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The world's 280 million electric bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2023
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If you're not that wealthy you might be able to afford a car but not want to buy a car and an expensive e-bike. A car is useful for short distance trips in bad weather, longer trips that might not be the majority of your travelling, and transporting stuff that won't fit on a moped (or an e-bike unless you get a trailer... or bigger stuff than that.) In that case you're going to buy the one tool that covers your needs.
On the other hand, a car has far greater maintenance costs. The car has license, insurance, maintenance, gas, parking, etc., whereas an ebike is basically free in comparison. Electricity to power an ebike is pennies, and maintainance is a few basic tools and a new tire or inner tube on occasion.
With all the money saved, you can just rent a car for the handful of days the ebike genuinely is not sufficient.
This isn't even an exaggeration imo - I loaned an ebike for a month and didn't notice any change in my electric bill at all, despite racking up around 100mi on it
Well, here's some math on that. The battery pack I have in my kit-built electric bicycle has roughly 624 watt-hours in it, and being generous/lazy and not accounting for conversion and charging losses, thus costs about $0.049 to charge from zero to full (which I never do since I don't run it flat) at my current grid rate of $0.0789/kWh. That is, 4.9 cents. Slightly less than a nickel.
It'll propel my ass (along with the rest of me, usually) about 18 miles without pedaling, albeit not any faster than about 25 MPH.
Even owning two electric cars, I've only seen my electric bill increase by about 30%. I live in the United States FYI.
My e-bike battery is about 1-2% of the capacity of my car's battery.
yep my 750w/h battery gives me up to 200km range (real world uses usually about 130km) and costs less than a dollar to charge from empty to full
Yeah, which is why it's the reasonably wealthy people who have cars and not bikes. But that includes almost everyone in developed countries.
E-bikes are kind of a red herring here anyway; there's little practical use-case for them that isn't already covered by unpowered bicycles unless you live somewhere very hilly. (Even in moderately hilly places you get used to hills quite quickly). It's not unreasonable to do a shopping run on a bike as long as the shop isn't far away... But if it is, an e-bike won't help you get there in a reasonable length of time.
Even in a place that isn't very hilly, an e-bike could make the difference between arriving to work sweaty or not, which can easily mean the difference between biking or not. The extra help also expands the available user base to those who are less fit, and expands the range of what is doable for any given person. And, again, I want to emphasize the sweat difference, which also ties back into range (how far can you bike on a regular bike versus an e-bike without breaking a sweat?)
Exactly. I rode an ebike one summer to commute to an internship. The sweat factor alone meant I never would have done that by regular bike, as I would've arrived at the office sweating like a pig.
The sweat factor alone is what allowed me to use the loaned ebike as part of a journey to a wedding. Had changing facilities en route but not shower facilities...
range extension is huge
When I biked to work I never arrived sweaty. Cycling allows you to travel faster than walking for the same effort, so you have better evaporative cooling (i.e. your sweat works better, before it soaks into your clothes) so this line always seemed weird to me - how far can you walk without breaking a sweat? Indefinitely, most of the year.
We’re generally assuming that walking is impractically far for the trips in question. It’s quite obvious that you can bike faster and further on an e-bike without breaking a sweat than you can on a regular bike.
I brought up walking only because I don't get sweaty walking - it doesn't have to be practical to commute that way. If you can go for a 6 hour hike without getting sweaty, you can bike to work for substantially less than 6 hours without getting sweaty, right?
No, I don’t think most people in most climates can, actually.
Do your sweat glands just not work like most people? You can probably bike very slowly on level ground without breaking a sweat. The faster you go and the warmer or more humid it is, the more likely you are to sweat. E-bikes move that threshold significantly. Every person is a little different, of course, but it moves the sweat threshold for everyone.
I live in a relatively cool climate but it gets to a high relatively humidity. I don't think it has anything to do with my sweat glands - if it were then I would overheat easily because I wouldn't be sweating enough, right? It's bizarre to me that you think most people in most climates can't walk indefinitely without sweating - walking shouldn't be an exertion unless you're climbing a steep hill or are seriously unfit. Sure, in a hot climate in summer, but there's a lot of the world which is not that.
