E-bikes: Cool Tools With Hot Benefits
How satisfying individual “I wants” can help solve societal “you shoulds”
Suddenly, e-bikes are everywhere. More than a million e-bikes were imported into the US last year which means e-bike sales outnumbered electric cars (800,000 sales in 2022). During the pandemic, many people started biking rather than taking public transport. Many industry experts expected e-bike demand to decrease once the pandemic passed—yet 2022 saw a new peak in sales number, easily topping the previous high of 880,000 e-bikes sold in 2021 and 450,000 in 2020.
Why are e-bikes becoming so popular?
I’ve been riding bikes since I was a kid growing up in Germany. I learned to ride at age 5. By 5th grade, I was riding my yellow 3-speed bike the 1.5 miles to my school half way across town—while my dad rode his bike the one mile to his office. In many parts of Europe, bikes have long been a key part of the transportation system. You ride a bike for the same reason you drive a car: to get places.
When I came to the US, I was struck by how different the biking culture here was. Fewer people rode bikes at all. Those who did often wore tight neon lycra clothing, clip-in specialized biking shoes, and hunched down over the drop-bars of their carbon racing bikes, traveling in pelotons of dozens of people on weekend team rides. Or they’d haul their full-suspension mountain bikes atop racks on their SUVs or trucks, heading to gnarly single-tracks that they’d thunder down protected by full-face mountain bike helmets.
In Europe, bikes are transportation. In the US, they are exercise tools.
E-bikes change that paradigm. E-bikes expand the capabilities of bikes so they can be used to get places in many US cities and suburbs. This means more people get on bikes, for more reasons.
Take teenagers. A decade ago, I hardly ever saw a teen on a bike in sub-urbian California. As recently as two years ago, I’d point out the occasional teen on an e-bike going to our local high school. This year, that school dedicated a whole bike parking lot which is full of e-bikes each morning—and the line of cars that always forms at drop-off and pick-up seems a bit shorter and moves faster, too. For teenagers in some parts of the US, e-bikes are fast becoming a way to get out of the house on their own. My son—who got his Super73 throttle-operated e-bike in 2022–calls it his “freedom machine” because it allows him to go places at will, without needing to get a parent to do the driving.
Or take me as an example of a middle-age person living in a spread-out US suburb. I’ve been biking my whole life, but try as I might, I could not use any of my three regular bikes for transportation. The wonderful steel cargo bike I used to haul kids and groceries when I lived in the dense, urban Bay Area just didn’t work pedaling 5 miles and 500’ climb to the nearest town. (I tried: it took 50 minutes to crawl up the hill, often at walking speed. I was sweaty and miserable in the summer heat. No, thanks!) 18 months ago my mom bought me an e-bike for my 50th birthday. My Dutch-built Gazelle pedal-assist e-bike now has 2,500 miles on it. I ride it all the time—to head to the gym or the track for workouts, to grab milk and berries on a mid-week run to Trader Joes, to pick up Thai food, or to get Handel’s ice cream with my son. The electric motor makes me feel like superwoman as I pedal uphill at 25 mph. The e-bike trip to town takes less than 20 minutes. Even taking the car takes 15. Drive or ride? Most days, the bike wins!
Three generations on three classes of e-bikes. My son on his Class 2 throttle-enabled Super73 bike (aka e-moped), and my mom and I on our pedal-assist Gazelle bikes, mine a Class 3 and my mom’s a Class 1.
I’ve been noticing how many people now use e-bikes for many different types of trips.
There’s the San Clemente surfer dude on his Murf e-bike carrying his surfboard straight to the beach, music blaring from the small speaker strapped to the rack. He’s having fun and doesn’t have to worry about finding parking and carrying his board and gear down the hill to T-Street beach.
There’s the parent riding their two kids to school on the back of a Tern cargo e-bike—with built-in bags that easily fit two lunch bags for the kids and a briefcase for mom or dad.
There are the e-biking seniors who don’t quite have the strength to pedal a regular bike but who get back to day trips on their e-bikes and proudly post about it in the Gazelle e-bike Facebook group.
And there’s the worker who crosses paths with me on my way to the gym at 6:15am who is using his RadRunner e-bike to get to his service job. I wonder whether he’s choosing to bike to avoid the high cost of car ownership or the hassles of taking public transport.
E-bikes are popular because they solve a wide range of real-world transportation problems. Plus, they are fun!
E-bikes benefited from innovation in electrification technology that made batteries smaller and cheaper and enabled more powerful and varied e-bikes to be built. The market took care of the rest. Dozens of new companies emerged and existing bike manufacturers expanded into e-bikes, building products that opened up this wide range of new ways of using bikes for transportation.
