Electric bikes, bike sharing surge in pandemic
Virus highlights ‘micromobility’ as essential transport
As with all bicycles during the pandemic, electric bikes, or those with battery-powered motors to handle propulsion, boomed. Market research firm NPD Group said sales of e-bikes grew 145% in 2020 compared with 2019, outpacing sales of all bikes, which were up 65%.
“Bike categories that catered to families and recreational and newer riders grew better than more performanceoriented bikes,” said Dirk Sorenson, a sports industry analyst at NPD, adding that e-bikes “overcome challenges like big hills or going on a longer ride than a typical bike.”
But it’s not just consumer sales that have mainstreamed e-bikes. Municipal bike-sharing systems have increasingly adopted the technology, with some cities going with an all-electric fleet during the pandemic.
Social distancing demands, the quest for safe and more accessible public transportation and sustainable travel measures have forged a growing adoption of e-bikes among travelers as well as local residents.
“COVID sort of propelled electric bikes forward by years,” said Josh Squire, founder and chief executive of Hopr, a bike-share service.
Cities, bike-sharing companies and even a peerto-peer bike-sharing platform (in which bike owners rent their bikes directly to users) are jumping into the e-bike ecosystem. Here’s how bike-sharing — sometimes called “micromobility” to include other small vehicles, such as scooters — has shifted in the tourism
lull.
COVID did not kill bike-sharing
In the early days of the pandemic, bike-share usage stalled as those working from home stopped commuting. For essential workers who needed to travel, bike-sharing became an alternative to buses or trains, where they might be exposed to the virus by other passengers. Lyft, which manages bikeshare fleets in nine cities — including the largest systems in New York City and Chicago — gave about 30,000 essential workers free yearly passes.
“COVID was able to highlight micromobility as an essential transportation service, filling in where transit service stopped or where gaps existed and helping essential workers get to work,” said Samantha Herr, executive director of the North American Bikeshare
Association.
As people began to leave their houses in summer, biking rebounded. In Honolulu, nearly 80% of members of the bike-sharing system Biki said riding was the safest form of public transportation during the pandemic. In Chicago, the Divvy bikeshare system recorded its busiest month on record in August.
In New York City, where Citi Bike added 3,700 new bikes in 2020, ridership exceeded 2019 levels in the last four months of 2020, according to a monthly report filed with the New York City Department of Transportation. The company said 27% of rides were deemed “casual,” or recreational, in 2020, versus 17% in 2019, with the most popular stations around hospitals and parks, reflecting the mix of essential and casual uses.
E-bikes for the people
The electrification of bike-share systems, accelerating now, has been underway for several years. In 2018, the Bikeshare Planning Guide from the Transformative Urban Mobility Initiative, a global initiative on sustainable transportation, called them “ideal for bikeshare because of their otherwise high upfront cost to users, and they can improve user comfort by reducing oftencited barriers to cycling such as fatigue, sweating, and longer-distance or hilly trips.”
According to the North American Bikeshare Association, in 2019, the last year for which statistics are available, 28% of bike-sharing systems had e-bikes. It found e-bikes were used more intensively than traditional bikes, at a rate 1.7 times higher.
In 2019, when the Madison BCycle fleet in Madison,
Wisconsin, went electric, usage more than doubled. Novelty was a driver, along with affordability.
“To be able to try an e-bike for a very low rate for a day pass is what draws people initially to try it out,” said Helen Bradley, general manager of Madison BCycle, where a day pass costs $15. “Then they get hooked,” she added, on the range of the bikes, which can go 30 to 35 miles on a full charge with top speed of about 17 mph.
Chicago plans to have 10,000 e-bikes in its Divvy system by 2022 — it added 3,500 e-bikes in 2020 — in a plan to provide accessibility to 100% of the city.
Adopting e-bikes hasn’t come without growing pains. In New York City, Citi Bike introduced e-bikes in 2018, but removed them in 2019 after reports of brakes malfunctioning, causing rider injuries. Last winter, New York reintroduced Citi Bike e-bikes, which reach maximum speeds of 18 mph, below the limit of 20 mph later set by the city for the pedal-assisted e-bikes. There are now about 3,700 e-bikes in the 19,000-bike system; the average e-bike gets more than nine rides a day, while the average for pedal bikes is 3.5.
“Putting a little bit of a motor on it makes cycling more attractive to a wider and aging audience,” said Aaron Ritz, who oversees the Indego bike-share system for the city of Philadelphia.
Going farther, faster and mainstream
Shared bike systems always aimed to go the
“last mile” or fill the gap between public transit hubs and your destination. E-bikes make them more serious contenders as transportation options by going farther with less effort.
“If I can get someplace farther or faster, that matters when you’re picking a mode of transportation,” said Bill Dossett, executive director of
Nice Ride Minnesota, the nonprofit that started the shared mobility system in Minneapolis, now operated by Lyft, which plans to add about 2,000 e-bikes this spring.
The success of electric bikes and scooters has encouraged Bolt Mobility, which is in about 21 cities and college campuses, to develop electric mopeds, three-wheeled bikes and minicars, electric vehicles that offer more stability and protection.
“These devices aren’t supposed to be just for 20-year-old kids, they’re supposed to be for everyone,” said Ignacio Tzoumas, chief executive of Bolt Mobility.