[1]Skip to content

Site Navigation

  • [2]
  • 
    [5]Popular[6]Latest[7]Newsletters

    Sections

      □ [8]Politics
      □ [9]Ideas
      □ [10]Fiction
      □ [11]Technology
      □ [12]Science
      □ [13]Photo
      □ [14]Business
      □ [15]Culture
      □ [16]Planet
      □ [17]Global
      □ [18]Books
      □ [19]Podcasts
      □ [20]Health
      □ [21]Education
      □ [22]Projects
      □ [23]Features
      □ [24]Family
      □ [25]Events
      □ [26]Washington Week
      □ [27]Progress
      □ [28]Newsletters
      □ [29][nav-arch]Explore The Atlantic Archive
      □ [30][crosswor]Play The Atlantic crossword

    The Print Edition

    [31][current-issue]
    [32]Latest Issue[33]Past Issues
    ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    [34]Give a Gift
  • 
    Search The Atlantic
    [37][                    ]
    Quick Links
      □ [38]Dear Therapist
        Dear Therapist
      □ [39]Crossword Puzzle
        Crossword Puzzle
      □ [40]Magazine Archive
        Magazine Archive
      □ [41]Your Subscription
        Your Subscription
  • [43]Popular
  • [44]Latest
  • [45]Newsletters

[46][47]

  • [48]Sign In
  • [49]Subscribe

[50]More From Planet

More From Planet

[51]Explore This Series

  • [52]A person holds an umbrella in the wet and snowy city

    The Threshold at Which Snow Starts Irreversibly Disappearing

    [53]Zoë Schlanger
  • [54]Color photo of an arctic vole resting on small tundra plants

    A Major Climate Force Has Been Ignored for Decades

    [55]Bathsheba Demuth
  • [56]Photos of flooding, as well as of family Polaroids and heirlooms,
    arranged in a 3 x 4 grid and washed blue, against a blue background

    Pack Your Memories Into Your Disaster Bag

    [57]Ayurella Horn-Muller
  • [58]A man works on an electric car

    Electric Cars Are Already Upending America

    [59]Saahil Desai

[60]Health

The Real Reason You Should Get an E-bike

It’ll cut your emissions. It’ll also make you happier.


By [61]Michael Thomas
A collage of 12 photographs of e-bikes against a light-pink background
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
October 20, 2023
Share
Save

Today’s happiness and personal-finance gurus have no shortage of advice for
living a good life. Meditate daily. Sleep for eight hours a night. Don’t forget
to save for retirement. They’re not wrong, but few of these experts will tell
you one of the best ways to improve your life: Ditch your car.

A year ago, my wife and I sold one of our cars and replaced it with an e-bike.
As someone who writes about climate change, I knew that I was doing something
good for the planet. I knew that passenger vehicles are responsible for much of
our greenhouse-gas emissions—[64]16 percent in the U.S., to be exact—and that
the pollution spewing from gas-powered cars doesn’t just heat up the planet; it
could increase the risk of [65]premature death. I also knew that electric cars
were an imperfect fix: Though they’re responsible for less carbon pollution
than gas cars, even when powered by today’s dirty electric grid, their supply
chain is carbon intensive, and many of the materials needed to produce their
batteries are, in some cases, mined via a process that [66]brutally exploits
workers and harms [67]ecosystems and sacred Indigenous lands. An e-bike’s
comparatively tiny battery means less electricity, fewer emissions, fewer
resources. They are clearly better for the planet than cars of any kind.

[68]Read: America is missing out on the biggest EV boom of all

I knew all of this. But I also viewed getting rid of my car as a
sacrifice—something for the militant and reckless, something that Greenpeace
volunteers did to make the world better. I live in Colorado; e-biking would
mean freezing in the winter and sweating in the summer. It was the right thing
to do, I thought, but it was not going to be fun.

