280 million e-bikes are slashing oil demand far more than electric vehicles
280 million e-bikes are slashing oil demand far more than electric vehicles
E-bikes and scooters displace 4x as much demand for oil as all of the EVs in the world.
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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.
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.
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.
Cars are what permit suburban areas to be practical; it was the rise of the car (and a few related technologies to a lesser degree, like the tram) that made the suburb popular. So, yeah, I think that it's probably fair to say that suburbs aren't well-suited to bicycle commuting, or foot.
But in general, people can -- well, in general; if you're a farmer or something that constrains you to live away from urban areas, no, but in general -- live in urban areas rather than suburban. I mean, we have cities, and there are built-up areas in those cities, and in general, if you live in the suburb of a city, you could live in the city proper.
But that's not the choice that people have generally been making. If we expected people to want to live in an urban environment, we'd expect to see apartment and condo prices in high-density areas constantly rising. We'd expect to see population on net shifting from suburbs into cities.
googles
That shows that more people from outside the US entering the US move into an urban area than a suburban area. But inside the US -- and overall -- people have generally headed out of urban areas to live in suburbs.
That is, I don't think that the problem is that planners have failed to provide what the consumer generally wants. I think that the consumer has had the option, and has decided that he wants to live in a suburb with a car.
Also, I think that there's a question of whether this is US-specific or whether the US is just a leading indicator. My guess is that the world will likely tend to shift towards suburbs, absent some form of technological change. One tends to see urbanization globally -- that is, people move out of rural areas, as a smaller portion of a developed economy is involved in agriculture. But that doesn't mean that it's to high-density areas; that's inclusive of growth of suburbs:
https://environment.yale.edu/news/article/global-urban-growth-typified-by-suburbs-not-skyscrapers
To many people, the term “urban growth” connotes shiny new high-rise buildings or towering skyscrapers. But in a new analysis of 478 cities with populations of more than 1 million people, researchers at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (F&ES) found urban growth is seldom typified by such “upward” growth. Instead, the predominant pattern in cities across the world is outward expansion: Think suburbs instead of skyscrapers.
The article does mention India's zoning restrictions:
In contrast, in places where populations are growing but zoning is sometimes restrictive (India)...
I've read before about problematic Indian zoning laws that restrict heights of construction in Indian cities; that might legitimately be a case where people are kept from living in higher-density areas despite wanting to do so. But I'm skeptical that that is a dominant factor globally. If one removed height restrictions on construction in some cities -- take London, for example, where one has line-of-sight restrictions -- I can certainly believe that prices in the built-up areas would drop somewhat, and a greater portion of people would live in the city proper than is the case today. Fine, that probably makes sense. But are height restrictions the dominant reason that people don't choose to live in urban areas? Chicago has relatively non-restrictive height regulations, but it's seen outflow too. This article discusses it and finds a small amount of growth right in downtown, a lot of growth in suburbs and exurbs, and population loss in the area in between:
https://www.newgeography.com/content/003560-chicago-outer-suburban-and-exurban-growth-leader
The story was much different outside the core area. The balance of the city, where 93 percent of the people live, lost 250,000 residents – a loss greater than that of any municipality in the nation over the period – including Detroit. The losses were pervasive. More than 80 percent of the city's 77 community areas located outside the core lost population.
Thus, the core area boom is far more than negated by the losses in the balance of the city. The losses that were sustained in the area between the urban core and the outer suburbs and exurbs were virtually all in the city itself.
The overwhelming reality of metropolitan growth in Chicago, however, is that the outer suburbs and exurbs continue to capture virtually all growth. Overall, areas outside 20 miles from the core of Chicago gained 573,000 residents between 2000 and 2010. By contrast, the entire metropolitan area gained only 362,000 residents. As a result, these outer suburbs and exurbs accounted for 158% of the Chicago metropolitan area's population growth between 2000 and 2010. The core gains, city and inner suburban losses are illustrated in Figure 3.
That doesn't really look like what one would expect if people were really intent on living in higher-density areas.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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