In the Electric Transition, Size Matters

How E-Bikes Can Change The World

The best thing you can do for your health and the planet today is get an electric bike.

There are many reasons. It takes less work, thus less food, and the load from recharging the bike isn’t as great as that. You wind up riding more, thus substituting more car miles, with an e-bike than a regular bike. As for myself, I feel 40 years younger on an e-bike.

An e-bike will change your ideas about how your city works. America’s cities and suburbs aren’t designed for bikes. They’re designed for cars. Big cars. When America’s car companies saw the electric transition coming, then, they built big electric cars.

Big electric cars are garbage.

They’re garbage because the energy density of today’s lithium-ion batteries is lower than gasoline. Electric cars are garbage because with no engine in the front a collision can kill you. They’re also garbage because a side impact destroys the battery pack and, thus, totals the car.

All this is being used by oil lobbyists to claim the EV transition can’t and shouldn’t happen. If Americans remain dependent on energy hogs, they’ll never get the EV message.

That’s where e-bikes come in. Young families now put kids on the backs of their e-bikes, or tote little ones in trailers. (I tried that on a regular bike when my daughter was tiny. It didn’t work.) There are kids using “bike trains” to go to school, and a lot more advocates for bike trails and bike lanes in town.

Chopping down the distance between chores, from a half-hour car ride to a half-hour bike ride, is going to change cities like nobody’s business. Every suburb will need, and have, a center. There will be safe paths to get between towns because people will demand them.

Shorter trips will create more demand for smaller EVs. The “mid-market” is already buying hybrids like my Toyota Corolla, and it’s hungry for EVs that are just as reliable. A plug-in hybrid has plenty of range for city trips and can be recharged at home while the gas engine gives you all the range you want. It’s the next generation of solid-state, all-metal batteries that will give small EVs the full driving range they need.

How much range is that? If I’m on the road and can get from a Buc-ees to another Buc-ees without needing a fill-up, I think that’s plenty of range. An electric Buc-ees, or something like it, gives me something to do while waiting for the car to charge. I’d love a concierge service that will deliver an alert when the car is full, with someone to clean the windows and park it by the store. I think that’s coming.

But such services only arrive when there is a market for them, when we change our attitudes about transportation, and e-bikes can help do that. Get one.