280 million e-bikes are slashing oil demand far more than electric vehicles : technology

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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%.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Theft
Weather
Expense (because I have to have a car anyway)
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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

What city are you talking about?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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 [email protected] and [email protected], both of them seeming a lot more fitting for the topic...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[+] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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[+] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I don’t think that introducing electric motors into the mix is going to be the factor that drastically changes the above ratios.

Very confident you're wrong in that sentiment.

American urban design is awful. It's really bad. And I would feel safe claiming that most Americans who might consider bikeped commutes rule it out because it is just not practical with our sprawling, idiotic suburban model.

That electric motor decreases your delta with prevailing traffic substantially and massively expands your range both as a function of literal distance and as a function of how far you can get in a given time. ebikes have absolutely HUGE potential to act as a transition as US urban planners (hopefully) get their act together and stop building financially and environmentally unsustainable, ugly, unsafe cities -- and start opening the door to the kind of infill needed to fix the already-busted ones.

[+] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Literally everything you've written here is premised on the idea that people have a choice. That both kinds of living arrangements are equally available and people are choosing one over the other. That and a mistaken understanding of density that so many people have, where you think only Metropolis style apartment blocks could possibly be walkable when really the small town Main Street has been the icon of walkability for basically all of human history.

It's such a fundamental error that I'm comfortable dismissing pretty much everything else you wrote based on it. There's a reason almost the entire world and human history has cities that generally follow the same pattern. Walkable, modest density communities with a mix of uses that grow organically.

And there's a reason those don't get built anymore in the US. It's not because people hate them. People love them. The ones that do exist are some of the most desirable places to live based on so many metrics. Particularly price, which is the true story - the supply on these kinds of towns is unbelievably tight and so people can't afford to live in them. They're forced by factors outside of their own preference and control to instead live in places that 100% require a car for all day today life activities with absolutely no mix of uses and where it is only legal to build single-family detached homes. Because these places are way cheaper. Even though they shouldn't be. They absolutely and objectively should cost more to live in because it costs more for the municipal government to service you living in them. You consume more public resources living in them. But we subsidize them so much that they magically get cheaper even inclusive of one or two $10,000 a year cars.

The reason suburbs show so much clear growth is because we subsidize them intensely in so many ways.

And it wouldn't even matter if you were right and people genuinely preferred suburbs because they're not financially productive they're not financially sustainable and they're an environmental disaster. Just having a preference for something doesn't mean that the government should tax everyone else and subsidize it for you.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Suburban areas are usually not linked to urban ones with corridors that support (e-)bikes, so you'd often need to literally construct a completely new set of bike-friendly routes to support them.

That electric motor decreases your delta with prevailing traffic substantially

People currently aren't commuting in from suburbs on 30mph residential roads, they're on 50-65mph highways. I live in the Bay Area, and there is not a good way to bike into the city currently from either the East Bay or from the North, both of which are where most of the actual suburban sprawl is. You'd literally have to get on BART if you're in the East Bay, because the Bay Bridge doesn't have bike or pedestrian pathways. And BART can't handle that many more riders; it's already a mess during rush hour.

stop building financially and environmentally unsustainable, ugly, unsafe cities

If your solution requires completely restructuring the way we build cities (how are you planning to change the ones already built), it's not going to work in any meaningful timeframe. Our current model of city planning evolved over the past hundred years. We don't have that long to move people to electrics.

Cities are not being designed the way they are (highly compact downtown area with majority of jobs) in order to cater to cars, they're doing it to cater to businesses. Rather than trying to get people to commute in a better way, we should be focusing on what we've already seen deal the most damage to urban business: remote work. That has removed, and will continue to remove, far more cars from the road each day than e-bikes will.

Not a bike commute: no commute.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Our current model of urban planning has only existed since the middle of the 20th century. Only really got started in around 1960s.

I think it's important to point out that it is definitely under 100 years. On the scales of human urban policy it is the brand new experiment. And it is a disaster. And we're still throwing bad money after good on it in huge quantities.

Cities are already remodeling themselves, small bits at a time, to start fixing these issues. There is no choice in the matter here. They have to do it or else they're going to find themselves with roads full of potholes that they can't afford to fix and failing water systems and all those other modern signs of decay growing worse and worse until they basically aren't a town anymore. As someone in the Bay Area you should know this well, because that City both has some disastrous symptoms and is building policies to this effect.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

No, our current model of city building stretches back to the early 1900s, and really took off around 1916 when the first modern zoning map was created, for NYC, that set the precedent for how we carve up land around urban areas. But the suburban sprawl that took off in the 20s and post-WW2 era was an imitation of the extra-urban residences of the old-money families.

