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TL;DR: Due to being smaller and lighter, electric bikes and mopeds require significantly less energy to move themselves around than an electric car. The article starts with a headline about “oil demand” but then spends much of the rest of its length harping on consumer monetary costs instead. I could have said that in a lot fewer words. Actually, I just did.
Also, in SE Asia and other places where the primary mode of transport is a small motorbike, as it happens these small motorbikes actually pollute a lot for their displacement due to having basic uncomplicated engines, often not running very well, and lousy or absent emissions controls. ICE vehicles are also at their worst fuel consumption/distance traveled ratio when they’re idling or crawling around urban areas at low speed. Replacing these with electric versions just makes sense.
Full disclosure: I own a gas guzzling truck, a fuel efficient car, seven motorcycles, and an electric bicycle. I use different tools for different jobs, as appropriate. If you’re looking for a magic bullet, you will probably need it in a few different calibers.
I need to kill an elephant. What should I drive?
Your ancestors hunted the mammoth on foot with a rock tied to a stick. Use that.
Yeah but they’re all dead, what does that say about their tactics?
I mean, they hunted mammoths to extinction so, pretty fucking effective lol
I mean, we’re here, which means someone must have killed a mammoth.
But really they didn’t hunt them with rocks on sticks. They chased them toward a cliff with their friends waiting at the bottom to dispatch any that survived the fall. This is why there’s no more mammoths.
We didn’t just kill a mammoth, we killed all the mammoths.
Not true, a bunch survived until a few thousand years ago up north.
I refer you to my previous statement.
Ah, the Tremors method.
They weren’t very good at living for eternity? And really, who would want to?
drunk.
A Sherman?
Out of your seven motorcycles, which one is used for which purpose?
I’ll bet you weren’t expecting to get an actual answer to this, but I’m going to give you one. (Spoiler: None of them are a Harley.)
First, I do use all of my bikes for commuting (the electric bicycle often, too, when the fancy strikes me) and usually ride a different one each day. They all get better mileage than my car and certainly better than my truck.
KLR650: Long distance touring and adventure rides, motocamping, hauling comically large objects that should not be transported by motorcycle.
Bashan BSR-250/Enforcer: I ostensibly bought this for my nephew to ride on adventure trips with me, but I also use it for tooling around town, light duty shopping, etc.
Honda VT750C/Shadow A.C.E.: Two up riding and touring, also good for making lots of obnoxious noise. My wife likes the passenger seat and sissy bar. Goes faster than the Vanvan, even with two people on it for long trips.
Yamha FZ6R: Dicking around on twisty roads. Irritating Tesla/M3/AMG/Corvette owners.
Orion/Nicot RXB250L: Playing in the dirt, at the motocross track, off road, doing wheelies, and narrow technical trails I probably shouldn’t try to manhandle the KLR down.
Honda CH50/Metropolitan: In town errands, shopping trips. It achieves ludicrous fuel economy and you can fit a lot of stuff under the seat. My wife rides this one more than I do.
Suzuki RV200/Vanvan: Bought for my wife to learn how to ride a “real” motorcycle, i.e. with a clutch and gears. She uses it for motocamping trips.
Relevant username, lol.
I used to have a DR650, and used it much like your KLR. It was getting tothe point where I had to fix it all the time, I had another weird little bike that I couldn’t get parts for which also needed help… I ended up selling both and buying one bike that I could just ride. I love riding, and love different bikes for different things, but I don’t like maintaining a fleet of stuff, keeping tags up to date on a fleet of bikes, so…
I love the little RV! Used to have a GSF 400. Those small suzukis are so fun
TLDR: they’re all for driving
As opposed to what, exactly? Eating?
Well you tried to spin it like they’re each a unique tool serving a special purpose that you need fulfilled.
But really you’re just a guy who likes motorcycles.
If you’re looking for a magic bullet, you will probably need it in a few different calibers.
That’s a clever way to put it and I like it
Over consumption is probably worse for the environment than petrol powered cars
If you’re looking for a magic bullet, you will probably need it in a few different calibers.
This is an excellent phrase and I’m going to have to start using it
What do you think about the impact of owning so many vehicles?
Zlich. Because – stay with me here – I can only operate one of them at a time.
“BuT tHe PrOdUcTiOn ImPacT!!!”
I bought all but two of them used. That ship sailed before I even swung a leg over.
