9approach him. Searching the area, they
spot a telltale VanMoof handlebar sticking
out from a balcony. Daniel uses a digital
signal to verify it’s Ludo’s bike, then calls
the police, who help recover it. Over-
joyed, Ludo hops on and begins riding.
‘‘Bike Hunters’’ takes a product cate-
gory with massive potential to increase
the public good, then talks about it in a
surprisingly goofy way: via reality-TV-
infl ected short videos about young peo-
ple executing what sometimes seem like
awfully ineffi cient retrieval operations.
(In two early episodes, several VanMoof
employees fl ew from the Netherlands to
Ukraine and Romania, spending days,
and signifi cant amounts of carbon, on
the trails of bikes they never found.) The
show can be a little silly. It’s for exactly
this reason that it feels terribly important.
Consider cars, the core of the problem
e-bikes promise to help solve. Much of
cars’ dominance of United States tran-
sit culture stems from the accumulated
power of a century of political decisions.
But some credit must also be given to the
car’s great success at infi ltrating every
crevice of our culture. Cars come to us
in advertisements, in fi lms, in song lyrics;
they’re powerful, they’re sexy, they’re fun.
Bicycles, by contrast — the everyday,
getting-from-A-to-B type — are off ered as
the vegetables to cars’ steak. Prudent and
responsible, maybe. Powerful and sexy,
defi nitely not. Ditto for the likes of pub-
lic transit and walkable neighborhoods,
options often presented in the soberregister of a nonprofi t report. There’s talk
of safety, public health and the negatives
we might avoid: death and injury counts,
toxic emission fi gures, congestion sta-
tistics. We hear about fun and pleasure
only in footnotes and asides, if at all. This
dynamic applies far beyond transit. Eating
less meat, buying less clothing, wearing
masks indoors during a disease outbreak:
Too often, demonstrably good interven-
tions arrive via scolding exhortations to
eat our vegetables, both real and meta-
phorical. Not because the vegetables are
tasty, but because eating steak is bad for
the planet and we should know better.
Psychologists distinguish between
‘‘avoidance motivation’’ (which steers us
away from threats) and ‘‘approach moti-
vation’’ (which guides us toward rewards),Winner of the blog
We Love Cycling’s
2015 ‘‘European
Bike-Stealing
Championship,’’
which timed how
long it took for
someone to
steal an unlocked
‘‘bait bike’’ in
different cities:
Amsterdam
(22 minutes and
40 seconds)