While they had never biked much before, they've slowly replaced daily errands like getting groceries or taking their son to school with e-bike rides.Ĭook, a software engineer, just made an addition to the couple's fleet - a cargo bike from Urban Arrow that has plenty of room for their son and their baby who's arriving later this year. The E-bike maker Aventon has seen its sales explode since 2020.Īfter Wesley Cook and his wife sold their second car last year, they test-rode a pair of e-bikes from a local, Atlanta-based company called Edison Bicycles and never looked back. "I'm trading an activity that I absolutely hate doing, which is getting stuck in traffic, with something that I actually like doing, which is getting some exercise and riding my bike," he told Insider. He said he wasn't going to miss the insurance payments or traffic jams. He recently bought another e-bike and is looking to sell his and his wife's second car since it barely gets any use. Victor Silva, a product manager in the suburbs of Washington, DC, bought a RadRunner Plus from Rad Power Bikes for $1,900 in the summer after realizing most of his car trips were only a few miles. Another study found choosing an e-bike for 15% of one's miles traveled cut their transportation emissions by 12%.įast, fun, and convenient, e-bikes are already helping people make that kind of shift in their daily lives. According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, more than half of all trips in the US are under 3 miles.Ī University of Oxford study found that swapping a car for a bike just once a day slashed an individual's transportation emissions by a whopping 67%. "We need to make sure we are putting programs in place that really encourage people to take alternatives."Į-bikes can help reduce car dependency, green advocates say.Į-bikes have loads of potential to pry Americans away from their beloved automobiles, advocates told Insider, especially since short trips could easily be made on two wheels instead. "Cleaner cars are an important solution, but we can't just focus on cars," Katherine García, the director of the Clean Transportation for All Campaign at the Sierra Club, told Insider. Gains in vehicle efficiency are being dragged down by rising sales of large SUVs and trucks, while practically no progress has been made in reducing the number of miles people drive, Carter Rubin, a transportation lead at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Insider.Īll that makes enticing people to step out of the driver's seat and onto a bike, bus, or sidewalk increasingly important for meeting climate goals. And light-duty vehicles (cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs, not semis and airplanes) make up the largest chunk of that. Transportation is the single biggest contributor to US greenhouse-gas emissions. And that's a great thing, because while replacing gas-burning cars with electric ones is key to heading off global warming, research has found Americans also need to drive less altogether to avoid climate catastrophe. The clean-transportation revolution won't arrive by way of futuristic hyperloops, driverless taxi pods, or drones the size of minivans - not anytime soon, at least.Īnd while electric cars get all the hype, a game-changing solution to getting around without warming the planet has flourished right under our noses.Įlectric bicycles of all shapes and sizes have whirred and zipped their way into the mainstream in recent years as the pandemic has supercharged an e-biking boom that was already well underway. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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