Silver buckshot is how I describe it
This article is vastly understating the potential benefits of e-bikes. Like-for-like replacements for car trips are only the tip of the iceberg; the real benefit of e-bikes is that the more people that use them, the less car parking we need. That means we can put back all those buildings we destroyed when we razed our cities for the car.
Fuck more buildings…make parking lots into parks and green spaces
Why not both? More housing and more parks. Win win.
that’s kind of assumed to happen if you packed people into tighter and tighter densities
We need more lanes. Just one more lane and we’ll be done with trafic, I swear!1!!one!1!1!
Don’t forget you can ride a mile or two to the train station and get around like that.
Even if you have a bike in town and one at home. Two bikes are cheaper than 1 car and more space efficient.
If everyone had an ebike, getting on and off the train would be a complete pain in the ass. I guess if there were lock boxes it might be OK, but hundreds of people trying to get their bike on a train would be a nightmare
Many urban-suburban trains, and even some regional trains, have entire cars dedicated for bicycles, with no (or only few) seats. This is very scalable on multiple scales, when the demand is growing:
- Adding more bicycle cars to existing bike-friendly trains 🏩🚞🚃🚃🚃🚃🏫
- Adding more bike-friendly trains to existing lines 🚆🚆🚉🚊🚇🚇
- Building new well-placed bike-friendly stations on existing lines 🏢🏪🚵♂️🚵♀️🚈
- Adding more passenger railway lines to existing rail networks. 🛤️🛤️🛤️🛤️🛤️
K but… what’s up with the emoji?
I did the math once for my own commute, on my e-bike and with my electric car, and found that while the electric car uses only 20% of the energy that an average gas-powered car would, the bike uses just 1%. My bike, on my route (both directions averaged together) got 2,200 mpge.
Miles per gallon energy? What’s that abbreviation?
Just another example of how Americans will use anything but metric (we do use metric sometimes, I know, it’s just a meme). We could easily measure it in Wh/km, but then we would also have to change how we measure gasoline cars if we want people to make direct comparisons. But, since we sell gas by the gallon, we would also have to change how gas is sold. When the EPA first came up with mpge I thought it was stupid (we don’t buy electricity by the gallon!), but I’ve come around to the convenience of being able to easily compare the two types of fuel. The EPA assumes 1 gallon of gas to contain 33.7 kWh of energy.
Maybe we should get everyone to switch to Joules for measuring, buying, and selling gasoline and electricity?
To be fair, even in metric countries in Europe, they use imperial occasionally. This is the case for wheel sizes and display sizes, both usually measured in inches.
Don’t tell them. Once you start looking for exceptions to “use metric for everything”, you’ll find one in every country, and people get really angry when you point this out. As if not being 100% metric is some kind of moral failing.
Car tire sizing is a bizarre, design-by-committee thing, though. Diameter is in inches, width is in mm, and sidewall width is a percentage of the width. Why?
It’s a pretty flawed comparison, though. It assumes a certain amount of fossil fuels being burned at the power plant that’s feeding your electric car. That’s a number that varies a lot between regions, and is bound to change as more and more renewables are spun up. Putting solar panels on your home throws the whole comparison out. It’s nearly useless.
Isn’t the point for the consumer to measure their cost? Not the overall efficiency of the production and distribution for each source of fuel?
Like I buy X gallons per month of gas because my car gets 20 mpg and I dive Y miles. If this electric car uses Z amount of electricity and I still drive Y miles, I’ll save ß dollars.
It is not really possible for the consumer to calculate their respective mpge, since your specific utlities power mix will differ region by region.
That’s the idea, but it doesn’t actually do that. Even if it did, the cost would be variable by region, so it’s still imperfect.
You’re using kWh instead of Joules in your comment. :P
Joules represent a very small amount of energy. We probably want kWh or kJ. Although, I think just places in the US already use kWh for electricity?
It’s not complicated. Mpge allows you to compare energy efficiency vs internal combustion cars. They also provide kWh/100 mi, which allows you to calculate actual cost of operation, depending on how much you pay for a kWh.
The E is for Equivalent. It’s how “fuel” efficiency is discussed when referring to non liquid fuel vehicles.
Gotcha, thanks.
