Why e-bikes are more important than EVs
Bikes can actually transform cities in the way driverless cars promise
I have written the international section of The Economist this week, which is a slot where we tend to run stories about trends affecting the whole planet, or at least multiple regions of it. The piece examines how three things - a pandemic hangover, the rise of electric bikes, and the spread of bike lanes - is transforming cities the world over. I reported it from Montreal, a city I almost instantly fell in love with, not least because of its wonderful pedestrianised streets (sadly for now a summer feature only).
There’s so much more I could have written, but I do think the e-bike is one of the more exciting inventions out there right now, having real world impacts that are simply missed by the car-driving Silicon Valley set (the people who run Lime aside). Just last night I took an electric Divvy - the Chicago bike share scheme - to a wedding party and back. It was four miles each way, took 16 minutes, and cost me a total of about $6.50 for the round trip, for a journey that in a taxi would have cost $20 each way and taken longer (I do in fairness have an annual membership which reduces the per minute fee).
The big advantage of bikes is that, unlike buses or trains, they go directly from where you start to where you finish, at the exact moment you need to go. The advantage over cars is that they need perhaps 1/10th of the amount of road and parking space. Roads that jam up quickly with cars can carry effectively unlimited numbers of people by bicycle.
What this means is that bikes offer the chance to radically improve the efficiency of our existing transport systems in congested cities - which is any city worth living in. This is incidentally why Paris built so many bike lanes during the Covid-19 pandemic. The city government realised that it was the only way people would be able to get around easily without being exposed to the virus on trains. And it worked brilliantly.
Please do read the piece. If you’re not a subscriber, registering will let you read it for free. And the more people read and register, the more likely it is that I will be able to get more pieces like this commissioned.