Introduction

Times right now are certainly… difficult, for a lack of better words. Gas prices are skyrocketing, climate change continues to wane over the planet, people are feeling residual pains from COVID-19, and WWIII is more on the table than ever before. It’s easy to feel helpless, hopeless, and depressed because of these major events. What if I told you there is a solution you could apply to your life with the potential to ease these feelings and burdens and improve yourself? Assuming you are a human being capable of rational thought and not a braindead zombie scrolling the Internet for little pieces of serotonin (yet), you might already guess I am going to talk about electric bicycles or e-bikes. In this blog, I aim to share the pros and cons of using an e-bike combined with helpful resources and commentary from urban professionals. Once you have finished reading, you will be more informed about the e-bike craze and possibly convinced to buy one of your own instead of a second car. You might even feel inclined to sell your current car in exchange for the benefits of what an e-bike could bring into your life.

In the summer of 2021, my parents moved from an overpacked suburban city to a less packed suburban city with bike-friendly infrastructure. They saw several people utilizing the roads with their sleek new e-bikes, and my mother liked the idea of buying an e-bike for herself to enjoy the surrounding nature while getting a bit of easy exercise. Before buying the e-bikes, she asked me what I thought about them. She was entirely unaware of the can of worms she was about to open: my hyper-fixation about the entirety of the subject. I thought to myself: instead of explaining the many wonders of e-bikes every single time, why not just write about it and send them here?

Pros

Pricing

The first and likely most obvious pro of an e-bike over a car is that it is incredibly cheaper. According to the Pew Research Center, twice as many Americans bought e-bikes in 2020 compared to electric vehicles: half a million e-bikes compared to roughly 230,000 EVs. Some might argue this was only spurred by the pandemic, but e-bike sales are continuing to skyrocket even now. Some experts predict roughly 130 million e-bikes will be sold by the end of 2023, and this prediction might come a bit short if gas prices continue to escalate worldwide. I wouldn’t be surprised if major transportation companies begin rolling out e-bikes of their own to avoid losing money to their competition.

From an infrastructure perspective, accommodating e-bikes and bicycles, in general, is also typically less expensive for cities than building around cars. Previous transportation commissioner for New York, Janette Sadik-Khan and her associate Seth Solomonow talk in their book “Streetfight” about the endeavor of implementing bike lanes into their city: “Federal funding, particularly transportation clean-air funds that could be used to help build bike lanes, paid for 80 percent of our bike lane expenditures; the rest we paid for with a local match”. However, the topic of building bicycling infrastructure in a city is highly contested and has enough history to warrant its own blog post. Because of this, we now return to e-bikes.

Sustainability

Yes, it is true: e-bikes produce fewer carbon emissions than any existing car. Its production is also more sustainable than the production of a Tesla or any other EV on the market. Because of the overwhelming studies relating to the harm carbon emissions have on the planet, it is safe to assume e-bikes are some of the most sustainable and user-friendly modes of transportation currently available. Some bicycle critics claim cycling is less sustainable than cars due to the diets of a typical cyclist being, specifically targeting the “paleo diet”. However, the accessibility and convenience of an e-bike allow for a significantly larger pool of potential riders and can be utilized according to the desires of those who use it. This means my pizza-loving car-utilizing family can potentially use their e-bikes for certain trips without the need of changing their diet drastically—and we can tackle a healthier carbon-friendly diet once we feel ready to make the commitment. For now, lowering our average carbon footprint one step (or pedal) at a time is all some people can do.

Lifestyle

Like my parents, many families bought e-bikes during the pandemic and quarantine to keep themselves healthy and active. For many people, making healthier lifestyle choices like eating healthier, going to the gym weekly, or other commitments amongst our busy lives is the hardest part of living healthy. Biking has been the same way for a long time, which is why you have likely seen bicycling enthusiasts who do keep their commitment on the road in tight spandex or heard of rumors about them being rude and egotistical towards other people while on the road. E-bikes have arguably changed the bicycling lifestyle forever by removing possibly the biggest hurdle keeping some from getting out of their car: hills. E-bikes have made it possible to essentially flatten any street with the press of a handle, allowing anyone brave enough the capability to ride. I personally cannot tell you what it will take for you to overcome the fear of commitment involved with traveling by e-bike over your car, but once you do, the other steps needed to live a healthy lifestyle come much easier.

Because I mentioned health in my previous section about sustainability and carbon emissions, I believe it is necessary to mention emissions in this section to even the scale. Some people might have concerns about whether cyclists are more at risk of being harmed by toxic air quality or not. In an industrial world, it is difficult to find cities where there isn’t something potentially hazardous in the air that might cause lung cancer further down the road or even worse: the next COVID-19 variant. Thankfully, studies have shown that people in cars and buses are typically exposed to more toxic gases than the average cyclist.