Yup. There’s a Wikipedia page listing all the modes of transportation and their efficiency. Electric bikes are just about the most energy efficient way to transport humans.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
This is a weird definition they’re using, and it doesn’t encompass the whole box. An electric vehicle might be more efficient on a distance per unit energy basis, but it’s less efficient on a total energy basis because we lose some of the energy in the electrification.
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My only problem with ebikes is there’s no chance in hell I’m consistently driving on the road with cars.
With how convenient these are, I hope there’s more push to add protected bike lanes in road heavy places to increase adoption.
Get an electric scooter, Vespa size. It’s super convenient.
To clarify - I’m not going on the road in anything but a car
Protected lanes or paths only for me on any form of bike/scooter
Chicken :-)
So you are afraid of cars so you take your own car… I fully understand that but it is all the problem.
We have to constantly remind drivers that road are for everyone, and not only to go full speed.
Here they painted bikes on roads and put speed limit at 30kmh so it is better, drivers seems more conscious, but we still see too much distracted people that don’t realize they can easily kill someone just by not looking constantly at the road.
I’m a bit in the same situation. I can a lot with my bike but it’s dangerous at times, especially with my kids in the back. People need to go to places and unfortunately, everything we built for the last 70years were almost just for cars.
There’s a need for more bike lanes and bus/tramways/métro.
When I was younger and more invincible around 2005, I bought one of these crappy Ebay engine kits for a bicycle. One thing I noticed is that it wasn’t really any slower from home to work than a car, because I could go around traffic. An E-bike would have been great. A lot of them get around on 500 watt or 750 watt motors, which is considerably smaller than an electric car’s motor.
I’d have one now, but it’s hard to ride one when I have to carry a kid with me most places.
I’d have one now, but it’s hard to ride one when I have to carry a kid with me most places.
I got an e-bike because I needed to carry a kid (actually, two) around with me. FYI, cargo bikes are a thing:
There is no way the kids sitting on the back of the bike in that picture are safe…
No less safe than wheeling a kid around in a little red wagon or letting them ride their own bicycle.
Little Red wagons generally don’t travel at 20mph in the street with cars going even faster. That kid in the photo can barely hold herself upright. One little wiggle or unexpected turn and she’ll slip right through those bars and under an SUV.
Seriously, you might as well just put your kid in to one of these.
Oh no, look at all the super dangerous people biking with kids on them.
https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA?si=qlcN0Y9YrykPIlPe
People really don’t fall off of bike seats easily. Maybe you should try biking.
Literally millions of people have bought e-bikes specifically to carry kids. I own one, and my kid loves riding on the back. I have never heard of a kid falling off of one either.
Radbikes even makes a bicycle specifically designed to carry children on the back (the radwagon) - and so does Extracycle, Trek, Lectric, Yuba and half a dozen or so other long tail e-bike brands.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/rQhzEnWCgHA?si=qlcN0Y9YrykPIlPe
https://piped.video/-ypwGlE-f88?si=l0RGbouB6efBHAZs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Yeah, but the picture above has them sat in a luggage rack.
it’s only unsafe because of all the cars. aside from that, whats’ the danger, they might fall out?
it’s only unsafe because of all the cars. aside from that, whats’ the danger…
Swimming in a pool of razor blades is only unsafe because of all the razor blades. Aside from that, what’s the danger?
…they might fall out?
Yes
car dominance is literally a conspiracy by big oil to make us dependent, it is in no way natural.
Cars exist, you can’t just ignore them. They’ll run you over whether you believe in them or not
Then we should burn them
Nah this is completely right though. Soon as she stops those two kids are gonna bonk heads together, the smaller one needs a bike seat at the very least, and the toddler probably needs one as well. You could still do that with a bike like this, so it doesn’t discount the point entirely, but the image itself is a pretty stupidly conceived piece of work.
It will never not be funny to me how scared some people are of any transportation that’s not a car.
It’s fun how the preview image for the article has two kids being carried around. But I can understand if you don’t see that as safe in your area, etc.
My daughter would absolutely not ride in that.
Have you ever put your kid on a bike? How would you know?
I have both am ev and an ebike, and a 7 mile commute.
Driving takes between 20 minutes and an hour and a half. Biking takes 45 minutes no matter what.
Car uses about 25x more energy though and parking is around $20/day.
I should add my son much prefers the bike.
Whaaaaat? You mean electric last-mile micromobility cuts down on emissions in a significant way, just like people had been saying for years? Who would have thought?
