The Problem With E-Bikes

There’s a problem with e-bikes.  Actually, many.

Have I gotten your attention?  Was the headline click-baity enough? (Let me know in the comments.)  As a writer, I want you intrigued enough to click and start.  I tend to think such an assertive headline motivates two camps; those who strongly agree with the affirmative and want support for their position, and those who strongly disagree and are looking to pick the piece apart.  I hope many in both camps come away disappointed, but they still read through to the end, and then share the work with others, others who aren’t so certain, yet want to read on.  I need viral success as much as the next writer.

The proximate cause of this effort is an essay in The Atlantic entitled, “The E-bike Is a Monstrosity” by Ian Bogost.  I read it, found it thought-provoking enough to share with a friend who works in micromobility.  And that was that; it didn’t weigh on my mind.  Then I saw bike twitter had an issue with it.  And Outside Magazine weighed in.  And Streetsblog.

I fear I’m now constituting the backlash to the backlash.  That is not my objective, but if the hope of written combat convinces you to click and read and share, then I guess I should be for it.

Bogost’s piece comes from the perspective of one who seems to be the ideal bike or e-bike customer—someone self-aware enough that he realizes he drives to much, doesn’t exercise enough, and knows the environmental impact of his lifestyle is too great unless he does something drastic to reduce that impact.  He has even bought an e-bike and has used it.  But it’s his take of why he’s uncomfortable with his e-bike that gets people angry.

The problem with e-bikes.

He writes:

“currently, e-bikes are trapped in the weird smear between pathetic, loser bicycles, and pitiable low-end motorbikes.”

“Cars denote freedom; commuter bikes imply, for better or worse, jerkitude or tweeness; motorcycles are cool; e-scooters are for douchebros. But e-bikes bear no clear character.  They fall between the cracks.  Even when I willingly tell people, ‘oh, I got an e-bike,’ I’m not sure if I’m bragging or revealing shame. ‘Mmm, wow,’ they respond, before changing the subject to something more interesting, such as the weather.”

Deep breaths.

Try not to take it personally.

I’m into bikes.  I commute, ride for leisure, exercise, competition.  Sometimes, many times, I’m the only one I see engaged in the activity.  Other times, I’m surrounded.  On the balance, riding a bicycle of any kind in the United States makes someone an extreme outlier, though, it seems like less so than it did when I first committed to two wheels.  Whether or not I worry about the derogatory-seeming comments of a person I don’t personally know well was answered a long time ago.

There are a few ways to look at his assertions.  I think there are both psychological and statistical answers.

I doubt Bogost was basing his comments on the personality traits of cyclists from any sort of statistical survey, and that’s annoying.  At the same time, maybe he sees something more dedicated cyclists don’t.  Not that we should change our habits, or stop riding, just because of his seemingly negative evaluation.

Statistically speaking, bike commuting, up until 2019, the last year I can find complete-seeming stats, is pretty rare.  Nationwide, 0.51% of commuters took a bicycle to work that year.  That’s 786,000 bike commuters.  Oregon counted 1.9% of their workers as bike commuters, the highest of any state.  New York state, 0.69%.  It’s hard to know how reliable these are.  According to the New York City Department of Transportation, the city had nearly 51,000 daily bike commuters in 2019, or roughly 0.61%, which seems low considering the other set of numbers.  But the point of this is that not even one in 100 commuters nationwide is using a bicycle to commute.  Though, to be fair, bike commuting increased by 61% from 2000 to 2019, which should be taken as a real success.

As awesome as I think, and possibly you think, cycling is,  it seems our enthusiasm for bike riding is not shared widely by our fellow Americans.  Maybe we can adjust the numbers up somewhat because it’s unfair to lump kids, who probably don’t control whether or not they get bikes, and senior citizens, many of whom possibly can’t ride bikes anymore, in with the rest of the people who aren’t riding.  Regardless, why people aren’t riding is something we cyclists might have an interest in understanding.

Damned because bikes aren’t popular.

Bogost offers a kind of answer.  People aren’t riding because it doesn’t seem desirable compared to the alternatives.

There’s much about driving and car culture I don’t understand.  That people favor cars over bikes in many circumstances when bikes have many real advantages suggests that I and the typical driver don’t see the world in the same way.  I can largely accept that, even though I want to change the equation.  I don’t understand why people seem to tie much of their identity to the objects they possess.  An Ispsos poll in 2018 found, “81% of Americans agree with the sentiment that their car reflects who they are, and 59% consider themselves as someone who is passionate about cars, trucks, motorcycles, or other vehicles. Perhaps because so many Americans rely on their cars, they have become such an important cultural tool. More than three-quarters of Americans (78%) assert that they definitely need to have a vehicle to get to work.”  As a friend of mine put it, for many people, a car is like a fur coat; they want people to see them in it.  Cars are, for many, a way to code their status, both for themselves and to signal others.  Bogost seems to be saying the signal he feels he gives when he rides an e-bike is one he doesn’t want to be yoked with.

I feel I see this everywhere.  Sport utility vehicles (SUVs) never seemed particularly sporty or utilitarian to me; they don’t drive well, they can’t carry much stuff, they’re bad on fuel, and they’re dangerous.  I consider them strange to drive, but that hasn’t made them less popular.  They’re far more dangerous to people outside the vehicle as well.  And they’re getting more dangerous by design. Their popularity killed off the more practical station wagon.  I initially thought the SUV was for people who were otherwise the kind of person who would buy a minivan or station wagon having a sort-of mini rebellion (there’s nothing rebellious about buying a car).  But once SUVs became popular, they took over.  Pickup trucks are likewise hugely popular, yet 70% go off road with it once a year or less, 35% use the bed once a year or less, and 24% are registered for business.  Fuel economy for SUVs seems terrible.  In 2020, the average fuel economy of the SUV/light truck category was 17.5mph, whereas a car was 24.2mpg.  I consider both numbers pretty terrible.

