That leg-over business gets more and more undignified and fraught with advancing age. Significantly, Sheldon Brown, who thought deeply about all things bicycle, considered it altogether the wrong way to mount a bicycle. According to Sheldon, the correct way is to tilt the bike, put one leg over the top tube onto the pedal, and then to tilt the bike upright again. However, as Energyman has pointed out, an electrified bike can be heavy, and if the battery is on the rack, topheavy, which makes even the Sheldon-recommended mounting method fraught. It's probably smart to start with a low stopover if you're building or buying an electric bike. It needn't be ultralow; a mixte is already a huge advance on a big diamond frame.
BTW, as a schoolboy I rode a penny farthing from the local museum in a parade. The approved manner of mounting a penny farthing is to push the bike with your hands on the bars above your head, until you're almost running alongside it, then to climb with the far foot onto the step and swing the near leg over into the saddle. I didn't have time to learn this procedure so some mates and I devised an alternative. The crossbar in the rugby H (I grew up on South Africa, where rugby is the main religion) goalposts is just the right height, so my chums would form a human pyramid up which I would run until I could grasp the crossbar of the goalposts, the pyramid would break away, and someone else who has been standing by with the bike would run up with it under me, I'd drop into the saddle and ride it on. The parade ended at the annual agricultural show where this Dance of the Schoolboys with Penny Farthing was mistaken for a gymnastic entertainment, and given a prize that should have gone to the choreographed swimming. Getting down from the penny farthing was as easy as stopping pedaling -- the thing is not geared and has no freewheel -- and falling over. The audience liked that part so much, we gave several reprises. The museum took the resulting damage to the period suit they issued me for the parade in good heart, but the next year asked me if I wouldn't instead of the penny farthing like to take their 1899 De Dietrich motorcar for a spin (they knew I could drive -- it was the current local scandal that I did 310 miles to Cape Town under three hours in a supercharged Packard). "Also," Miss Keays, the librarian who was on the museum board, said primly, "the clothes to go with the car are leather, beyond even your powers of destruction." I regret that I never got around to asking Sheldon the Bros way of dismounting a penny farthing.
