The Popularity of E-Bikes Isn’t Slowing Down
There is a joke told in transit circles about people who ride electric bicycles: How do you know if someone has an e-bike? They’ll tell you. The idea, of course, is that users of the battery-powered two-wheelers tend to be proselytizers for the technology.To get more news about himiway ebike, you can visit magicyclebike.com official website.
Take Monte Paulsen, a building energy consultant in Vancouver, British Columbia, who used to drive a car five days a week. A former “fair-weather cyclist,” he rode his bike maybe twice a month, weather permitting.
The pandemic, he decided, was a good time to buy a RadWagon, an electric cargo bike from Rad Power Bikes, a top-selling e-bike company. Now, Mr. Paulsen said, he makes 90 percent of his trips on it.I started as a personal experiment to see how I could lower my carbon footprint,” he said. “I’ve stuck with it because it’s really fun.”To get more news about fatest ebike, you can visit magicyclebike.com official website.
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.To get more news about ebike accessories, you can visit magicyclebike.com official website.
Indeed, e-bikes are everywhere. The pandemic bike boom boosted e-bike sales 145 percent 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 best-selling electric vehicle, or E.V.
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 and a specialist in new forms of mobility technology.
The first is the rapid development of lithium-ion batteries. Used to power electric cars, these batteries “have gotten smaller, more efficient and cheaper,” Mr. Zipper said, allowing their use in scooters, mopeds and, he added, “for smaller applications, too, like a bicycle.”
The second, he said, is a worldwide resurgence of interest in urban cycling over the last decade. And the third is what he called the “gateway drug” of bike-sharing programs, which allow riders to try e-bikes without buying one.
“You put those together and it’s a sort of natural outgrowth,” said Mr. Zipper, who uses Washington’s Capital Bikeshare, or CaBi, regularly. “E-bikes capitalize on all of those things.”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 miles per hour, 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 m.p.h.