Car-brain finds small electric vehicles are more efficient, in shocking study.
… but will instantly fabricate reasons why the car will be needed at least 5 times a day anyway.
But what if it … gasp … RAINS?
Watched a YouTube about electric vs gas scooters in Taiwan 🇹🇼. Apparently it’s like 6 scooters for every 10 people, crazy!
But the uptake of electric scooters wasn’t as much as they thought, but a lot of complaints were around “cost”, “parking” and “weight”
Sounds like an electric bicycle would solve all those issues over an electric scooter 🛵
Especially for the poorer, high 2 wheel usage nations, like Vietnam or India.
Just have to pedal a bit! 😉
Goddamn I love my ebike. It’s still very much a bike, but it changes the equation. I can ride a nice big heavy comfortable cruising frame, pull my kid in a trailer bike, get up steep hills that would otherwise stop me, and go 4x as far before I’m tired. It is just a total game changer. I’ve rediscovered the joy of riding my bike like I haven’t known it since college. I’m older and creakier than ever but my bike enjoyment hasn’t diminished - it has increased.
Also, it keeps you in shape!
I have heard this for years now. This all fine. I also have an E-Bike. I really love using it. But I live in central Europe. Weather is really shitty here from October-March. I use my car then. And no, clothing for biking in bad weather is not an option for me. I really can’t be bothered to change clothes on my job. I just won’t do that.
And the issue is where? You can just fuel up your car with co2 neutral fuel (like many Europeans already do with HVO100 Diesel in Sweden, the Netherlands and many other countries) and do the rest with your ebike. You probably dropped your co2 footprint to less than 5 tonns. The fact that HVO100 Diesel right now is ~30 cents more expensive doesn’t matter anymore. B33 gasoline is coming and 2025 it’s expected to be ramped up to 100% sustainable.
And compared to a BEV that needs more than 10-15 tonns to be even produced, just driving an older or cheaper car longer still makes it less co2 overall.
Seems like a no brainer! And especially useful in dense cities where you don’t want to be stuck idling in a car.
I think big cars and SUV should be banned.everyone should use a moped or a bike but 9-5s pretending to be rich will hate it.
I think people always go to the extremes way to fast.
I have to transport a large rehabilitated mammal back into the mountains this week. Without a big car or SUV, we’d have to just euthanize everyone we receive
Which we probably wouldn’t receive many due to transportation issues… that leaves quite a bit of animals slowly suffering and dying.
And this is just one real random use for big cars/SUVs. There are countless more reasons they are beneficial…
I know there are dickheads rolling coal, and people using large vehicles that don’t actually need large vehicles. But there is also a lot of harm that happens taking away large vehicles from people who do need them
How about just banning fossile fuels…?
Great. All technologies that bring down CO2 emissions are needed.
As long as people get rid of their dino juice cars, who cares.
Yeah, right. And make 15 tonns of co2 extra, that would not have been needed when filling up the “Dino juice” car with “techno juice” that has 0% CO2.
But, we’ve lost the battle anyway already, so who cares.
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.
Electricity to power an ebike is pennies
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
How often do people use their cars to do something that would be difficult by e-bike?
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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Is this because of China? Big middle class all wanting cars but the cities were designed pre-car, so bikes make more sense and cost less?
Outside of the US, almost everywhere in the developed world, there is a big bike revolution happening. Paris, London, Montreal, etc. have massively expanded their bike networks.
these are feasible in cities that you wouldn’t want to drive a car in anyways. probably not so good for commuting around Boise Idaho
Because Boise, ID is not interested in building the necessary infrastructure for ideological reasons.
I’m going to wager this comment was posted and upvoted by people who have never been to Boise. Because that place has a good amount of people biking around. Especially around Boise state and for recreation.
Been to Boise many time. Take a trip to Europe and then come back and tell me what you think of Boise’s bike infrastructure.
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I’d bet an electric bike would work well in most cities, especially ones that you can reference and people recognize.
I think the market that it misses most is the people who live outside of cities/towns, and have to travel that initial 10+ miles just to get into the city. Still feasible, but less so
And winters.
I live in one of these out west cities. I’d take an electric bike over my car in a heartbeat for most of the spring/summer/fall. To bad a decent electric bike is extremely expensive.
Boise is a college down that is VERY bike friendly. Nearly 200miles of bike lanes and trails.