There are e-bikes that really are e-mopeds. They often are designed for the cool factor, like my son’s Super73. They have cheap rear hub motors and a throttle, in addition to pedals. Teens use them like mopeds, driving them with the throttle most of the time. The technical term for these is Class 2 e-bikes—limited to a maximum speed of 20 mph with a throttle and pedals. Other Class 2 bikes serve other specific needs - like cargo hauling or surf-board transporting.
A Murf purpose-built surfboard bike and a Tern cargo bike. Photo credits Murf & Tern
Then there are pedal-assist bikes like my Gazelle that don’t have a throttle. You need to pedal them, but the motor gives you extra power. Some go up to just 20 mph (technically called Class 1 bikes), others like mine go up to 28 mph (Class 3) and have enough torque to go up even the steepest San Francisco hill. Pedal-assist bikes now come in many versions - from step-through Dutch-style city bikes that make it easy for less flexible people to keep riding, to beach cruisers, to even e-road bikes that enable the lycra-clad 70-year-old to still keep up with his younger club rider friends.
It’s worth noting that this surge in e-biking in the US is a market phenomenon. There are very few government incentives to ride e-bikes, and in general, governments haven’t done much (yet!?) to make our car-centric infrastructure more bike friendly (although they should—more on that in another article.)
The extra range and power of e-bikes make bike transportation finally practicable in more of the US, for more people.
E-bikes work for the longer distances we need to cover here in the US. Many European cities are much denser than US cities. I recently was back in Freiburg, Germany, where I was born, a town where biking has always been a way of life. My 6-mile morning run there took me all around town, while my 6-mile run here doesn’t even leave the suburb I live in! In 20 minutes on a regular bike I might cover 3-4 miles—plenty for a commute in Freiburg, but just half way up the hill here. My e-bike, in contrast, enables me to cover 7-8 miles in the same time, which now makes it a usable tool for suburbia. Also, in many European cities good public transport systems exist, and people take bikes onto trains for multi-modal trips. In contrast, here in the US, we often need our bike to cover the whole distance. An e-bike again makes that much more feasible: in an hour-long commute, a Class 3 bike can take you 15-20 miles, a not untypical commute between close-in suburbs and a city center. (Of course, it would help if the infrastructure were better—more on that in another essay!)
Comparison of taking my touring bike (left) and my e-bike (right) to the gym. The e-bike is about twice as fast–and only takes about minutes more than my car. (And if I rode on the shorter, busy street which is too dangerous, the difference would be even less.)
The superpower of the electric motor helps deal with hills and climate challenges. No-one likes to arrive at the office or the restaurant all sweaty. And, let’s face it, much more of the US has unbearable heat in the summer than say, Germany—and we sure have many more hills than the Dutch! With less physical exertion needed going up hills in the heat, e-bikes make biking practicable in more of the country, for more of the time. Even in wetter or colder weather, e-bikes can help: it’s easy to carry a change of clothing on a rear rack or put a commuter bag into a water-proof pannier bag when you don’t worry about the weight as much.
This doesn’t mean that e-bikes right now work everywhere, all the time. Rural areas with narrow roads and no bike lanes or shoulders may just be too dangerous to ride at dawn or dusk. Winter in Chicago with windchill in the teens and slippery roads is not set-up for enjoyable rides, even on e-bikes. High-crime urban areas make it risky to leave expensive e-bikes outside while at work—especially as we have way too few sturdy bike stands to lock our bikes to.
Despite these constraints, e-bikes are surging ahead because everyone, from teenagers to grandmothers, use them to meet their own individual goals and needs. E-bikes are, like cars, individualist vehicles. Americans don’t like to be told what to do. We don’t like waiting for the bus or being squeezed with many others into crowded trains. E-bikes allow us to go where we want to go, when we want to go, just like cars.
Interestingly, beyond the individual(ist) benefit, e-bikes can also help solve at least three big societal problems: climate change, lifestyle diseases, and mental health challenges.
The obvious one that’s been much written about is climate change. E-bikes require less energy to operate than electric cars, and they have a lower materials footprint (smaller batteries, less metal, and so on). Mass adoption of e-bikes could significantly lower emissions. 60% of vehicle trips in the US in 2017 were 6 miles or shorter—a distance that can easily be ridden via an e-bike, so many car trips could quite realistically be done by e-bike instead. Transportation makes up about a third of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, and to date, much effort has been focused on making cars emit less per mile traveled. The popularity of e-bikes is a new opportunity for people to voluntarily get out of cars and mode-switch to a more energy efficient vehicle.
