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It’s basically free transportation (aside from the pennies it costs to charge the thing), and you get that wonderful, smug downtown-Toronto feeling of being better than all those suburban folk in their carbon-spewing SUVs. You’re like a character in one of those obnoxious Richard Florida rhapsodies about car-free metrosexual life.

But I must warn: If preserving your dignity in public spaces is a top-of-list concern, an ebike is not for you.

As noted above, it is embarrassingly slow on hilly terrain. With the cars, and even bicycles, whizzing past, you look to the world like a faux-handicapped George Costanza puttering in his cart along New York streets in The Butter Shave episode.

On a regular bike, you can weave nimbly through traffic-clogged cars. On the wider, heavier frame of an ebike, such manoeuvres are harder. And thanks to the weight, you feel every bump on the road as if it were a major pothole. (Watch out for glass: I got two flat tires this summer.)

Finding a place to park the thing on a sidewalk also can be problematic. And don’t even think about trying to lift it into a station wagon or up along stairs without getting someone to help.

As an ebiker, when you pull up at a red light next to someone on a real motorcycle, you cannot help but feel infantilized — like the little brother on his Big Wheel pedalling madly after his older siblings on their 10-speeds.

Cyclists, meanwhile, think you’re a lazy fat-ass who can’t be bothered to pedal. They don’t say it. But they’re thinking it.