Everyone is talking about E-bikes these days

And why not? They can help reduce emissions, congestion, and budgets.

The Washington Post has a “climate advice columnist”-now that’s a job I want! I could do it; my last book, Living the 1.5 Degree Lifestyle, was full of it. Perhaps I could make it a feature here; if you need climate advice, put a question in the comments below, and I might do this. Meanwhile, Michael J. Coren has some advice that I have been dispensing for a while: Get an e-bike.

Coren discusses the many personal benefits, such as saving money and getting healthy, but mentions how city governments are beginning to catch on to the benefits.

From New York to Cleveland, city officials have rolled out measures to prod drivers to leave their cars at home, from closing streets to traffic to creating “15-minute cities” where life’s essentials are just a walk, bike or transit ride away. Vast networks of safe bike lanes are becoming mainstays of downtowns and business districts.

I raised my eyebrows at that; I have been complaining for years that car-brained governments are missing the e-bike opportunity completely with their obsession with electric cars. But in cities, authorities are being forced to pay attention these days because of the dramatic increase in the number of e-bikes on the roads.

Now, the RMI (formerly the Rocky Mountain Institute) is giving those cities more reasons to promote e-bikes with a tool: “RMI’s new e-bike calculator helps city policymakers and advocates quantify the environmental and economic benefits of replacing short-distance vehicle trips with e-bike trips”

RMI builds on studies we have discussed previously, which note that almost 60% of trips taken in the US are less than six miles (about 10km), which is easy on an e-bike. We just need to get a bigger percentage of those trips changed from cars to e-bikes to make a big difference.

Shifting short vehicle trips to other modes of accessible, convenient transportation can help local and national governments reduce VMT, contributing to broader transportation and climate goals. For example, shifting 25 percent of short vehicle trips from cars to e-bikes would cut overall VMT by 3 percent on average across the 10 cities… in each city if a quarter of short vehicle trips were replaced with e-bikes in 2024, totaling more than 461 million miles a month. Because the average American drives approximately 1,200 miles a month, cutting these vehicle trips in the 10 largest cities would be equivalent to removing over 388,000 vehicles from the road.

It reduces emissions too:

Strikingly, if the top 10 most populous cities shifted a quarter of their short vehicle trips to e-bikes, they would save over 1.8 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent (CO₂e) in one year — equivalent to avoiding the use of 208.5 million gallons of gasoline or 4.2 million barrels of oil.

The report lists economic benefits, noting that e-bike riders save a lot of money, and social benefits from improved health and lowered pollution, and stresses the urgency:

Cities must act now by investing in safe and connected bicycle infrastructure to improve access and drive adoption as rapidly as possible. Implementing these changes to our streetscapes in cities and suburbs alike will reduce emissions and provide economic savings while creating more livable, thriving communities for all.

RMI makes so many good points; They are not talking about everybody or every trip. This is why that statistic about 60% of trips being less than six miles is so important (and it is not an outlier; I have others); we are not talking about long or difficult rides. Nor are we talking about everyone e-biking all the time; just a quarter of those short trips. This is the point I tried to make in my post Quit whining. Even the Dutch don't all cycle like the Dutch; even in the Netherlands, the modal share for bikes is only 28%.

It’s not a big ask: just a quarter of the short trips, really just about 12% of all trips. But there is too much focus on cities, a failure on the part of all us urban biking writer types.

Writing in The Atlantic, Michael Thomas discusses the real reason you should get an e-bike: “It’ll cut your emissions. It’ll also make you happier.” He also notes that not everyone everywhere has to do this.

“Of course, e-bikes aren’t going to replace every car on every trip. In a country where sprawling suburbs and strip malls, not protected bike lanes, are the norm, it’s unrealistic to expect e-bikes to replace cars in the way that the Model T replaced horses. But we don’t need everyone to ride an e-bike to work to make a big dent in our carbon-pollution problem.”

The problem in North America is that most people don’t live in the city, but that’s where e-bikes will make the most difference. According to Pew, A growing share of the population lives in the suburban counties of large metro areas; the majority now live in the ‘burbs, where the politicians are even more resistant to bike lanes, even though the roads are wider and there is more room to share. But it may not be so unrealistic to fix this.

A British study, E-bikes and their capability to reduce car CO₂ emissions, noted that people in cities have lots of choices: transit, taxis, or even walking. Suburban and rural areas have poor public transport and are car-dependent, so there is even greater untapped potential for e-bike use. They also note that suburban and rural trips are longer (median 10Km) compared to city trips (5km) increasing the impact of the switch.

The researchers figured out how many trips could comfortably be done by e-bike rather than car for a subset of the population that is healthy and willing and concluded that “e-bikes have the capability to reduce car CO₂ emissions by 24.4 million tonnes per annum in England.” They also note the urgency: "Although the CO2 intensity of the car fleet will improve as it moves towards electrification, this is progressing too slowly to avoid the need for parallel reductions in car use.”

The English researchers, bless their hearts, also get the importance of upfront carbon emissions: "E-bikes require less material and have lower manufacturing emissions than cars; for example, an e-bike battery is only 1–2% of the size of an electric car battery meaning less resource use per e-bike.” But they don’t forget about the reductions in operating energy, with competing demands on our electrical systems these days:

“Electrification of heat, cooking and transport raises issues around electricity grids and supplies. E-bike chargers in the home draw relatively low power (500W–1400W) and would run on existing circuits, so would not specifically require upgrades to the domestic electricity grid. It is also important to note that the power required to charge an e-bike is significantly lower than for electric cars, particularly the rapid charging of cars."

I once did a little spreadsheet and found that the juice needed to fill one Ford F-150 Lightning could run 300 average e-bikes. So why are we not concentrating on making it as easy and safe as possible for people to use them? Perhaps the RMI paper and calculator will help, although the evidence that promoting e-bikes might be better than pushing so hard on e-cars has been there for anyone to see for a while.

People will continue to say, "not everybody can ride an e-bike." It's true—and not everybody can drive a car. The conclusion remains that from any basis of comparison, be it speed of rollout, cost, equity, safety, the space taken for driving or parking, embodied carbon or operating energy, e-bikes can beat e-cars for a big chunk of the population.