Modern life is peppered with moments of discovery around mobility: the first car drive as a teenager; the first trip on a train, plane or bus, watching the world from a window seat. In this decade, that moment is increasingly likely to be an inaugural ride on an e-bike, often said to spark a childlike joy, thrilling and freeing.
Indeed, e-bikes are everywhere. The pandemic bike boom boosted e-bike sales 145% from 2019 to 2020, more than double the rate of classic bikes, according to the market research firm NPD Group.
While estimates vary, industry experts put the number of e-bikes Americans brought home in 2020 somewhere around half a million. (In comparison, they bought 231,000 all-electric cars in that time period, according to the Pew Research Center — a rate of about two to one)
And that growth does not seem to be slowing. Deloitte projected that between 2020 and 2023, 130 million e-bikes would be sold worldwide. At the moment, e-bikes — not cars — appear to be the world’s bestselling electric vehicle, or EV.
That sort of trend has the potential to transform urban transit. In New York City, just over half of all car trips are three miles or less, according to a 2019 study by the analytics company INRIX. Many short car trips could be replaced, hypothetically, with a short, brisk e-bike ride. So what would it take to get there?
The exploding appetite for electrified rides is a product of three trends unfolding simultaneously, said David Zipper, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
The first is the rapid development of lithium-ion batteries. Used to power electric cars, these batteries “have gotten smaller, more efficient and cheaper,” Zipper said, allowing their use in scooters, mopeds and, he added, “for smaller applications, too, like a bicycle."
Most e-bikes fall into three categories. With the first, pedal assist, riders are given a motorized boost, like an invisible hand is pushing them forward. The second, a throttle, allows the rider to zoom around, up to 20 mph, without pedaling, and is commonly used by delivery drivers and couriers. And the last is a faster pedal assist, allowing speeds of at least 28 mph.
For New York’s Citi Bike, the electric-blue pedal-assist bikes make up 20% of the fleet but carry 35% of all rides, according to internal data provided by Lyft, its parent company. Given that monthly Citi Bike rides have topped three million four times this year, that’s a lot.
In an interview, Adeleye shared the screen with Mica Osbourne, a director at the company. The sleek, jet-black model is designed to cater to noncyclists, they said. “We want people to view their cars in the same way they view their bikes, which we don’t think is happening at the moment,” Osbourne said.
Fast, safe and stylish — to beat the car, one might have to think like a car. “We know a lot of people don’t have confidence on a bicycle, and that’s one of the reasons why we want this bike to set apart,"Adeleye said.
If the bike can keep up and has ample space to move, then zipping past traffic becomes an afterthought. “Because then you won’t think about the traffic. You want to give people that freedom."
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