I was very wrong. The first thing I noticed was the savings. Between car
payments, insurance, maintenance, and gas, a car-centered lifestyle is
expensive. According to AAA, after fuel, maintenance, insurance, taxes, and the
like, owning and driving a new car in America costs[69] $10,728 a year. My
e-bike, by comparison, cost $2,000 off the rack and has near-negligible
recurring charges. After factoring in maintenance and a few bucks a month in
electricity costs, I estimate that we’ll save about $50,000 over the next five
years by ditching our car.

The actual experience of riding to work each day over the past year has been
equally surprising. Before selling our car, I worried most about riding in the
cold winter months. But I quickly learned that, as the saying goes, there is 
[70]no bad weather, only bad gear. I wear gloves, warm socks, a balaclava, and
a ski jacket when I ride, and am almost never too cold.

Sara Hastings-Simon is a professor at the University of Calgary, where she
studies low-carbon transportation systems. She’s also a native Californian who
now bikes to work in a city where temperatures tend to hover around freezing
from December through March. She told me that with the right equipment, she’s
able to do it on all but the snowiest days—days when she wouldn’t want to be in
a car, either. “Those days are honestly a mess even on the roads,” she said.

And though I, like [71]many would-be cyclists, was worried about arriving at
the office sweaty in hotter months, the e-bike solved my problem. Even when it
was 90 degrees outside, I didn’t break a sweat, thanks to my bike’s
pedal-assist mode. If I’m honest, sometimes I didn’t even pedal; I just used
the throttle, sat back, and enjoyed my ride.

Indeed, a big part of the appeal here is in the e part of the bike: “E-bikes
aren’t just a traditional bike with a motor. They are an entirely new
technology,” Hastings-Simon told me. Riding them is a radically different
experience from riding a normal bike, at least when it comes to the hard parts
of cycling. “It’s so much easier to take a bike over a bridge or in a hilly
neighborhood,” Laura Fox, the former general manager of New York City’s
bike-share program, told me. “I’ve had countless people come up to me and say,
‘I never thought that I could bike to work before, and now that I have an
option where you don’t have to show up sweaty, it’s possible.’” (When New York
introduced e-bikes to its fleet, ridership tripled, she told me, from 500,000
to 1.5 million people.)

[72]Read: How to get fewer people to commute in cars

But biking to work wasn’t just not unpleasant—it was downright enjoyable. It
made me feel happier and healthier; I arrived to work a little more buoyant for
having spent the morning in fresh air rather than traffic. [73]Study after [74]
study shows that people with longer car commutes are more likely to experience
poor health outcomes and lower personal well-being—and that cyclists are the 
[75]happiest commuters. One day, shortly after selling our car, I hopped on my
bike after a stressful day at work and rode home down a street edged with
changing fall leaves. I felt more connected to the physical environment around
me than I had when I’d traveled the same route surrounded by metal and glass. I
breathed in the air, my muscles relaxed, and I grinned like a giddy
schoolchild.

“E-bikes are like a miracle drug,” David Zipper, a transportation expert and
Visiting Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, told me. “They provide so much
upside, not just for the riders, but for the people who are living around them
too.”

Of course, e-bikes aren’t going to replace every car on every trip. In a
country where sprawling suburbs and strip malls, not protected bike lanes, are
the norm, it’s unrealistic to expect e-bikes to replace cars in the way that
the Model T replaced horses. But we don’t need everyone to ride an e-bike to
work to make a big dent in our carbon-pollution problem. [76]A recent study
found that if 5 percent of commuters were to switch to e-bikes as their mode of
transportation, emissions would fall by 4 percent. As an individual, you don’t
even need to sell your car to reduce your carbon footprint significantly. In
2021, half of all trips in the United States were less than three miles,
according to [77]the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Making those short
trips on an e-bike instead of in a car would likely save people money, cut
their emissions, and improve their health and happiness.

E-bikes are such a no-brainer for individuals, and for the collective, that
state and local governments [78]are now subsidizing them. In May, I asked Will
Toor, the executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, to explain the
state’s rationale for [79]a newly passed incentive that offers residents $450
to get an e-bike. He dutifully ticked through the environmental benefits and
potential cost savings for low-income people. Then he surprised me: The
legislation, he added, was also about “putting more joy into the world.”

