Are Electric Bikes a Passing Fad or a Revolutionary Transportation Tool?

For many months now, I’ve been tracking the slow progression of electric bikes into the mainstream and I believe I can confidently say: it’s happening. The explosion is here.

Electric bikes or “e-bikes” used to seem like some futuristic invention that would have a hard time catching on with the general public. Remember the Segway? It was supposed to change the world of transportation and instead it became the purview of mall cops and dorky city tours. 

The first electric bike I ever saw up close was owned by a neighbor in my graduate student apartment building who was a geeky engineer that built his own solar panels…which he affixed to the top of his van in order to charge his e-bike. Suffice it to say, if that was the profile of the average user, I didn’t see much future for electric bikes beyond being a cool toy for tech-interested dudes. (No shade to him by the way; he was a great guy!)

And yet, I couldn’t help being intrigued. As someone who’s biked regularly as a form of transportation (in plenty of less-than-bike-friendly cities) but isn’t particularly strong or athletic, the idea of a bike that could give me some speed and power for regular trips to the library or grocery store sounded pretty appealing, especially if I was hauling a big pile of books or several bags of groceries. The option to show up at a location in the warmer months—say, a business meeting or a church service—not drenched in sweat after a hard ride, was also very attractive. And I can only imagine that’s more significant for people who live in hotter climates. (I’m in Wisconsin where we only get a couple months of 80-degree weather.)

But now, between our friend Johnny Sanphillippo (a middle-aged guy who’s definitely not a tech bro) recently purchasing an e-bike, my 85-year-old grandfather-in-law hopping on his own electric trike, and plenty more anecdotal stories (not to mention e-bikes popping up on the streets around me), I’m starting to think this thing is going mainstream. 

That’s particularly exciting for those of us who want to see our communities become more financially resilient. We’ve long said here at Strong Towns, that enabling more people to safely and conveniently bike will have a dramatic, positive impact on our cities. Bikes are a far cheaper form of transportation than cars—both for households and for cities, because the infrastructure they require and the wear-and-tear they create on roads is minimal. Bike-friendly streets have also been shown to increase property values, local business sales, etc. I could go on.

If electric bikes are going to make it easier for more people to travel by bike and maybe even ditch their family car, saving a ton of money in the process, I’m all in. I had a lot of questions, though. I hit up one of our Strong Towns board members, Andrew Burleson, who’s been following the e-bike trend for some time and has tried his fair share of e-bikes (as well as other types of “micromobility,” like electric scooters), to get some answers about this current trend.

An e-bike rider in Hartford, CT. (Source: BiCi Co. / Jacob Sheppard-Saidel.)

What’s Better About E-Bikes?

Let’s start with the most game-changing aspect of e-bikes: they make biking more feasible for more people. E-bikes allow people who are less fit or athletic to still get places quickly without a car. This is especially true in hilly cities where pedaling is a lot more work, or for hotter climates where a cyclist can easily get tired in the sun. E-bikes just make all of that easier and faster.

There’s tremendous power, too, in an electric bike’s ability to change how biking in the street feels for the average user. While biking next to cars, the speed difference between the bike and the car is part of what makes the street feel so dangerous. But an e-bike enables you to get much closer to a car’s speed. “It’s very easy to maintain a sufficient speed, by which I mean 15–20 miles an hour,” says Burleson, “and your reaction time doesn’t have to be perfect.”

He explained many e-bikes also have a “throttle” feature which allows you to basically coast while still traveling very fast, meaning you can stop focusing on pedaling and give your full attention to something like merging with traffic or signaling a turn. Multitasking to do these sorts of things while also pedaling on a regular bike can create some scary moments. I can attest to this. The times when I’ve felt most at risk of falling on my bike are the times when I’m simultaneously trying to travel forward and signal a turn with my hand at an intersection. My husband actually broke his shoulder doing this exact thing (although we also blame a poorly placed manhole cover).

Put simply, an electric bike lowers the barrier to entry for so many people that might otherwise not be ready to bike much in their cities. And, Burleson also made this point to me multiple times: They’re just plain fun! 

What’s the Real Cost?

One of my biggest questions about e-bikes was whether they’d be affordable for the general public. Most run anywhere from $1,400 for a basic e-bike up to $10,000 if you’re looking at a cargo-bike option with space for groceries or kids. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there are several models around the $1,000 mark available now, though. A sign that this is indeed becoming more normal and accessible? $1000 is still a lot to shell out, but that’s in the range of plenty of nicer non-electric bikes and it’s way less than any car or even moped you could find (especially when you factor in insurance, maintenance, and gas). If you think about it as a replacement for a car for local trips around town, the price starts looking a lot more reasonable.

