In Stockholm, Daniel and Ludo comply with the tracker sign to a bunch of condo buildings. As they interview residents, Daniel picks up “tremendous tense” power from a person who runs off earlier than they’ll strategy him. Looking out the realm, they spot a telltale VanMoof handlebar protruding from a balcony. Daniel makes use of a digital sign to confirm it’s Ludo’s bike, then calls the police, who assist recuperate it. Overjoyed, Ludo hops on and begins using.
“Bike Hunters” takes a product class with huge potential to extend the general public good, then talks about it in a surprisingly goofy manner: by way of reality-TV-inflected brief movies about younger folks executing what generally seem to be awfully inefficient retrieval operations. (In two early episodes, a number of VanMoof staff flew from the Netherlands to Ukraine and Romania, spending days, and important quantities of carbon, on the paths of bikes they by no means discovered.) The present generally is a little foolish. It’s for precisely this purpose that it feels terribly necessary.
Contemplate vehicles, the core of the issue e-bikes promise to assist remedy. A lot of vehicles’ dominance of United States transit tradition stems from the amassed energy of a century of political choices. However some credit score should even be given to the automobile’s nice success at infiltrating each crevice of our tradition. Vehicles come to us in commercials, in movies, in tune lyrics; they’re highly effective, they’re horny, they’re enjoyable.
‘Bike Hunters’ exists to not make you are feeling dangerous however to make you need a fancy bike.
Bicycles, in contrast — the on a regular basis, getting-from-A-to-B kind — are supplied because the greens to vehicles’ steak. Prudent and accountable, perhaps. Highly effective and horny, undoubtedly not. Ditto for the likes of public transit and walkable neighborhoods, choices typically introduced within the sober register of a nonprofit report. There’s speak of security, public well being and the negatives we’d keep away from: dying and harm counts, poisonous emission figures, congestion statistics. We hear about enjoyable and pleasure solely in footnotes and asides, if in any respect. This dynamic applies far past transit. Consuming much less meat, shopping for much less clothes, carrying masks indoors throughout a illness outbreak: Too typically, demonstrably good interventions arrive by way of scolding exhortations to eat our greens, each actual and metaphorical. Not as a result of the greens are tasty, however as a result of consuming steak is dangerous for the planet and we should always know higher.