Mental Health

Alongside improving your physical wellbeing, switching from a car-dependent lifestyle and incorporating an e-bike for select trips improves your overall mental health. Many of today’s generation suffer from mental illness in one way or another. This is further exacerbated by incredibly stressful situations. For example, studies suggest that 3 out of 4 college students today will experience prolonged depression, anxiety, or another form of mental illness before graduation. Now imagine being a college student who is living through a worldwide pandemic, no hope to live past 50 because of a dying planet, and rumors about World War III mentioned more and more by the day. For some of you reading this blog, you might not even need to imagine it.

Studies have shown how rates of mental illness are increased by factors including natural light deficiency, little human interaction, and unfulfillment. It’s almost as if living in quiet suburbia and going outside just to mow the lawn, take out the trash, or get in the car to commute to a monotonous 9-5 job and back only to return home to briefly say hi to the family and spend the rest of the day online is a fundamentally unhealthy lifestyle! Revaluating transportation priorities is a crucial step in realigning one’s life with what is important. Like physical health, starting small by substituting shorter trips around town with an e-bike will help improve mental health and open doors to ways of improving one’s life.

Equity

Martin Luther King Jr., one of the most famous civil rights activists in history, was often seen commuting by bicycle. Whether in Bogota, Colombia; Portland, Oregon; New York City, or any other place where inequality or discrimination exists, people around the world still see bicycles as tools to promote human concerns like racial equality, equity, safety, and the climate instead of continuing support for cities built around the automobile.

While it tries its best to not appear so, transportation in America has been used to discriminate and restrict personal growth for hundreds of years; some argue the Whiskey Rebellion during the time of George Washington could have been prevented if city merchants were less critical of rural farmers in the countryside. Besides farmers, transportation has been used as a racial segregation weapon against black people in conjunction with zoning policies known as redlining for decades, but most prominently around the 1960s. Despite this, people are still astonished when people like Pete Buttigieg refer to highways as “racist”. When you choose to ride a bike, you become an additional spark of hope towards helping people overcome their trials.

Community

Do you often feel secluded from your neighbors and find it hard to make new friends within your community? It seems nowadays the only way to feel involved within your community that doesn’t involve serving on a committee or nonprofit organizations is through paid institutions like gym memberships, sports teams for children, or many church activities. Community is a word several people mention when they refer to nice places to live, but like two-faced job listings showing off how great their work environment is, these claims are often misleading and the “thriving community” is just an abundance of grass lawns with a bench at the end of the road. Bikes are the unlikely boost necessary to help people talk with one another. The mayor of Bogota, Colombia; Enrique Penalosa, discovered this when he pushed for safer streets for children to use. Charles Montgomery, the author of “Happy City”, talked with Penalosa on a bike ride through the friendly streets once riddled with crime and murder. I believe Penalosa’s words about building around all varieties of people in cities are more profound than ever: “We might not be able to fix the economy. We might not be able to make everyone as rich as Americans. But we can design the city to give people dignity, to make them feel rich. The city can make them happier”.

Since redesigning Bogota to be more bike-friendly, people living there are generally happier and feel a sense of community. In contrast to many American streets lined with car-dependent suburbia, it furthers the idea that you cannot buy happiness with money. Sadly, not everyone is in a similar situation like Penalosa to change their city, but that shouldn’t deter you from feeling like you can’t make a significant difference. Charles Montgomery shares multiple stories in his book about how people passionate about improving their quality of life take to the streets by bike to be the difference they want to see. I couldn’t recommend more Montgomery’s book, “Happy City” if you are still unsure about how riding a bike can significantly improve your quality of life.

Traffic

Last, but certainly not least, is the lack of traffic one can expect while riding an e-bike. Americans value their freedoms in life but fail to realize how they are constantly enslaved by the whims of their transportation. This is further solidified as sprawl continues to infect everything it touches. Even though cars are hailed as a “symbol of freedom”, drivers are still subject to everyone else on the road, especially in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and their own wallets. Many Americans only work so they can afford to buy gas for the car they use to go to work and make payments towards the ownership and upkeep of the said car. Buses and transit are a step in the right direction, but your accessibility and schedule are determined by where transit extends and their frequency. Bikes and walking are possibly the two modes of transportation with the potential for the most reliability, independence, and lessened stress.

Jeff Speck mentions in his book, “Walkable City“, how being stuck in traffic leads people to become more stressed, antsy, and even more at risk of death. He mentions a German study that discovered people are three times more likely to have a heart attack after being stuck in congestion for roughly an hour. The concerning rise of stress caused by traffic has become such a problem that cities like Atlanta, Georgia has social workers specializing in emotional freedom techniques, or EFTs, to help people stay calm while in traffic. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

These have been some of the many benefits of owning an e-bike or bicycle in general over a car. However, now comes the need to play devil’s advocate and address some cons many of you may or may not have already thought about when weighing your options. Nonetheless, I will still attempt to dispel most of these cons by shedding light on what is rarely mentioned in each respective argument.