Burleson explains that the cost of manufacturing the battery packs and motors is the current limiting factor on price: “You pretty much can’t make an e-bike for less than $1,000 today, but two years ago, you couldn’t do it for less than $2,000.” As batteries and motors get cheaper to make, the cost of e-bikes will surely go down. Burleson doesn’t predict $100 e-bikes any time soon. (It’s hard to find a regular new bike for that price, frankly.) But he does predict that the market for used e-bikes will grow a lot in the coming years. Just as the used car market is a way to access otherwise unaffordable vehicles, e-bikes will probably follow the same trend.

Besides the start-up cost to purchase, Burleson reports that e-bikes have little maintenance expenses beyond what a regular bike would have. The bike frames will last for years and even decades. The battery may eventually need to be replaced, depending on how much you use it, but that’s the only serious maintenance cost you encounter with an e-bike, and that likely comes after several years of use. 

(Source: Unsplash.)

How Could E-Bikes Transform Cities—and Suburbs?

Because electric bikes could enable so many more people to bike and to travel much farther doing it, they open up a world of possibilities to cut back on car-dependence and dominance in our communities. Strong Towns member and writer Johnny Sanphillippo recently picked up his first e-bike. He wrote in a post on his blog, “The electric bike makes almost all my trips viable without a vehicle unless the weather is particularly bad or I’m carrying big, heavy things. Not having to deal with traffic congestion or parking is a tremendous upgrade. And the distances I’m willing to go on a bike expanded greatly with the electric boost.”

What would it mean to hop onto an e-bike to pick your kids up from school five miles away or grab medications at the pharmacy, instead of climbing into a car? Think about the amount of money your family would save if you were able to replace one of your cars with an e-bike.

Ultimately, the design of your streets is going to determine whether e-bikes could take hold on a large scale in your city today. For an area that’s already fairly people-oriented, with bike lanes, narrow streets, and a navigable street grid, e-bikes are easy to plug in (pun intended). In a city or historic town, “micromobility is potentially better than cars at everything cars are good at,” says Burleson, “except for long trips and hauling things.” He described zipping past cars idling in traffic on his e-bike when he lived in San Francisco. 

In auto-oriented areas, on the other hand, e-bikes become more challenging to use. No matter how fast your bike can go, you’re probably not going to feel safe on a six-lane, high-speed stroad. Burleson comments that some suburban areas can still work well for e-biking, though: “The sparse suburbs are pretty much e-bike utopia. Inside the subdivision, [e-bikes] are fantastic because the cars are going slow enough.” And if you can get from your suburban home to a shopping area or office building using those slower residential streets, e-bikes could be a really powerful transportation tool.

However, “if you can’t get to the grocery store without going on a megastroad, that’s when you’re toast,” says Burleson. “Those things are cars-only.” 

It should be noted that Burleson spent the last several years in San Francisco and then recently moved to Austin. He doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that electric-biking is a lot harder in Austin than it was in the Bay Area. In San Francisco, Burleson commuted to work every day on a bike. Now, he only really feels comfortable taking the electric bike within a small radius of his house where there are reliable bike lanes or quiet residential streets. That means he can get to the park or a hamburger joint with his kids, and that’s about it. Beyond this, Austin is just too car-centric and full of stroads. In this Texas city, like so many other cities, biking is still mainly seen as a recreational activity, not a legitimate form of transportation. 

But we hope it doesn’t stay that way forever. Burleson sees a long-tail future for micromobility, where kids today who grow up with electric bikes and scooters will keep enjoying them into young adulthood and, eventually, if they move to the suburbs to buy a house or have a family later in life, they’ll ask, “Why can’t I keep biking and scootering here, too?” Burleson also points out that, with so many large corporations investing a ton of money into the micromobility industry, it's probably not going away any time soon. 

(Source: Unsplash.)

At the end of the day, if we want to see biking take hold on a greater scale in our communities, our priorities and culture will need to shift. Our cities and towns will have to stop being places that prioritize fast-moving car traffic over every other form of transportation, and viewing things like biking and walking as recreation activities. We’ll need to start seeing people as the most important element of an economically productive place. 

Electric bikes could help with that shift by showing more people that, yes, they too can bike for their daily travel instead of drive—and they don’t need to be especially fit or strong, or live somewhere particularly flat or temperate, either. If more people could trade in their cars for electric bikes, we might see a movement toward safer towns and cities, less wear and tear on our roads, and decreasing transportation costs for everyone.

Returning to that question I posed at the top of the article: Is the e-bike revolution here? I believe we’re looking at a significant moment in biking history, but it goes beyond that. Andrew Burleson argues, “The e-bikes are not the actual magic. The magic is the combination of dense batteries ... with small powerful motors. And those can be combined in all kinds of ways that [enable you to] get a really meaningful bite out of what a car does, in a much smaller package that’s much cheaper.” 

Let’s check back in a few years to see where we’re at, but I feel pretty confident in saying that, by then, you’ll find me riding an e-bike all over town, hopefully with safer, more people-oriented streets, to boot.

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