I do cycle pretty slowly (about 10mph) so if your journey is onerous at that speed but doable at the speed limit of an e-bike than that would make a difference of course. Still, I think people get too fixated on cycling fast in some countries where cycling isn't the norm because cycling is seen more as a sport than as transport.
I got a cargo e-bike specifically because I got tired of hauling two kids up hills in a trailer pulled by my regular bike.
E-bikes make things less daunting for certain people to get on a bike for their commute. Anything that gets us there is a win in my book.
My city has <5% bike usage for commutes. It was dropping from a high of around 8% prior to the pandemic. Post-pandemic, work from home is now at around 25% while bike usage is still low. These numbers are pretty typical of cities in the US. If we could get bike usage to 20% while maintaining work from home numbers, that would be transformative. It's basically what is naively expected to happen when you add a lane of traffic, except without (hopefully) the induced demand problems. Which you can avoid by adding a full sized bike path with physical dividers for all those new bicyclists to use.
Basically, if you can get to 20%, the next 20% becomes much easier, and at that point, combined with work from home, you're down to the cars that actually need to be there for one reason or another (deliveries, disabled people, etc.)
You know, I thought that but now that I've been riding an e-bike for about 3 months I completely disagree.
You can write about three times further on an e-bike than you can on a regular bicycle and still be 100% fine at your destination. It's basically a range extender for a bike.
But it also makes you go faster and makes you less tired, and you can conquer any hill no problem at a pretty good rate of speed. Not to mention that I can carry about 200 lb of cargo on my bike with no issue at all.
There are hills in my city that I cannot bicycle up. I would have to walk my bike. Find my e-bike, I can go uphill with 200 lb of cargo on the back no problem.
commuting without breaking a sweat is a big plus
What if you need to move? You better just buy a whole cargo truck in case you need it.
Unsurprisingly there is a cost-benefit analysis going on. How often do people use their cars to do something that would be difficult by e-bike? For many of them, quite often. How often would people get use out of a cargo truck that they can't use their car for? Almost never.
Sure, some people have cars unnecessarily. Many people could use and afford a bike but don't have/use one. But there's an obvious behaviour going on here which means that electric cars are important.
Almost never.
Really? Average commute distance in the USA and in the UK is 20 miles each way, which is going to be about 1h20 on an e-bike going 15mph. I would imagine that millions of people buy groceries regularly that is too bulky to transport by bike without a trailer, and I think that if you do allow a trailer, millions of people are still transporting bulky items like flat pack furniture, appliances, waste etc several times a year.
All of that amounts to more frequently than "almost never".
E-bikes should be able to hit their top speed of 20 miles per hour fairly easily though. However, I think a 20 mi commute on an e-bike is pretty far, although it is still doable. Even on my 7 mile commute sometimes driving can take over an hour and a half.
That kind of distance, mass transit if available may be a better option.
Why does the bike get the lousy speed limit, a car going 15mph will take just as long.
Because in my country they are limited to 15mph by law. In the USA they are limited to 20mph, which would be 20 minutes faster, and still much longer than the average American's commute, which is 27 minutes. In the context of the original post, there will still be many people whose commutes have stretches with much higher speeds possible, for whom the difference would be even greater, so even there "almost never" is clearly wrong.
Maybe there are people advocating for electric motorbikes, rather than electrically supported push bikes, though I don't see them. But of course the faster you go on any kind of bike the more dangerous it is - riding an ordinary bike is pretty safe, and the exercise benefits mean it's overall good for public health. But encouraging more people onto motorbikes, even zero-emission ones, could easily be a public health disaster due to the inevitable increase in fatal accidents. Cars are much safer per mile travelled, which again goes to the above context.
First of all, "needing" a car to buy groceries is doing it wrong.
Second, bulky items aren't an excuse either.
Given that many people don't live in the Netherlands I think we can ignore that in this context.
The trailer the post mentions (you realise I mentioned trailers, right?) is neat and all but I don't think it really changes the overall point
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