on Eighty-second Street and Second Avenue, in Manhattan, with my wife and another couple. We were in the midst of saying goodbye on the small island between the bike lane and the avenue when a bike whooshed by, soundless and very fast. I had been back in New York for only a week. As is always the case when I arrive after a period of months away, I was tuned to any change in the city’s ambient hum. When that bike flew past, I felt a shift in the familiar rhythm of the city as I had known it. I watched the guy as he travelled on the green bike path. He was speeding down the hill, but he wasn’t pedalling and showed no sign of exertion. For a moment, the disjunction between effort and velocity confused me. Then it dawned on me that he was riding an electric bike.

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Like most of the guys you see with electric bikes in New York, he was a food-delivery guy. Their electric bikes tend to have giant batteries, capable of tremendous torque and horsepower. They are the vanguard, the visible part of the iceberg, but they are not indicative of what is to come. Their bikes are so conspicuously something other than a bike, for one thing. For another, the utility of having a battery speed up your delivery is so straightforward that it forecloses discussion. What lies ahead is more ambiguous. The electric bikes for sale around the city now have batteries that are slender, barely visible. The priority is not speed so much as assisted living.

I grew up as a bike rider in Manhattan, and I also worked as a bike messenger, where I absorbed the spartan, libertarian, every-man-for-himself ethos: you need to get somewhere as fast as possible, and you did what you had to do in order to get there. The momentum you give is the momentum you get. Bike messengers were once faddish for their look, but it’s this feeling of solitude and self-reliance that is, along with the cult of momentum, the essential element of that profession. The city—with its dedicated lanes and greenways—is a bicycle nirvana compared with what it once was, and I have had to struggle to remake my bicycle life in this new world of good citizenship. And yet, immediately, there was something about electric bikes that offended me. On a bike, velocity is all. That guy on the electric bike speeding through the night was probably going to have to brake hard at some point soon. If he wanted to pedal that fast to attain top speed on the Second Avenue hill that sloped down from the high Eighties, then it was his right to squander it. But he hadn’t worked to go that fast. And, after he braked—for a car, or a pedestrian, or a turn—he wouldn’t have to work to pick up speed again.

“It’s a cheat!” my friend Rob Kotch, the owner of Breakaway Courier Systems, said, when I got him on the phone and asked him about electric bikes. “Everyone cheats now. They see Lance Armstrong do it. They see these one-percenters making a ton of money without doing anything. So they think, why do I have to work hard? So now it’s O.K. for everyone to cheat. Everyone does it.” It took me a few minutes to realize that Kotch’s indignation on the subject of electric bikes was not coming from his point of view as a courier-system owner—although there is plenty of that. (He no longer employs bike messengers as a result of the cost of worker’s compensation and the competition from UberEATS, which doesn’t have to pay worker’s comp.) Kotch’s strong feelings were driven—so to speak—by his experience as someone who commutes twenty-three miles on a bicycle each day, between his home in New Jersey and his Manhattan office. He has been doing this ride for more than twenty years.

“There is this one hill just before the G. W. Bridge that is a good six-degree grade, and it goes for half a mile,” he told me. “If you commute to Manhattan on your bike, you have to find a way to get up that hill. A lot of people are just not willing to commit to that much exercise on their way to work.”

Recently, though, he has noticed a lot of people cruising effortlessly up the hill on electric bikes.

“It’s a purely pragmatic decision for them,” he said. “It’s just a much cheaper and faster way of getting to work than a car. So they use an electric bike.”

He described a guy on one of those one-wheeled, Segway-like things.

“He passed me going up that hill, then took the long way around to the bridge. I use a shortcut. I thought I got rid of him, but when I got to the bridge, there he was—he was going that fast!”

I laughed and told him about a ride I took across the Manhattan Bridge the previous night, where several electric bikes flew by me. It was not, I insisted, an ego thing about who is going faster. Lots of people who flew by me on the bridge were on regular bikes. It was a rhythm thing, I said. On a bike, you know where the hills are, you know how to time the lights, you calibrate for the movement of cars in traffic, other bikes, pedestrians. The electric bike was a new velocity on the streets.

And yet, for all our shared sense that something was wrong with electric bikes, we agreed that, by any rational measure, they are a force for good.

“The engines are efficient, they reduce congestion,” he said.

“Fewer cars, more bikes,” I said.

We proceeded to list a few other Goo-Goo virtues. (I first encountered this phrase—short for good-government types—in Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker,” about Robert Moses, the man who built New York for the automobile.)

“If it’s such a good thing, why do we have this resentment?” I asked.

He wasn’t sure, he said. He confessed that he had recently tried a friend’s electric bike and found the experience appealing to the point of corruption.

“It’s only a matter of time before I get one,” he said ruefully. “And then I’ll probably never get on a real bike again.”

