Electric bikes make it possible to easily travel around town for less than a penny per day — literally.
I love my electric bike, and largely agree with the sentiment of this article. My bike has has saved me a fantastic amount of gas.
However, I think calling them the “most climate friendly” is reasonably accurate, but has some issues.
If you’re including the human power, a regular bike is more efficient electrically, using none, but the calculation for climate friendly is much harder.
If you’re not, there are more aerodynamic electrical vehicles that are more efficient, but given their rarity, I can understand why they’re not included.
If you’re not including human power, the other more common electrical vehicles, scooter, onewheels, etc. Are likely about the sane efficiency, but have less environmental costs to make (smaller) and can be integrated into many peoples lives easier.It’s a tricky blanket statement to make.
I think the key part of ebikes though is just how versatile they are that makes them so much more practical for a lot more types of trips than anything you mentioned (although I don’t know what the aerodynamic electric vehicles you’re talking about are)
Ebikes make doing a lot of things you would otherwise need a car for easier. I can’t pick up my kids from school on a scooter or carry as many things on a regular unassisted bike (or at least it would be much harder). Ebikes might not be able to do everything but they can do a lot.
For a society that is so dependent on cars I think ebikes are a real game changer for that reason.
How do you get your kids?
I can use a couple different ways actually. I have a seat that attaches on the rear rack and a trailer that I can hitch with capacity for 2 kids plus a trunk for extra stuff.
Recently though we purchased a front load cargo bike which comes with bench seating for 2 kids and we can get an optional extra bench for a third. We could also put a rack on it and have an additional kid (or stuff) on the back as well. Technically we could probably hitch the trailer to it as well but I think that would get a little impractical at that point since it’s already pretty long so the handling with the trailer probably wouldn’t work too well
I like that this article preemptively acknowledges that ebikes are not always the right transportation mode for every single thing, but they don’t have to be. Too often whenever ebikes come up you get those people going "but what if I need to bring a couch which derails from the real point. It’s like saying trains aren’t an efficient way to move people because those people can’t also move furniture.
There are still a lot of trips that can be replaced by ebikes and they can do more than most people probably realize
No, an e-bike is not going to get you to the beach. You’re not going to be able to transport a couch sectional. And it won’t work for your six-kid carpool to the soccer game. But there is no reason that a single vehicle needs to accomplish every transportation need. Use the car for the carpool, and use the e-bike for shorter trips in-town, to the pharmacy, out to dinner, to meet friends, or even to the grocery store, You’d be amazed what you can carry with the right equipment.
@crisisingot I’m not sure if you can call them the most climate-friendly way - they still use (probably Li-Ion, never checked) batteries in them, which are quite costly for the environment to extract and to dispose once their life cycle has ended.
I might have an unpopular opinion (as many people brag to say nowadays), but I think we should contain Li-Ion batteries to cars until battery technology matures enough in order to get something less polluting powering our stuff. Otherwise, in 10-20 years (or earlier) we will see a lot of such batteries disposed.
So no, I think I’ll keep my non-assisted bike going forward even though I have to break a sweat sometimes (I have gears on it, tho, so it’s easier, plus my city is not that hilly).
Well you can actually build about 130 or so ebike batteries for every average car battery so if batteries are your concern ebikes are much better in that regard. In general bikes are way more efficient than cars and honestly at should try to limit the usage of all cars, electric or not,as much as possible and ebikes are a great alternative in a lot of cases.
I have no problems with unassisted bikes think of course!
@crisisingot So any type of battery can be used, you say?
I was trying to say lithium batteries. So for the amount of materials is takes to make one lithium car battery you could make around 130 ebike batteries since they’re so much smaller.
But yeah I agree with you that we need better programs to actually recycle the batteries.
