It’s marginal gains all the way here but genuinely if you’re an omnivore the E-Bike might work out more enviromentally conscious
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Can someone explain how an e-bike is better than a regular bike?
They’re basically the same thing, but one has a battery and requires charging (burning fossil fuels in most places) and the other doesn’t. E-bike almost certainly requires a replacement battery way before a regular bike would ever need to be replaced.
Is it like…the person on a regular bike breathing more heavily and needing more calories? Surely this adds up over time, but is it really worse than mining lithium and charging using fossil fuels?
Edit: I found a very detailed article on this. Reading it now, but I think my guess about calories is correct based on this table
https://www.bikeradar.com/features/long-reads/cycling-environmental-impact
yeah nailed it. vegan acoustic biker clears every other mode of transport but otherwise burning a lot of oil might net you more energy than converting meat, cheese and eggs through a human.
The only thing that just seems wrong is the manufacturing emissions of e-bike versus analog bike. E-bikes weigh more, so shipping them around has more emissions as well. I think it’s probably very close, but like you said, it depends a lot on what the food is too…
Idk, I rarely trust emission numbers because a lot of companies fake that shit in various ways and many of the numbers are self reported.
E-bikes weigh more, so shipping them around has more emissions as well.
I don’t mean to attack you but there’s a point to be made here as per the slavery conditions battery ressource miners minors are subjected to but like a shipping crate full of batteries ain’t it. Like look it up, the “shipping” part of most goods is like in the cents regions because a container ship is pretty damn efficient.
I mean, it’s more than just the batteries. E-bikes weigh about twice what a regular bike does. So if the max capacity is 1000 bikes it would be 500 e-bikes (made up numbers here). To ship the same number of e-bikes would take two separate trips.
I know sea freight is very efficient, but there’s no reason not to account for the difference if we’re making the comparison?
Just because I am the type of person that I am I have to point out as to whether an e-bike weighs more than a regular bike depends highly on the regular bike and also the e-bike honestly. They made some heavy ass acoustic ones, they make some lightweight e-bikes. Latter with little range, mostly, to be fair. I say this to ask if somebody shipped some heavy ass steel bikes, would you be concerned as per CO2 Output?
I know sea freight is very efficient, but there’s no reason not to account for the difference if we’re making the comparison?
I mean it’s there, but it’s genuinely just marginal. Like 0,03% of the CO2 Budget of any given bicycle were it ridden.
Now the resource extraction I don’t have numbers on and it probably sucks. People buying E-Bikes to ride them 200km over a 10 year period probably also isn’t great for CO2-output - in the context of bicycles - but if we assume what gets shipped gets used it doesn’t matter
I think you’ve mistaken my comments if you think I’m trying to make e-bikes sound bad or something. When I made that comment, I looked up how much a few bikes weigh and found several articles that said e-bikes typically weigh about twice as much. Obviously this isn’t applicable across the board to every bike, but there’s really no way to make that kind of comparison without using rough averages or doing way more research than I’m prepared to do.
Again, I’m just saying if we are going to compare the emissions of e-bikes and bikes then we should make the comparison for everything. We’re already talking about a pretty small number, so even if it only requires 1.5 extra trips or whatever there would be a difference.
Also, a container ship isn’t the only thing required to get a bike to people. Trains, trucks, and planes are used as well. If the truck going from Seattle to North Dakota or whatever has to make a second trip or 1.33 trips or whatever, that is an increase in emissions. I’m not sure why we are going back and forth on this because it seems incredibly obvious that this would have to be accounted for to make an accurate comparison.
I’m not sure why we are going back and forth on this because it seems incredibly obvious that this would have to be accounted for to make an accurate comparison.
The frame of reference here, to me at least, isn’t the utopia where we get to squabble about the ecological merits of e-bike vs. acoustic bike, it’s where one car getting shipped anywhere from anywhere eats up the logistical CO2-equivalent of about 50 bikes (55 for e-bikes).
There’s a couple of issues at play which mean it doesn’t work exactly like that.
