Where are we headed?

Watching traffic outside a cafe window recently, I found myself wondering: in a decade, how many of the cyclists passing by would be riding e-bikes? By the end of my coffee I’d decided it would be almost all of them. Not only that, but many more people on buses and in cars to whom the idea hasn’t even occurred yet would have joined them. Sounds implausible? I think it’s inevitable.

The trend for electrification was already evident as I sipped my americano. It didn’t take long to tick off the usual e-bike categories: parents and kids on cargo bikes, fully equipped commuters and young people on dockless hire bikes, plus a seemingly inexhaustible stream of delivery riders.

Of course there were plenty of conventional bikes too. In fact, it’s only the delivery riders that seemed to have switched wholesale over to using e-bikes.

But why were any of these people on the road? Even the keenest cyclist will find little joy in navigating traffic on a weekday morning. The delivery riders, the school kids and the commuters were there because they had to be. Fundamentally, bikes are transport. And almost all bicycle journeys are faster, safer and more enjoyable with the addition of electrical assistance.

So what’s stopping more people from making the switch? Cost. This is coming down. Awareness. E-bikes are increasingly visible as a means of transport. Convention. A silly reason to struggle on with a sub-optimal solution. As governments seek to encourage more people to cycle, it’s hard not to imagine e-bikes aren’t just the machines to tempt people into trying something new.

Fortunately, it turns out we’re already well on our way to a future where e-bikes help more people make sustainable transport choices. Compiling stats for this issue, I discovered that 30% of all bikes purchased in the UK last year came with electrical assistance. In the Netherlands, that figure is nearly half.

No one seems quite sure of the size of the market worldwide. What I did find were reams of market reports suggesting the e-bike market still has the potential for massive growth. And while it’s hard to put an exact number on it, the values mentioned were large enough to get investors excited. I’m just happy the e-bike boom seems sure to deliver more people riding down a less polluted high street on a Tuesday morning very soon.