I'm not too familiar with the local rules in Lithuania, but the EU has two different possible classifications for E-Bikes:

* EU-Spec E-Bike: Up to 25kph, No license / special equipment is required * Speed Pedelec: Up to 45 kph, Requires licensing, insurance, and a special helmet. In the Netherlands, you can't drive these on bike paths / may have to mingle with cars. * US-Spec E-Bikes: Up to 32kph, unregulated / illegal

In general, all three categories are capable of easily sustaining reasonably high 25 to 35kph speeds for 40 to 150km on a flat surface.

If you're dealing with hills or wind resistance, you'll need the beefier motor & battery of a pedelec, or you'll need a slightly more specialised E-Bike, but there's no reason why you couldn't make it work by throwing a bit more bike at the problem. I've taken E-Bikes around some of the medium sized hills in San Francisco before, and apart from having to pedal slightly harder and my battery usage doubling, cycling on a hill wasn't that much different than cycling along Market Street.

> you can't drive these on bike paths

But everyone does.

I've been living in Vilnius for 9 months. Scooters see a great deal of use within the city. I use a sharing service daily for my commute where 3km cost about 1.2eur. Steep inclines well if the total load is under 100kg.

Lithuania is indeed quite flat, but perhaps not as flat as Netherlands. There are quite hilly areas in the country too. The more important aspect, though, is that the highest car concentration is in the cities and they, in general, tend to be flat(ish).

Question , could this e-bikes be equipped with breaks that will recharge the battery? would help with less flat terrain but I am not sure how expensive, efficient and space consuming such a system would be.

You can, and indeed many direct-drive hub systems include this, but it's not a range issue. It's more to save some brake wear. In a 'best case' scenario of many steep hills, such a system will extend range perhaps 5%. Much less in normal use.

they are sometimes, but actually that is rather pointless. The energy wasted by braking is quite negligible compared to riding at reasonable speed with some headwind. better invest in a better battery or make the bike cheaper than regenerative braking. At least from my perspective with an electric cargo bike an normal e-bike, and a super expensive speed-pedelc (45km/h) Stromer bike with regenerative braking. Because of the regenerative braking my fastest bike is actually the slowest if the battery is dead. Also it is almost impossible to go faster than the speed limit as the bike actively brakes whenever you go over 48 km/h. That's why I am selling it.

It's not worth it.

First, I believe conventional wisdom is you can recover 1-3% of total battery capacity, which in a 400Wh pack might be as little as 4Wh, or one AA battery worth.

Second, you can only actually do regen with a hub motor, but mid drive is much more popular.

If the people in Oslo can and use e-bikes and e-scooters a lot (which made me quite surprised) to move around I'm sure that other non-flat countries can do well.

While this is a nice initiative on many levels (from reducing emissions to getting people on bikes/scooters etc.), but I can't see it working well for few reasons:

- We have pretty harsh winters (well not the last one), so any biking/scooter'ing isn't really possible for at least 3 months, thus one still needs a car. - Only few (I'd say only 3 largest) cities have kind of an infrastructure for scooters/bikes and only for major travel paths - outer-most city rings aren't well suited for such traffic. - Local traffic culture (which goes both ways BTW) - car drivers aren't really well adjusted to bikes, and scooter/bike riders also have some not-so-great attitude on pedestrian walkways.

TL;DR - this probably would work really well _somewhere_, just not sure Lithuania is the best candidate for something like this, even if I personally still appreciate this.

Source: I'm Lithuanian and currently live there.

e-bikes deal with hills just fine. With assisted drive (required in the EU) there's extra power from human input. The energy you use going up is free when going down.