Firstly larger ocean freight don’t scale proportionately to weight linearly. So even if we assume that ebikes would mean a full doubling of the weight of a given trip it wouldn’t require double the energy and therefore emissions to do the trip. It will depend on the exact vessel but an estimate from here is for each additional 100 ton of mass to a container ship it would use an additional 0.0714 of a gallon of fuel. Its very cool physics which is largely just down to the sea doing most of the work carrying the weight itself (the same works for different reasons for rail but all other modes have much closer to linear scaling).
The other factor is that in practice the energy and emissions are the result of whole systems and trips are not always operating at ideal conditions. So its quite hard to judge what actually changes in a while system if there’s an increase in some weight of some products.
These are the reasons that additional weight in ebikes doesn’t come out to a huge increase in shipping emissions when its all worked through.
edit: paper uses imperial ton not tonne - corrected
Also a result container ships scale on volume not mass so a trip that has a capacity for 1000 acoustic bikes largely has a capacity for 1000 ebikes since when shipped they use up the same volume (excluding cargo bikes)
One way to look at it is to compare it with the EV debate- the carbon expenditure to create a new EV far outweighs the net emissions of keeping an old combustion vehicle running for a year. But say you drive 20,000 miles a year. At some point (I forget the math but it’s 5-10 years) you’ve closed the gap and now you’ve got a real net deduction of emissions per year (vs driving the ICE). It’s gonna be a lot more variable with humans and the types of food we eat but there should be a similar crossover point there too.
The added weight may be a lot of emissions over thousands of bikes/batteries, but per bike its probably negligible. The only part that is usually not manfactured locally is the battery, which can be shipped in bulk on cargoships for very minimal CO2 per-item (and more space-efficient than a bike frame).
This is for food, but the point is the same; transport is done in such high quantities that very few food items here even register as significant sources of emissions. I dont think this chart is super accurate but I hope that gets the point across.
No way the carbon footprint of buying a new E-bike is lower than me going to a local upcycling place, fixing up an old bike from the 1970s using spare parts, and using that as my daily driver.
The logic of repairing and using an old beater car might work out on emissions, but not with acoustic bikes. There are a lot of assumptions being made in these calculations and there are a lot greener ways to acquire an acoustic bike than buying a new one from a store. Upcycling a bike will always be greener than a new one and the classic steel frames just keep going so long as you can find parts. I suspect their improved ergonomics over modern bikes also contribute to less human energy needed to drive them. I’m not really using significantly more calories biking to and from work than I am walking.
Creative assumptions and manipulations of data to reach conclusions that are obviously misleading and likely incorrect without these manipulations. In the long term, replacement batteries for an E-bike will easily make the manufacturing emissions outweigh those of a new analog bike.
I support more bikers and E-biking gets some people into it that otherwise wouldn’t, but this reeks of attempting to justify and prop up tech in ways that it does not need and that will ultimately fuel more emissions in the long run. Better urban design and seasonal maintenance can largely offset the justification for needing an E-bike.
God, this comment goes so hard. “Vegan acoustic biker” fuck me, that’s a hell of a username.
acoustic biker
hell yeah
fuck the cArBoN fOoTpRiNt narrative to begin with and kill some BP executives in self-defense instead; but in addition to food calories stats like this should include “but are you actually using it though?” like how the “failure rate” of condoms as a bc method includes forgetting the condom.
a push bike you ride less often because of time, wind, hills, or workplace hygiene isn’t better than an e-bike that replaces more car trips
I think it is most likely assuming people are going to be consuming extra calories. I’m sure most people have enough calories already.
I am a machine that converts beans into food related emissions.
You could argue that the increased energy burn from cycling is offset by not needing exercise elsewhere. Cos like people gotta exercise but if your transport is exercising then two birds one stone right? If you use an ebike and go to gym after that isn’t saving on my fart related emissions
I have a pretty hard time buying the claim that breathing is more than twice as impactful as producing a lithium ion battery and my job is literally calculating emissions.
Maybe they’re including the extra laundry and showers from getting all sweaty? Or does manufacturing Lycra use a lot of fossil fuels?
Oh shit I’m really bad for the environment cuz I’m always sweating.
I think it probably accounts for “likelihood of use within a distance” where the average person is likely to use an E-Bike for a 30 minutes ride but not a bike. So the regular bike only decreases your impact within a like 15 minute radius of travel.