This story is part of the Atlantic Planet series supported by HHMI’s Science
and Educational Media Group.


References:

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/10/reasons-to-get-e-bike-emissions-climate-change-benefits/675716/#main-content
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/
[5] https://www.theatlantic.com/most-popular/
[6] https://www.theatlantic.com/latest/
[7] https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/
[8] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/
[9] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/
[10] https://www.theatlantic.com/category/fiction/
[11] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/
[12] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/
[13] https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/
[14] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/
[15] https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/
[16] https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/planet/
[17] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/
[18] https://www.theatlantic.com/books/
[19] https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/
[20] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/
[21] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/
[22] https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/
[23] https://www.theatlantic.com/category/features/
[24] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/
[25] https://www.theatlantic.com/events/
[26] https://www.theatlantic.com/category/washington-week-atlantic/
[27] https://www.theatlantic.com/progress/
[28] https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/
[29] https://www.theatlantic.com/archive/
[30] https://www.theatlantic.com/free-daily-crossword-puzzle/
[31] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/
[32] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/
[33] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/backissues/
[34] https://accounts.theatlantic.com/products/gift
[38] https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/dear-therapist/
[39] https://www.theatlantic.com/free-daily-crossword-puzzle/
[40] https://www.theatlantic.com/archive/
[41] https://accounts.theatlantic.com/accounts/subscription/
[43] https://www.theatlantic.com/most-popular/
[44] https://www.theatlantic.com/latest/
[45] https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/
[46] https://www.theatlantic.com/
[47] https://www.theatlantic.com/
[48] https://accounts.theatlantic.com/login/
[49] https://www.theatlantic.com/subscribe/navbar/
[50] https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/planet/
[51] https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/planet/
[52] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/01/winter-snow-loss-climate-change/677078/
[53] https://www.theatlantic.com/author/zoe-schlanger/
[54] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2024/01/alaska-arctic-voles-carbon-source-climate-change/677014/
[55] https://www.theatlantic.com/author/bathsheba-demuth/
[56] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/12/disaster-kit-loss-memories-mental-health/676961/
[57] https://www.theatlantic.com/author/ayurella-horn-muller/
[58] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/12/tesla-chatgpt-most-important-technology/676980/
[59] https://www.theatlantic.com/author/saahil-desai/
[60] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/
[61] https://www.theatlantic.com/author/michael-thomas/
[64] https://energy.mit.edu/news/us-passenger-cars/
[65] https://qz.com/135509/more-americans-die-from-car-pollution-than-car-accidents
[66] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2023/02/01/1152893248/red-cobalt-congo-drc-mining-siddharth-kara
[67] https://www.nrdc.org/stories/lithium-mining-leaving-chiles-indigenous-communities-high-and-dry-literally
[68] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/04/electric-ev-rickshaw-sales-climate-change/673629/
[69] https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/08/annual-cost-of-new-car-ownership-crosses-10k-mark/
[70] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/01/how-socialize-outside-winter/617520/
[71] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214140518306054
[72] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/02/seattle-car-commute/553589/
[73] https://travelbehaviour.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/caw-summaryreport-onlineedition.pdf
[74] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-commuting/long-commutes-may-be-bad-for-health-study-idUKBRE8470U520120508
[75] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214140518305255
[76] https://peopleforbikes.cdn.prismic.io/peopleforbikes/e3dad6f7-d81b-4e59-9208-b012406ffa8e_E-bike-Potential-Paper-05_15_19-Final.pdf
[77] https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1230-march-21-2022-more-half-all-daily-trips-were-less-three-miles-2021#:~:text=A%20research%20study%20for%20the,were%20greater%20than%2050%20miles.
[78] https://electrek.co/2023/02/19/free-electric-bikes-rebates-us-cities-and-states/
[79] https://www.cpr.org/2023/08/10/colorado-ebike-rebates-how-to-qualify/