In some ways, the bike-ification of New York City can be seen as the ultimate middle finger raised to Robert Moses, a hero for building so many parks who then became a crazed highway builder who wanted to demolish part of Greenwich Village to make room for a freeway. But are all the bikes a triumph for his nemesis, Jane Jacobs, and her vision of cohesive neighborhoods anchored by street life, by which she meant the world of pedestrians on the sidewalk?

“The revolution under Bloomberg was to see the city as a place where pedestrians come first,” a longtime city bike rider and advocate I know, who didn’t wish to be named, said. “This electric phenomenon undermines this development. The great thing about bikes in the city is that, aesthetically and philosophically, you have to be present and aware of where you are, and where others are. When you keep introducing more and more power and speed into that equation, it goes against the philosophy of slowing cars down—of traffic calming—in order to make things more livable,” he said.

Some bicycle-advocacy groups are cautiously optimistic about electric bikes, or even cautiously ecstatic. “E-bikes have the potential to democratize bikes for millions of Americans,” Paul Steely White, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, said, adding that he was “bullish on e-bikes, though it has to be done right.” I get his logic. Think of all the people who will be drawn onto bicycles by the promise of an assist when going uphill. The most important factor for bike safety, more than bikes lanes or helmets or lights, is the number of cyclists on the streets. The more people who ride bikes, the safer the conditions for everyone on a bike. (Hence the name of the bike advocacy group Critical Mass.) In this equation, bikes are the rare species that can be introduced into an urban ecosystem for the purpose of discouraging cars.

I went into a bike shop and asked about the electric bikes for sale: two thousand and change each.

“We don’t call them ‘electric,’ ” the salesman said. “We call it ‘pedal assist.’ ”

I asked if he had tried one. He gave me a huge smile. He had, and he loved it.

“Why?” I asked.

“It looks like you’re pedalling, but you are not doing nothing.”

A few weeks after this exchange, I was in Paris. There are bikes everywhere, often in the lane reserved for buses, and cars proceed with great civility toward people on two wheels or two feet, at least compared to New York. The other day, while pedalling down Boulevard Saint-Germain on a Vélib’—the Paris version of a Citi Bike—a woman in a dress with short blond hair cruised past me, her stylish bag flung over her shoulder. I immediately thought of that sense of joyous stealth or imposture implied by the bike salesman in New York. She was pedalling, but there was no question that her speed and momentum derived from something other than her effort. We stopped together at a red light. When it turned green, she placidly sailed ahead and out of sight.

I immediately searched out an electric bike to rent. I found a store on the Rue des Écoles that sold stately Holland bikes, both electric and regular. The guy agreed to rent one to me, and I began sailing around town. I found the effect narcotic and delightful: on a flat road, I moved faster than I did on a normal bike, with less exertion. Downhills were no different than a normal bike. Uphill, I maintained speed, with just a tiny bit more exertion. Now and then I could feel the happy bump of electric power. Assisted living was so pleasant! The only problem was that, like some mouse in a cognitive-behavior experiment, I began to crave that bump. It was the effect of the assist I wanted; it was the feeling of being assisted.

“This is an issue of shared values and perspectives,” my bike-advocate friend said. “This whole thing is about attentiveness. How do you deal with technology and the frailties of being a human being? Bicycles are mechanical augmentation of walking, really. It gets pretty ethereal—why is it bad to have a motor when you are already using gears? Who gives a shit if you are using a motor?

“But, I feel there is a clear line between human power and non-human power,” he added. “I think there should be a very simple classification: human-powered or not human-powered. And if you are not human-powered, you should not be using human-powered infrastructure. You should be in the street. E-bikes being licensed as motorized vehicles is good. E-bikes being in human-powered infrastructure is no good. . . .”

At which point we arrive at the insidious genius of our iPhone, Google, A.I. era, in which the distinction between human behavior that is and isn’t “assisted” becomes almost impossible to detect, and therefore to enforce.

This parallel found expression one afternoon in Paris, while I was on the electric bike in route along the Seine, way at the edge of town. The road was mostly deserted, the riverfront lined with shrubs and trash. I took out my phone to take a picture of the scene as I cruised along and then, creature of my era, I pressed the little icon that brought my own face onto the screen. I took a selfie. When I lowered the phone, I saw an older man walking along the river, waving at me in a strange way.

He had white hair, wore a rumpled suit, and held his waving hand in a peculiar position that I now realize is how one would hold a pocket mirror if you were trying to make it reflect a beam of light. At the time, I only noticed that there was something patronizing about his body language and wave, like he was trying to get the attention of a child. Before I had to time to even consider waving back, he turned his palm toward himself. With impeccably expressive poise, he mimed an orangutan staring sadly at his own reflection. I sailed onward, chastised and frozen-faced, moving a bit faster than I otherwise would have. I didn’t have time to react. He is still vivid to me in this pose, his body language and mopey face indelible. You always remember the picture you didn’t get to take—because its preservation in memory depends entirely on you.