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Personally I can say the only reason I don’t ride my e-bike more for daily use is due to the rampancy of bike theives and vandals. Shit is genuinely getting hard to deal with and I don’t have time or money to put up with it.
If I could guarantee with just a high end u-lock or bike chain, something not too unreasonable, if that allowed me to park my bike at a busy grocery store and be able to ride home 15 minutes later, I’d use it that way. I genuinely love my e-bike and find it fun to ride, even with the annoyance of locks and security.
But after having wheel(s) stolen, a shifter broken, lines cut and even a lock fucked up, and after having transients and crackheads harass me for parking and locking up, I’ve just given up. Our police are still choosing not to do anything about this kind of crime, and I can’t get insurance against theft like I can with my car.
Plus, my EV has security and cameras, and critically is big enough that even a jacked up thief can’t walk off with it. Worst they can do is break windows or smash mirrors. I’ll waste the extra time and energy driving to the store if it means I won’t lose thousands of dollars to theft with absolutely zero chance of recompense.
Personally I can say the only reason I don’t ride my e-bike more for daily use is due to the rampancy of bike theives and vandals. Shit is genuinely getting hard to deal with and I don’t have time or money to put up with it.
I remember a YouTube video someone did in New York City where they simulated stealing a bike using various increasingly-slow and obvious methods. Started with a pair of bolt cutters and went through a few others, including an angle grinder.
It culminated with them using a hammer and chisel to slowly carve their way through a bike lock chain. Someone stopped to help, suggested that they hold the chain differently. A NYPD cruiser stopped, asked them to move out of the street because it was on the edge of the sidewalk and they were lying in an active lane of the street, and then moved on.
I think that as long as something is light enough to be placed into a van and is stored in the open, if crime is an issue in the area, it’s probably going to either need to be really cheap – so not worth stealing – or have sophisticated measures to deter it, like requiring registration or maybe smartphone-style components that require cryptographic authentication and can’t be “reset” without the owner being involved.
Really cheap bikes is the Dutch way, you buy it for 20€ from your local bike thief and when it gets stolen you get another one. It’s a circular economy really.
You’ve hit on an important point here. I’d love to ride my bike downtown to work on the days I go there, and everywhere else. Problem is, the minute I take my eyes of it, it’s going to be gone. 100%.
As someone who would also love to do that, why don’t more cities have public lockups? I worked at a place near downtown that had one for employees and it was amazing. I could bike to work ditch the bike and catch a bus or train and not have to worry about my bike while I was out.
They still get into the lockups. The building at my former workplace had a secure lockup that required key card access, and a stringent card granting process. Yet it still happened. Just takes one bonehead to leave the gate unlatched, or to let someone in. Short of actual security guards standing within the cage, unfortunately I just don’t trust it enough.
Wow, that’s crazy! I certainly did not have that experience with my lockup, but it was in a parking garage behind a second locked gate, so fairly secure.
I guess that just becomes part of your risk assessment for biking places then! I know in my situation I’d have to lose an awful lot of bikes to make the cost of a car worthwhile, but I’d really rather not lose any.
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Theft
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Weather
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Expense (because I have to have a car anyway)
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Rampant threats to my life.
Yeah I could ride a PoS bike in some places that no one would want to steal and keep it locked up but it just doesn’t make a ton of sense where I live.
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What city are you talking about?
Arstechnica is doing blogspam now? This is just a repost from https://theconversation.com/the-worlds-280-million-electric-bikes-and-mopeds-are-cutting-demand-for-oil-far-more-than-electric-cars-213870.
Also, for the sake of diversity, maybe it would be better to have these conversations outside of /c/technology? The original article has been posted on !climate@slrpnk.net and !humanscale@communick.news, both of them seeming a lot more fitting for the topic…
I mean, Ars has often posted content written by sister sites… but in this case it was just a creative commons licensed article, so maybe they didn’t even need permission.
So what’s the best solution? You might think switching to an electric vehicle is the natural step. In fact, for short trips, an electric bike or moped might be better for you—and for the planet.
However, in an enclosed EV, you aren’t out in the weather.
I’ve spent time bike-commuting, and I live somewhere where the weather is pretty mild. But there’s a pretty big difference between being out in the wet and wind and cold when it’s raining or whatnot and being inside a dry, air-conditioned or heated cabin.
But it’s more than that—they are actually displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present, due to their staggering uptake in China and other nations where mopeds are a common form of transport.
I mean, that’s fine, but as the article points out, that’s because China’s consumers are generally more price-sensitive and the likely alternative is a moped. If you’re gonna get a gasoline-powered moped or an electric bicycle, sure, unless the range is an issue, the e-bike is a pretty reasonable drop-in replacement.