So as an individual it would always be best to stretch the distances you go as far as possible with the least consuming mode, but as a population, the E-Bike prevents more driving/bus riding/ horse riding (?) than a bike does.
I was gonna say this. I imagine there’s a lot of people for whom their lives wouldn’t really be serviced by a regular bike, unless they were a super avid cyclist and okay with being tired and sweaty all the time, and would still end up using a car a lot even if they genuinely tried to bike as often as they could. But an e-bike fills up a lot of those gaps.
It’s me, I’m the lazy bastard. (Not really, but I’m a absurdly sweaty bastard if it’s above 20C and I have to exert myself above a light stroll, so E-Bike has saved me many times from relenting to a car ride to the city center)
For me, it was a couple things:
- it made hills way easier
- it tripled the range I would normally have the time or willingness to go for any given trip
I simply do more with it than I used to when I just had a regular bike.
Regular bikes are definitely not obsolete or anything. In an area where it’s quite flat and there’s a lot of density and transit options, I think a regular bike is a better option. And ebikes are very heavy, so they’re not really an option if you’re in an apartment and have to carry it up and down stairs every day.
These kinds of system analyses are extremely sensitive to system boundary definitions. As mentioned in another comment, the only things they accounted for were “food”, charging electricity, and manufacturing. You burn more calories when cycling so they put in some estimate of the carbon footprint of diet.
Of course, they didn’t know what cyclists eat so it’s just some average cribbed from some other system analysis. If you’re a Bean Head then the number will be much lower. Same for if you fuel with sugar when riding or just do vegan protein powder, etc.
But more importantly they didn’t factor in what it means to regularly exercise that much. If a person is doing that they are going to improve their overall health substantially, live a better life, use healthcare less, and so on. No carbon footprint info was calculated for this because of the system boundaries, but of course all of these things are connected. By the logic of this system, the best form of transportation is sitting on the couch.
“Miles per square metre” fucking hell. Even when Americans try to do metric instead of football fields per Big Mac or whatever they normally do they still manage to fuck it up.
I like the added touch of using the British English spelling instead of American English.
Another argument is the land use associated with producing those calories (electrical or edible). The two images above are from the book “There is No Planet B” by Mike Berners-Lee
Hills
i’ve never worked anywhere with facilities, so the only bikeable commutes had to be leisurely
Maybe they use numbers from different sources, one that includes the production process and one that doesn’t
I’m walking
Ova here*
Ayyy
This is the correct answer. Urban areas should have a diameter of about 3 miles so you can walk from any point to any other in about 1 hr
why would i walk for a whole damn hour when i could bike for 10 minutes and have my joints not hurt?
Do you.
However, most of the time, you wouldn’t need to walk a full hour. Those are the furthest points in the urban landscape I’m imagining.
we already have the idea of 15 minute cities, we shouldn’t downgrade to 60 minutes.
But “15 minute cities” are not “cities that can be wholly walked in 15 minutes,” they’re cities where everything you need for day to day living is within 15 minutes. It’s fine if you have to walk an hour to see like a specialist doctor or to some concert venue or something since you’re not doing that every day. If your grocery store is more than 15 minutes walking though, that’s an issue.
It’s fine if you have to walk an hour to see like a specialist doctor
yikes
if your grocery store is more than 15 minutes walking though, that’s an issue.
15 minutes to get to a grocery store is probably too much tbh
The grocery store should be built into the ground level of your building and they should send your groceries up to you with pnuematic tubes.
It’s not that people are expected to walk an hour to see a specialist doctor but that the city is still considered walkable even if you have to drive/use public transport on rare occasions like seeing the specialist doctor twice a year or whatever.
Nah that’s actually important, making people walk for like 15 minutes is very important for overall health. People need to walk, a frictionless existence is horrible.
Historically, urban areas tend to develop around the distance people can travel in a hour.
I’m referencing that pattern of development and stating that we should set the scale to the distance someone can walk in an hour, the slowest form of transportation, rather that privileging faster forms of transportation.
As you already pointed out, for other modes this would be better than a 15 minute city
on sunshine
oh oh
They should have run the numbers on
riding an acoustic bike. I’d be curious to see what the formula says in that specific case.there’s a german blogpost I cant be arsed to translate but it does come out on top of everything, including walking
What about a vegan walking?
