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[42]More From Planet

More From Planet

   [43]Explore This Series
     * Satellite imagery provided by GOES-16 satellite shows Hurricane
       Otis making landfall near Acapulco, Mexico, as a Category 5 storm.
       It's bright red in the center.
    Hurricane Otis Was Too Fast for the Forecasters[44]Zoë Schlanger
     * Cropped images of fruit and bread in a grid
    The Great Underappreciated Driver of Climate Change[45]Alexandra Frost
     * White threads of mycelium growing on tree bark.
    The Invisible Force Keeping Carbon in the Ground[46]Zoë Schlanger
     * A collage of 12 photographs of e-bikes against a light-pink
       background
    The Real Reason You Should Get an E-bike[47]Michael Thomas

   [48]Health

The Real Reason You Should Get an E-bike

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


    By [49]Michael Thomas

   A collage of 12 photographs of e-bikes against a light-pink background
   Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
   October 20, 2023
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   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—[51]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
   [52]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
   [53]brutally exploits workers and harms [54]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.

   [55]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[56]
   $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 [57]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 [58]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.)

   [59]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. [60]Study after [61]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 [62]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. [63]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
   [64]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 [65]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 [66]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

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