But people in the US don’t generally commute via gasoline-powered moped. That is, they’ve already made a judgement as to the tradeoffs, and I strongly doubt that whether-or-not the vehicle has an electric or gasoline motor is going to change this.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2021/acs/acs-48.pdf
I don’t know which category a moped fits into here, but looking at Table 1 on Page 2, I assume that it’d be one of the following groups:
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0.1% of Americans commute via motorcycle.
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0.5% of Americans commute via bicycle.
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1.0% of Americans use “other means”.
Compare to:
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84.8% use a car, truck, or van
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5.0% use public transportation
I don’t think that introducing electric motors into the mix is going to be the factor that drastically changes the above ratios.
That being said, it is true that there are vehicles in-between a car and a moped, including things that have enclosed cabins. But…they haven’t really taken off as a class in the US, be it for safety or other reasons.
The EU has a “quadricycle” class of vehicles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadricycle_(EU_vehicle_classification)
The US equivalent is a “low speed vehicle”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-speed_vehicle
I remember watching a Fifth Gear episode where they almost rolled an instance of these, a Citroen Ami, over in a tight turn – they apparently don’t need to conform to the same safety requirements that automobiles do. I’ll believe that there is a legitimate niche – like, in a city with a serious lack of parking, one might be able to squeeze into tight parking spots that a full-size car couldn’t. And if you’re really, really tight on funds, then one might make sense.
https://electrek.co/2023/05/31/are-electric-micro-cars-nevs-and-lsvs-street-legal-in-the-us/
That’s one of the reasons that LSVs are limited to just 25 mph (40 km/h) top speed and can only be operated on roads with speed limits of 35 mph (56 km/h). Both of these are part of the federally mandated LSV regulations and are designed to prevent these vehicles from mixing with larger full-size vehicles at higher speeds, where the result of crashes are more likely to be fatal.
But you give up the ability to travel on anything other than low-speed roads, you lose crash safety, you lose space, you lose range, a number of amenities have likely been shaved off, and that’s a lot to trade for easier parking and a lower price. I think that that makes something like a quadricycle a difficult sell to most here in competition with a used regular car. Maybe for special cases, like where you’re going to to operate them off public roads – I mean, the golf cart is successful on golf courses. And ATVs are a thing as an off-road utility vehicle on things like farms and on large lots. But I’m skeptical that electric motors are going to make LSVs a major portion of road traffic.
I’d suggest that e-bikes have at least some advantage over traditional motorcycles in that you can take them onto public transport such as metro or rail. Or one might find easier parking for them at an enclosed stand af a nearby but out of walking range train station that helps you shave a bus and transfer off your commute in nice weather. The electric motor is definitely an advantage over unpowered bikes in convenience, and a major factor if one can’t or won’t shower when they get to work.
That being said i’d be amazed if it shifts the needle more than a percent or two at most. Proper show up and go metros take cars off the road by being so obviously better than having to find parking, but e-bikes don’t have the same end user benefits.
This is all to say nothing of rural areas, which often don’t have the density to support frequent transit becuse “why are we running empty buses, they aren’t turning a profit and that’s all that matters”, but amusingly most of farm country, at least in the US, was actually built around the idea that you would bike in to town if it didn’t require the cart. I mean it make that sane you would need to drop the 50mph limits on country roads down to 35 or so, and the sun will grow cold before any town politician survives trying that, but it was possible.
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In fact, for short trips, an electric bike or moped might be better for you—and for the planet. That’s because these forms of transport—collectively known as electric micromobility—are cheaper to buy and run.
Ok, so this article is actually combining e-bike numbers with electric mopeds, and while you might be able to argue that e-bikes somehow aren’t electric vehicles because they’re partially human-powered, anyone who thinks a moped isn’t one can sod off. They are fully motor-driven. They require a license. They have the same road-legal requirements as any other “electric vehicle”: turn signals, head and brake-lights, license plate, etc.
they are actually displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present
Yeah, show me those 2 broken out individually, because I bet you it’s far more about mopeds than e-bikes, but of course the article title doesn’t even mention mopeds at all.
and while you might be able to argue that e-bikes somehow aren’t electric vehicles because they’re partially human-powered, anyone who thinks a moped isn’t one can sod off. They are fully motor-driven.
While I’ve seen people use “moped” and “motor scooter” interchangeably, that’s really a shift in terminology; a “moped” is originally and still can be a “motorized” vehicle that can also be “pedaled”. Now, I don’t know how often people actually pedal even with pedalable ones, but…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moped
All of the example images there are vehicles that can be pedaled.