The bicycle does give you a lot of mechanical advantage over walking. But also this depends on road surface, condition of the bicycle and also incline. It’s hard to specifically calculate, but for most of the built up world the bicycle would clear easily. Unless you’re actively searching out loose gravel inclines to walk / bike up.
Let me give you an example, most people hate riding uphill for obvious reasons but the speeds they pull doing this would be a fast jog or a run if they were on foot
I have a bridge to sell you if you believe that
I mean it’s easy enough to test for yourself, go run at a continous 15kph for half an hour, then do that speed on a bicycle
But what about a
riding an ebike that’s charged solely by renewable energy?believe it or not, this actually takes carbon out of the atmosphere.
I don’t have anywhere to store it and if I leave it outside it is definitely getting stolen.
I have an ebike and anecdotally I’ve had to change out the tires more often than my normal pedal bike, at least twice as often. Meaning the ebike pollutes more in regards to making more waste tires. Used tires are a huge carbon footprint that often gets overlooked.
The ebike gets more tire replacements because I ride it both longer and faster than the pedal bike, so more wear on the treads. Both my bikes are carbon belt driven too, but if I had normal chain bikes I’d guess the ebike would need its chain lubricated or replaced more often.
Don’t get me wrong I love my bikes and they’re the only nice things I own besides my cats. But there’s a lot to consider here.
I’ll point toward my infographic here to show that the squabble between increased tyre consumption between E-Bikes and Acoustic bikes is akin to considering whether oat or wheat gruel is more ecologically sustainable while the majority of your peers sustain a diet of wagyu
It sounds like you’re just putting the kilometers on the tires at different rates. Likely, if they’re identical tires, you’re getting close to the same distances out of them. The difference between them would be that the ebike is slightly heavier and it has more power to the wheel. So there is more scrubbing. But I don’t expect it would be much more, because you’re also probably running higher air pressure in the ebike tires.
There can also be an element where the power assist prevents the rider from noticing as early when the pressure is getting low which causes them to wear out faster. Being conscious about checking ebike tires routinely can probably extend their life considerably.
the logic behind it is similar to why a horse is worse than a bus
A bus is a horse with a battery strapped to it
at least make it a horse pulled wagon, cmon
Don’t throw the horse in the ocean that’s how you get Poseidon
A bus is a complicated series of pulleys designed to imitate god’s favorite creature the noble donkey
Correct!
wrong, the ebike will not give me glorious quads like a real bike would
you can put olympic sprinter level power down on an e-bike to get massive ass. It kind of begs the question as to why you’d get an e-bike in the first place but you could
I’m very strong on a bike but I’m considering converting one of my old bikes to an e-bike so that I can ditch my car on trips where I can’t just go ham all the time. Like any time I can’t arrive somewhere dripping in sweat or wearing mostly spandex.
Like any time I can’t arrive somewhere dripping in sweat or wearing mostly spandex.
Don’t get this but go off, I support all types of bicycles
one would think, but every obnoxious ebiker i see zipping past me without a bell assuredly is nowhere near this, rarely seen pedaling
just use the power assist at the lowest level and only sometimes. you’ll still get a great workout you’ll just end up going x5 the distance.
i only used it for extreme hill climbing or when my legs started blowing out. did almost 70 miles in an afternoon
Having an ebike also means you can make longer journeys no matter what. If you triple your range, that’s a lot more trips that you can replace the car.
how’s that work over a regular bike?
says it right there mate
Doesn’t the battery cancel out the positive environmental effects of being low-carbon? Batteries are pretty bad for the environment once disposed of, usually, IIRC.
The Lithium mining to make the battery isn’t exactly eco-friendly either
Yes, this is definitely something mining watch associations try to explain: batteries have a huge environmental cost because of the impact of the mining industry required to produce said batteries.
It’s the same with electric cars: no they are not better for the environment.
Another linked cost is the infrastructure required to support these cars/charging vehicles (think the charging stations). Because of the required amount of copper that is involved.
Is the train electric or diesel? Are the buses electric? If so are they battery electric or are they trolley buses powered by overhead wires? Is this in a place powered by fossil fuels or hydro/solar/wind? What about trams? Or ferries? Or someone who tends their own garden and walks?
