cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/565171
Electric bikes make it possible to easily travel around town for less than a penny per day — literally.
I love ebikes but walking, cycling on a regular bike, riding on a skateboard, and all other unpowered means of travel are all still more climate friendly than ebikes. Ebikes are just less bad than something powered by an ICE.
Yes, but also no - if an ebike is replacing a car trip, it’s using 2 orders of magnitude less resources. As an example, this morning I had to take my kiddo to her summer camp, and it’s about 5 miles one way. I’m relatively fit, but without electric assistance I’d have driven.
Here in the US, we’ve built ourselves into a bunch of low-density suburbs - e-bikes represent an incredible opportunity to reduce carbon emissions now, without needing to demolish entire communities and rebuild them more densely.
Wouldn’t normal bikes be even more climate friendly?
Inb4 “I live in a very hilly area”. I mean for regular flat cities.
I was expecting the article to talk about how e-bikes might make a person choose to bike over take their car for short to medium length trips. In that case, there might be a tipping point where e-bikes could be more climate friendly than regular bikes just because they end up getting used more and take cars off the road.