Yes, but that is not what are being sold now as electric mopeds/ scooters that account for e.g. the 9.7 million annual unit-sales in China. Fully-motorized mopeds are. Which just makes using the ambiguity of the category in order to lie about carbon offset achieved by e-bikes even worse. The accurate headline would have been to say that electric scooters have likely proven to be far better than electric cars, but instead the author chose to make it about e-bikes.
That an especially important distinction when talking about the US, because electric scooters can already navigate our car-centric infrastructure far better than e-bikes can, which means that we can shift people to those much more quickly than we can to e-bikes (which we don’t have the infra to support an explosion of, since they need their own infra), and without the environmental re-construction costs to build that infra that would offset any gains for a LOOONG time.
I get that people wish we could shift to a European-like model of city transit, but we can’t without some pretty major tradeoffs (and heavy drawbacks). Electric motorcycles/ scooters are much more feasible and practical for most individual commuters than e-bikes, and electric cars for families. Most people are either not willing, or not financially able, to have both.
They require a license. They have the same road-legal requirements as any other “electric vehicle”: turn signals, head and brake-lights, license plate, etc
Only in some countries.
Even where they are regulated that generally only covers on-road use. If you ride them on private property you’re fine, which allows stores to sell high powered ebikes for “private use only”… for about the price of a good motorcycle helmet. No turn signals, no brake lights, a $3 headlight lucky and forget about number plates because there’s no way the tyres or brakes are suitable for the weight of the bike even at regular speeds, let alone the high speeds they can reach.
They’re not mopeds at all. They’re e-bikes with a throttle and excessively large electric motor. And if you ride them to work every day, nobody’s gonna stop you. Shit will hit the fan when you run into a pedestrian or car though.
Cool, what does the e stand for?
Electric, not really sure if this is a real question or sarcasm.
they probably mean the e-bikes are also electric vehicles.
Ok fair point, it’s pretty clear in this case it’s about bikes vs cars, but technically correct.
I don’t understand why it needs to be electric bikes vs electric cars when it should be electric vehicles vs non-renewable fuels. Electric bikes have the same problems as electric cars, just on a slightly smaller scale. The rubber in their tires causes microplastics, they’re fueled by electricity which may come from non-clean sources. They have more down sides, like not as many people can use them at once, you’re not gonna see people in rural areas adopting them - or most places in the US - because of the distance required to get to a store or whatever.
I think infighting here is stupid.
Did you read the article? Because there is zero infighting and it’s not about cars vs bikes. The article is basically just saying that everyone is looking at electric cars, but electric bikes and mopeds actually have much more impact at the moment. That is because in a lot of Asian countries these are the default mode of transport. It’s way cheaper to replace fossil mopeds with ebikes and emopeds.
Also what do you mean not as many people can use them at the same time? These things have pretty small battery packs, you can just charge them at a regular socket in your house.
Also an ebike is way lighter than a car so the amount of microplastics is way less.
Your whole point about distance? The article starts that 60% of trips in the US are less than 10KM, easily done on an ebike or emoped.
Who cares what it is? Just choose to trust
The “e” is silent.
Climate crisis needs not worry, car manufacturers will propagandize, bribe, and otherwise pressure cities to ban e-bikes if only to create consumer uncertainty to sell more electric/hybrid cars which have a much higher carbon footprint than e-bikes.
On the world’s roads last year, there were over 20 million electric vehicles and 1.3 million commercial EVs such as buses, delivery vans, and trucks.
But these numbers of four or more wheel vehicles are wholly eclipsed by two- and three-wheelers. There were over 280 million electric mopeds, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheelers on the road last year
There are about 20x more e-bikes than electric cars. Of course its going to demand more oil.
The real question is what is best in terms of oil demand between electric cars and e-bikes
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But it’s more than that—they are actually displacing four times as much demand for oil as all the world’s electric cars at present, due to their staggering uptake in China and other nations where mopeds are a common form of transport.
Their batteries make them heavier than a traditional car and draw heavily on the extraction of rare earth elements.
Smaller electric options like scooters and skateboards also offer a way to overcome the last kilometer problem that plagues public transport systems.
A study of e-scooter riders in the United Kingdom found these trips produced up to 45 percent less carbon dioxide than alternatives.
Global oil demand is now projected to peak in 2028 at 105.7 million barrels per day—and then begin to fall, according to the International Energy Agency.
If you live in an outer suburb or regional towns, you may find the longer range and larger capacity of an electric car is better suited.
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