They are a good fit here and my wife and I use ours a lot, but they are still early in traffic-calming efforts so it can be dicey actually getting to trails even on low-speed residential streets (drivers seem pretty aggressive and impatient here).
You are lucky if streets have a bike lane (but some places downtown have separated lanes which is sweet). The more common thing you’ll see is multi-use streets, which is just a picture of a bike painted on the street and does literally nothing to calm the kind of SUV/Dodge Ram drivers you’re most worried about. That said there are official bike routes pretty much anywhere in the city.
Property crime is also pretty high so I’m still nervous about bringing them anywhere I’ll be away from it for an extended period, too. (Even though to a bike thief it ends up just being a really heavy manual bike, I am not sure enough that they care.)
Some of this sentiment is probably because my wife and I have only been urban biking for about six months and we’ll figure it out eventually, I wish there were better resources to gauge this concerns from fellow cyclists and not the city.
All in all I think the city planners are doing a good job to encourage biking and e-bikes with policy and changes to infrastructure, but it still has some ways to go.
I’m going to see them next month and haven’t been this hyped about an event in a long time. Maybe I’m becoming an old man but bands that give me this kind of energy just seem fewer and farther between.
Also they grew on me over a long time. I remember listening to Joy as an Act of Resistance not long after it came out, thinking it was good but nothing special. Now it’s one of my favorite albums in recent years, though I also love seeing how they’re evolving and expanding into other genres now.