What If Electric Bikes Were as Cheap as Conventional Bicycles?

Last month, as part of our series on how to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, I wrote about how protected bike lanes are the single best way to encourage the use of electric bikes (and traditional ones) for daily transit. As a rule, people don’t ride bikes of any kind where they don’t feel safe, so infrastructure is paramount. But bike lanes alone are not always enough.

Take, for example, Portland. The city has been steadily adding to its network of greenways and bike lanes for decades, yet the share of vehicle miles traveled by bike has hovered stubbornly around 7%. In recent years, it’s even begun to erode, taking the city further away from its climate goal of getting to 25% mode share for bikes by 2035. “They’ve done an amazing amount of bike infrastructure development in the city,” says John MacArthur, sustainable transportation program manager at Portland State University’s Transportation Research and Education Center (TREC), “And we’re still bumping against the 7%.”