Cons

Too Cold

We’ve established that hills and elevation are no longer an issue thanks to the help of e-bikes, but a continuing geographic concern involves temperature: “it’s too cold where I live to ride a bike; how am I supposed to stay warm during the snowy winter?” If the climate is a reasonable argument against not commuting by bike, how might one explain countries with significantly colder climates like Canada, Finland, and the Netherlands have extremely higher bicycling outputs compared to the United States? Within the nation, Minneapolis, known for its icy conditions, has been considered the number one cycling city in the country, and people living in cold and wet Portland, Oregon regularly ride their bikes around town and show up in numbers for the city’s annual Naked Ride. If you still have reservations, it is also worth mentioning that new clothing companies specializing in weatherproof clothing for biking and working have been exploding recently and shouldn’t be overlooked. Be sure to look into REI’s selection of clothing and my personal favorite, Vuori.

No Storage

For people who are used to buying in bulk and using their car as an easy storage container, switching to an e-bike might be their worst nightmare. How could anyone accomplish anything around town with just a bike? Well, the recent craze of e-bikes has caused many to realize the additional torque provides enough power to carry bike trailers without too much additional effort. Some have even taken additional measures by creating electric cargo bikes with large cargo spaces pre-built inside of the bike.

While its admittedly not nearly as much cargo space as a typical car, this might be actually better in the long run. A concerning amount of produce is thrown away because Americans have entered habits of buying too much at supermarkets only to never eat it. Food waste is a large concern from a sustainability standpoint, as it emits hazardous carbon emissions into the atmosphere and pollutes our waterways as it decays. To fight against this habit of produce consumerism, many people choose to make more frequent trips to their neighborhood grocer to buy only the items they need on a daily or biweekly basis. In places where this is the norm, the local community uses their neighborhood grocers as places to interact with neighbors and increase their sense of community.

Not Family-friendly

Lastly, relying on an e-bike doesn’t necessarily imply you will never use a car again. Today, vehicle renting companies like Turo and ZipCar are quickly changing how people see car ownership. Do you need to move a huge sofa? Rent a truck for the day. This is much more optimal than owning a truck and utilizing it only once a year. Alex Edwards, president of the automotive research firm Strategic Vision, found that out of all truck owners, 75 percent of them tow something once a year, 70 percent of them off-road once a year, and 35 percent of them put something in the bed once a year. Most truck owners in America are only drawn to them because of their increased safety, but what will happen once almost everyone owns a truck for safety? Will they continue to expand until they’re roughly the size of a tank? We’ll touch more on this later.

Like the concerns of cargo space, many argue how one cannot transport a family effectively without a car. This explains the surging popularity of minivans, SUVs, and modern-day soccer moms. Backpedaling to my counterpoint of electric cargo bikes and bike trailers, e-bikes are extremely versatile in how they are utilized. Car seats and strollers can easily fit inside many cargo bikes and bike trailers make transporting more than one child even easier. Once a child grows out of fitting inside of an e-bike, they are around the aging capability of learning to ride their own bike with the help of training wheels. Other benefits of raising a family using bikes include children growing up to become more independent. Children raised in car-dependent families are often coddled until they reach the age of sixteen and need to buy a car of their own. This prolonged dependency has led many to be overly dependent on their parents and will likely not leave the house until their thirties. By teaching children how to survive for themselves at an earlier age, they are better prepared for the increasing difficulties of the world, which becomes increasingly unbearable for newer generations. While I say this, I recognize not all family situations are the same, so I recommend planning as a family how you could implement e-bikes within your own personal capacities.

Not Safe

Now we return to the issues of safety as a cyclist compared to cars. While bikes can be dangerous, automobiles are not entirely safe. Studies show people who spend their entire life driving will on average experience at least two near-life collisions in their lives—two coin-flips determining whether you die or survive. If safety was the number one priority of everyone’s commute, they would travel by bus or train. Nonetheless, I will not lie: you are more likely to get injured while riding a bike compared to a normal car. Safety expert Ken Kifer found that “bicycling was nineteen to thirty-three times more likely to result in injury than driving a car the same distance. Shortly after publishing his research, Kifer was killed by an automobile while biking. Biking can be a scary activity depending on where you live, so it is important for cities to be mindful of everyone on the roads instead of just cars: add bike lanes where necessary, sidewalks where they are nonexistent, and transit lines where dense populations live. Politics and misinformation can get in the way of general safety, but it is encouraging to know how e-bikes are changing the conversation in a better direction—one more mindful and considerate of everyone’s voices. Jane Jacobs said it perfectly when she wrote: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody”.

Societal Standards

I mentioned how e-bikes have been changing the perceptions of cycling culture, but we, unfortunately, have a long way to go until cyclists are viewed as equal to automobile drivers. We might never completely bridge the perception gap since many continue to view any mode of transportation not a car as being lower income. Even amongst drivers, there is discrimination based on the type of car you drive. Changing a classist society has never been easy. Does that mean it’s hopeless to attempt changing how society views cyclists? If you find yourself concerned about the societal perspectives of cycling once you start, I would recommend getting involved in a local advocacy group or nonprofit organization. Even in my sprawling suburban city, there are about two or three bicycling advocacy groups I can be involved in and make a considerable difference within my community.