The creation of HUD in 1965, which is what I assume you are referring to, long post-dates the commute-centric downtown+suburban-sprawl model.

(Have to run, will add more on cities changing/ etc in a bit).

Cities are definitely changing, but they're not all moving in better directions. We need solutions that don't rely on 10+ year infrastructure projects that may or may not ever even happen. City planning will cater to the demands of how people use the city, so the best way to get 2-wheel-friendly infrastructure is for people to use 2-wheel vehicles, so while e-bikes are great for people who are at short distances already, they don't help for people living at medium or long ones (i.e. the suburbs), and if only the short-range commuters change, that won't be enough to drive infra changes.

My personal preference is always trains, but unfortunately that has even less chance of happening anytime soon, and even worse is that in order to grow it requires reclaiming a LOT of land, and the land they eminent domain or low-ball mandatory-purchase ain't gonna be rich peoples' homes.

Ultimately though, they will only stop building centralized, dense downtowns when people stop working in high-density office buildings. Barring that, it's just a question of how we're mitigating the impact of the commute.

We should be pushing for divesting from urban centers entirely, in favor of smaller communities that are walkable and largely self-contained(as in, they each have all essential services within them, e.g. grocery, medical, leisure), with transit that connects them like rail and buses similar to towns in Europe, but that's definitely a LONG ways off.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The federal aid highway act.

The broken modern urban planing pattern did not predate it. Period. The suburban experiment is post war.

The rest of the 5000+ years of traditional urban design were overturned.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm not sure how you turned "post-war" into "post-1956" and just erased the 11 years in between, but the 1956 Federal Highway Act did not create suburbs. Suburbs existed pre- war, and exploded in the mid-to-late 40s as veterans returned with GI money and bought cars and suburban homes.

The groundwork for that explosion started much earlier, in the late 1890s and early 1900s as Federal agencies were created to establish guidelines for paved roads, such as the Office of Road Inquiry in 1893, and the Office of Public Roads, and the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 that established both federal oversight and state agencies for public roads, including interstate roads, which had been declared the purview of the federal govt in 1907 by SCOTUS.

The Highway Act in '56 was a major boon to longer-distance suburbs, which otherwise shared no connection to existing city roads (i.e. rather than growing outwards from the city edge, they could be built at a distance from the get-go), but those were by no means the first suburbs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Who's erasing anything? Christ man, I said 1960s and cited the 1956 law that represented the profound changes happening then. And yes, news flash, this is postwar. Cut this disingenuous shit.

And yes, it was the postwar era that heralded these changes, leading up to an explosion starting thanks in significant part to the construction of the Eisenhower system.

Stop pretending that the prewar streetcar suburbs have ANY similarities to postwar era "suburban experiment" development. They have no bearing on each other. After WW2, out of terrible fear of returning to a major recession, the entire country instead devoted itself to massive, massive, massive debt spending to build entire whole-cloth developments, to keep the wartime economic machine going. We expanded vast highway networks to encourage longer-distance commuting. We offered incredibly cheap, government-guaranteed, 30 year mortgages for single-family homes. We began the process of cinching down hard to "urban blight" (i.e., poor, productive neighborhoods). We updated building codes with completely unscientific mandatory parking minimums. We made it increasingly illegal to build anything but R1a residential or huge apartment developments. We changed our entire urban model to the one everyone grew up with -- suburbs and strip malls.

And it all happened within the last century. Well within it. Postwar, starting in earnest in the 1960s and only starting to slow down in the last decade or two as more and more cities had the bills start to come due and have realized the total insolvency it has left them with.

You can show me a picture of pretty much any neighborhood in any city and I call tell you whether it was a pre 1940 or post 1950. The difference is dramatic and obvious and I don't believe you if you claim otherwise.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[+] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Cool, what does the e stand for?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Electric, not really sure if this is a real question or sarcasm.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

they probably mean the e-bikes are also electric vehicles.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ok fair point, it's pretty clear in this case it's about bikes vs cars, but technically correct.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Who cares what it is? Just choose to trust

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

The "e" is silent.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

Click here to see the summary

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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