A much-less discussed problem that e-bikes can help solve is the deplorable physical health of Americans. Only 12% of us are metabolically healthy, which means 88% (!) of US adults have conditions that contribute to lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and even Alzheimers. These diseases explain a big chunk of the increased mortality of middle-aged Americans compared to longer-lived people in other industrialized nations. While the Standard American Diet (SAD–a very fitting acronym!) full of highly-processed convenience foods is the main culprit, a lack of activity is a major contributor.
Americans move less during their normal day-to-day, especially in car-dependent suburbia and for older people, than Europeans do. As people in the US adopt e-biking (especially if they choose to pedal, vs. use the throttle) we can become more like Europeans in our daily activity and reap the health benefits.
The Dutch have over the past 50 or so years become a cycling culture. About a quarter of all trips in the Netherlands are taken by bike—and researchers estimate that biking adds about a half year to Dutch life expectancy with 6,500 lives saved per year and 3% added to Dutch GDP. I’m not sure that we can get to 25% of all trips on bikes here in the US—although the fact that 60% of vehicle trips are 6 miles or shorter suggests that there is much potential here. But let’s say we even captured half of the Dutch benefit: that would still equal 60,000 lives saved. With an estimated value of $100,000 per quality-adjusted life year, that’s a potential of $6 billion in value created for the US economy.
Source: Netherlands Institute for Transportation Policy Analysis
Beyond physical health, e-bikes also help alleviate the mental health crisis that is plaguing our country. Take teenagers again: many studies show that their mental health has declined over the past decade, in part due to an epidemic of loneliness. As the Smithsonian summarizes, “For young people ages 15 to 24, time spent in-person with friends fell from about 150 minutes per day in 2003 to 40 minutes per day in 2020—an almost 70 percent drop.” Some of this may be due to COVID, of course—but a more recent study showed that the trend continues, with only 32% of high school seniors in 2022 seeing friends “almost every day” vs. 44% in 2010. Similarly, a typical 8th grader in 2000 had about 2.5 social outings a week in 2000, compared to 1.5 in 2021. As The Hill put it, “The nation’s teens have traded face time for Facetime. Adolescents are spending less time gathering in shopping malls, movie theaters and rec rooms, and more time connecting on Instagram, TikTok and Discord.” An e-bike can be a wonderful tool to get teens out of their bedrooms and out and about with friends! I see this with my son. Ever since he got his e-bike he's been out with his friends a lot, riding over to their houses or hanging out at a local coffee shop or park. So much better than only meeting them virtually playing computer games!
More generally, the US overall is gripped by an epidemic of depression which has risen across all age groups. Evidence shows that physical activity can help alleviate depression—maybe as much as medication. Yet it’s often hard for busy Americans to add even 30 or 45 minutes a day for dedicated exercise. Working out while going places on an e-bike is a great solution: it’s a twofer of getting where you need to go and getting the exercise you need to keep going. And one more benefit: e-biking takes you outside, and being in nature adds to the mental health benefits, even if it’s just riding through a park or in a green suburban street.
In summary, e-bikes are an individual “I want it” solution that addresses societal “you should” problems.
I want to have fun riding my e-bike to my friend’s house, popping wheelies along the way, thinks my teenage son. Without meaning to, he solves the problem of “you should” be on your screen less and spend more time with friends to better your mental health.
I want to take my kids to school on the cargo bike because it avoids the long car line, says the young mom. Without actively intending to, she’s following the “you should” of adding 40 minutes of exercise to her day, lowering her risk of metabolic disease without needing to spend much extra time.
I want to ride my bike to pick-up take-out food, because it’s much more relaxing than getting in the car at the end of the day, I think to myself often. Without actively meaning to, I have followed the “you should” of driving less to reduce carbon emissions (and saved about $1,500 over 18 months in car costs—meaning my e-bike will pay for itself in less than four years).
One of the things I love about living in the US is the workings of the relatively free market to figure out new, innovative solutions to many problems. Companies figure out how to leverage new technology like cheaper batteries and more powerful engines to solve problems that people may not have even identified. (How many surfer dudes thought, I really need a bike to carry my board?) Individuals then use these new tools in unexpected ways (say, a surfer dude making a home-made rack for his board on his e-bike)—which leads to more innovation (the Murf e-bike company was started to “help ourselves and our friends find better surf, more often”). These individual choices then often have beneficial side effects—substituting a car trip to the beach by a bike ride, reducing carbon emissions.
I think all too often when we are faced with big societal problems like climate change or health challenges we default to top-down “you should” solutions imposed on people as an unpleasant, unchosen duty. E-bikes are a great and under-rated example of how the dynamism of individual choices can better the world. It’s delightful when the “I want” solution that makes people smile also makes them and the planet healthier, no guilting “you should” required.