Driving a mink coat.

Cars are about, at least in part, status.  A car is merely a conveyance; everything that dresses up the conveyance obscures this reality.  A “sports car” has to be road legal and the driver has to obey all traffic laws, the same as the driver of the cheapest sedan.  The purpose of the car is to go from one place to the next, no matter how hard some drivers go to hide this elemental truth.  Cars allow us to cosplay, but it’s so woven into our lives that we don’t notice it’s expensive dress-up.

Most people who can afford not to see their car as merely a conveyance likely do select at least some status markers when choosing a car.  There’s a profile of a Subaru driver, right?  Car companies deploy psychological insights when  designing cars; they probably have profiles of the kind of people they’re targeting when they’re rolling out a new design. It helps that the auto industry spends billions of dollars advertising every year to convince people of how valuable cars are.  In 2019, the US auto industry spent $13.38 billion on digital advertising alone.  It’s not like those ads show cars how they’re actually used—sitting still in a driveway or parking spot for 23 or more hours a day, rolling slowly in bumper-to-bumper traffic, touring parking lots looking for a space—they show good looking, well-dressed people driving pristine vehicles, on open roads, in empty cities, as a connected entertainment center.  Car companies boast about a car’s power, even though there’s a speed limit that many cars are designed to easily surpass.  In some income brackets, people have two cars, one they can abuse and one they want to be seen in.

The American public has been conditioned to see cars as legit.  It’s what adults use.  The auto industry keeps television and movie productions stocked with new cars so that we see them as what normal people have.  Bikes, be they e-bikes or human-powered, are probably seen as suspect.  The 40 Year-Old Virgin was an oddity, in part, because he didn’t drive (When was the last time a cyclist was portrayed as ‘cool’ in a movie; put your answer in the comments.)  Someone who rides a bicycle to work in much of the country might be seen as someone who either can’t afford to get a car, or worse, literally refuses to buy into the system that 99.4% of those around her has already bought into.

How bikes get de-unpopularized.

If we want the world to get out of their cars and onto bikes, we need something to change.  Lebron James as a bike commuter might convince some people.  Reggie Miller and Ray Lewis riding bikes for pleasure and fitness might add.  But probably having the boss riding to work and encouraging people to so as well, along with having bike facilities is more important.  Having someone like Chili Palmer making bikes seem desirable could help.

Design might help as well.  When the mountain bike debuted, it was magic.  People wanted them, seemingly just for how they looked.  Kind of like how the SUV succeeded a decade or so later.  Bikes seem like a harder thing to tweak to people’s desires, unlike cars.  Cars are so big and so heavy with so many components, adding design features that can give a car a personality without it moving seem to be part of the process. Bikes are smaller, and much lighter, and most changes involve compromises that might take away from what the bike is supposed to do.  To me, one of the coolest-looking e-bikes around is the LeMond Prolog, which could possibly arouse the interest of people who want to be seen as sleek.  I’ve only seen one in the field thusfar.

When it comes to people embracing bikes for commuting, be they human-powered or electric, we’re fighting against not only the things already mentioned social and marketing forces, but the government as well.  The government, local, county, state, federal, puts a hand on the scale to keep driving artificially cheap.  They not only maintain, and build roads, but widen them, just for cars.  Interstates make it easier to live farther away from work.  Suburban sprawl is a consequence of public policy.  Speed limits are often adjusted for perceived driver needs.  Gas prices are kept artificially low, and when the marketplace dictates they rise, large groups of people forget about how much they love capitalism, how much they love the free market, and decide that the government should drive the price down.

Bikes are David.

Bike proponents are fighting all that when they’re trying to get more people to ride.  To call it asymmetric would be minimizing the scale.  The entire United States bicycle industry generated $6.9 billion in sales in 2020, a big year for bikes.  That’s a bit more than half of what the US car industry just spent in digital advertising in 2019.  We’re less than 1% of commuters nationally.  Much of the country is not designed to facilitate riding.  Savor the difficulty of fighting those headwinds.

But bikes, and bike commuting, are making a dent.  It’s slow, slower than I’m sure we think it should be.  But sheeple dominate and we’re stuck with what might be called ‘the outsider problem.’  This affects many things.  People stick with incumbents, with the thing they know, because of inertia, because of peer pressure, as much as anything else.  To get in, outsiders need to be better, more appealing, in many ways, and the establishment often needs to falter, before the outsider is even considered.  And luck is hugely important.  I mean, ‘people just like their cars.’

I know someone who became a multi-modal bike commuter because he looked at the price of parking at the commuter lot in his town and realized he could pay off a Brompton in two months and get exercise and get from the train destination to work faster and cheaper with the Brompton.  That’s the kind of thing that nudges people over to bike commuting.

The problem with Bogost.

Back to Bogost.  His biggest problem seems to be he’s uncomfortable riding because he believes bike riding isn’t desirable.  Which, ironically, is what makes bikes cool.  “Cool” means that someone’s temperature isn’t being raised, that they’re not making an effort, that they’re indifferent to others’ opinions, feelings, status hierarchy.  While within the bike world, cyclists might see status in ways that appeal to each other, to the vast majority, we’re uncool, which makes riding a bike the coolest thing around.

Until Bogost realizes that, of course e-bikes are a monstrosity.  It saddles the person seen on the bike with all sorts of negative symbolic values.  But, in addition to that general opprobrium, which can be seen as a good thing, driving cars in general is getting weighed down by negative symbolic values, as well as increasing cost.  Kids today don’t see cars in a positive light, and are driving less.  The monstrosity of e-bikes can turn out to be a selling point.

Not that we should just sit back and wait.

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