How dare this advertisement masquerading as information mislead us so!
I feel in my lobes that this graphic does trains dirty somehow.
I suspect it makes a massive difference depending on how many carriages/cars are in the train too.
they’re the next best option next to bicycles
I feel like it’s a mistake to consider human physical activity an energy cost tbh. I’m seeing this logic more and more in the wild — particularly wrt comparisons with LLMs — and… I mean it’s kind of insanely evil, isn’t it
I’ll agree with this mostly but I’d call this useful information on account of people trying to compare E-Bikes to like an E-HMMV. Popular thing in german op-eds, at least
I think it’s useful to consider only if from the perspective of how our diet (to which we are all mostly alienated from) impacts our ecology.
But that argument is one that can spiral into misanthropism if you let it go unwatched. And this graphic definitely does a shitty job at addressing the diet problem, and can come off like “humans are like stinky farty cows (derogatory)”.
i’m genuinely blown away by how much range they can get with a small battery pack
you could strap a few spares onto the bike and fill your backpack up and go like 1000 miles. even easier if you stay on power assist level 1 or 2.
this must be some breakthrough level where the energy density of li-ion batteries being so much less then gasoline is canceled out by the human muscle power combined with how light a bike + motor is.
i mean no old school moped is going to take you 1000 miles with a gallon of gas in a backpack. or maybe? either way i would rather deal with a simple electric motor then an annoying 2 stroke
but yeah rented some with my partner in the spring and rode a rail trail and it was the most fun we’ve had in years. it’s the closest to a powered exoskeleton i’ve ever experienced. a family member is about to get rid of their cargo e bike and i may be able to get it for free soon.
maybe not a moped but proper gas motorcycles can hit 70+mpg (city?), aero starts to matter at highway speeds, which is why electric touring motorcycles probably still don’t exist.
is it just because ebikes generally are going 15-30 mph? because they seem really efficient even compared to motorcycles
it’s weight at low speeds and then not having the high speeds’ drag when you never go all that fast. people generally don’t want the e-moto for a 100 mile trip because they’re trying to do it in less than four hours and none of the constraints really work out for that.
as well as the low(er) speeds bicycles in general are just really good at weight vs. transportable weight. I mean you can fit like 5 people and luggage in a car, for example, say what, 800kg of load? Even if you do this in a like a Gen 1 Twingo, miserable as that might be, you’d be looking at about 1:1 car weight vs. transported weight.
a 30kg E-bike has little problem transporting a 100kg perso, so more like 3:1 on that front.
They do, but the range is still an issue
They claim this one goes up to 400 km on a charge.
huh 400km isn’t too bad compared to a goldwing
sign into vimeo
lmao
Didn’t notice the ‘Sign in to vimeo’ before lmao.
It’ll take 4 hours at least to recharge. This is an exeptional range. Most of the electric tourers get up to 250.
Does the emission calculation for the train and bus take into account that these modes of transportation usually transport more than one person at a time?
I have not looked into the specifics of this shitpost but how otherwise would a bus fare better than a regular car
These type of calculations do indeed account for that. They often rely on local average occupancies so areas with good well used buses can be lower or areas of low utilisation higher
Which is actually another interesting thing about public and private transport. Doubling the trips by public transport does not double the emissions but doubling the number private trips does
typically these are per-passenger distance, but since it doesn’t have one guy in a car vs four people in a car there’s no way to know.
also fuck “carbon footprint” anyway, the biggest culprits are corporations we should legislate or luigi into reducing their pollution.
TIL skipping the gym is good for the environment.
This is ridiculous.
I mean that they are saying an e bike is greener than a regular bike, not your comment. They literally are saying in the post that because of the more calories you consume when you exercise that e bike is greener, which is dumb.
The idea that one person can reduce their carbon footprint is dumb to me also, but this means that obese people who eat more than they should are one of the biggest problems with climate change…. (Which is a dumb idea)
Buying new stuff instead of using old stuff contributes more the climate destruction than any of this….
It’s better to drive a 25 year old gas guzzler than to buy a new electric vehicle. It’s just that the climate destruction is exported to the countries they are mining the lithium and metal from. Your local environment will have less emissions, but that’s about it.
I realize that. No offense taken, comrade. I agree.
