The Power of Electric Bike Libraries
Climate-friendly e-bikes are a key part of plans to decarbonize urban transportation. To speed adoption, more cities are offering lending programs that can expose more riders to this new mode.
Customers wearing protective masks try out an electric bike outside Motion Makers Bicycle Shop in Asheville, North Carolina, in May 2020. The pandemic helped spur a boom in e-bike purchases, but the vehicles remain too costly for many consumers.
Photographer: Logan Cyrus/Bloomberg
Kate McCarthy had no problem biking downtown from her home in Montpelier, Vermont. It was the ride back — and the steep quarter-mile climb up Franklin Street — that killed her enthusiasm. When it came time to pick up her son from school or go shopping, taking the car was easiest. She mostly walked to work.
But when McCarthy and her husband decided to expand their family, they knew they’d need a second option to move everyone around. She didn’t want to have to buy a second car. So when a lending library for battery-boosted e-bikes came to their local outdoors shop in summer 2019, the couple jumped at the opportunity to borrow one for free. For four days, they experimented with a cargo e-bike with a child’s seat to see how it handled the hills for errands and commutes. They liked it so much that they bought a used Yuba Mundo off Craigslist a year later.