Over the past decade, China has been undergoing the biggest adoption of alternative fuels for transportation, ever. Although this transition isn’t being led by green cars like the Tesla or the new lines of “eco” buses that are popping up in an increasing number of the country's cities, but e-bikes — electric bicycles.
There are now up to 200 million e-bikes zipping through the streets of China, providing low cost, energy efficient, and emission-free transportation for people across the country. E-bikes have also become a big business, with over 35 million being sold each year, 700 manufacturers, and an industry chain that is valued at US$30 billion in China alone.
However, contrasting other policies to bolster electric transportation and alternative fuels, many Chinese cities have taken measures to remove e-bikes from their streets.
As China’s cities have grown in size, population, and complexity many fold over the past two decades, new transportation options were needed for middle and working class residents to commute to work and back, and the e-bike adequately filled this void for hundreds of millions. This phenomenon occurred without any formal policy support from the Chinese government, and was a purely market-driven response to a very real social demand.
E-bikes at a busy intersection in Zhenjiang. Image: Wade Shepard.
Christopher Cherry, a professor from the University of Tennessee who has been researching transportation in China since 2005, views the e-bike as a key technology that holds Chinese cities socially and economically together. He found that it is China’s middle and lower-income classes that have mostly benefited from the rapid proliferation of this form of personal transport.
“The poor tend not to live on high capacity transit corridors and cannot afford cars to escape their location disadvantage,” he explained. “So they’re stuck with transit systems that require multiple transfers and overall low accessibility to jobs, goods, and services offered by the city.”
For the user, the reasons for the e-bike’s popularity in China are clear:
1) They are cheap to buy and use, often costing in the range of $125 to $375 with an average daily operating cost of just 21 cents per day (1/20 the operating cost of a car in China);
2) They are relatively fast, with speeds up to 40km per hour;
3) They reduce the fatigue element that’s associated with bicycles, and research has shown that they extend the radius of an individual’s potential commute -- which means that people can live farther from where they work, which is key in China's rapidly expanding cities.
E-bikes in China have become complete utility vehicles as well, transporting not only armies of workers around cities but goods as well — everything from fast food to e-commerce orders are now being delivered by e-bike.
As big cities all over the world, and especially in China, move towards creating more compact, more resource efficient cities, the e-bike serves another benefit: its relative small size. A passenger car occupies at least ten square meters while an e-bike roughly takes up under two. E-bikes also take up far less per-capita roadspace, with the flow rate of e-bikes being six times that of cars. In addition to this, as Chinese cities become more and more packed with personal automobiles, parking spaces are becoming harder to find, which has resulted in sidewalks, bike lanes, and even parts of roadways being transformed into defacto parking lots. An e-bike takes up a fraction of the parking space of a car, and can be more easily kept from impeding public thoroughfares.
So if e-bikes are so good then why are some Chinese cities banning them?
Over 10 major cities in China, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xiamen, and Shenzhen, have restricted or outright banned e-bike usage.
In addition to their social, economic, and environmental upsides, e-bikes carry some very pronounced drawbacks in China. A walk through a Chinese city that has a high prevalence of e-bikes reveals these problems clearly: electric bicycles zipping around in every direction, dominating the bike lanes, driving on the sidewalks, virtually running down pedestrians, and weaving in and out of traffic often with little heed to road rules or personal safety. It is not uncommon for two or more people to be riding on a single e-bike -- sometimes you even spot entire families packed onto one.
A typical street scene in a Chinese city where e-bikes have not been banned. Notice the complete... [+]
Legally speaking, e-bikes are held under the same regulations as bicycles in China, which means that riders don’t need a license, any training, insurance, or even a helmet to operate one — all you have to do is buy one from the shop, hop on, and go.
“E-bike riders are among the most egregious traffic law violators,” Cherry proclaimed. “Data shows that e-bike fatalities are really high, and almost reach e-bike growth.”
In fact, Cherry discovered that e-bikers were driving the wrong-way on 44% of his study segments, often failing to yield the right-of-way, and a full 56% violating stop signs and traffic signals.
“The enforcement of traffic rules for this group is poor,” Cherry said. “Police are unable to punish them because the population is so large and violations are so frequent.”
Ironically, the electricity that e-bikes run off mostly comes from coal-burning power plants in China. Although Cherry affirms that “ebikes are green, even when they rely on dirty technologies.” His reasoning is that e-bikes are extremely energy efficient, with a power train that uses a mere 2kWh per 100km, or, for comparison, the equivalent of about 1,000 miles per gallon.
“There is no other mainstream motorized mode that matches that efficiency,” Cherry said. “Even when 100% charged by coal power plants, they are quite clean compared to every alternative.”
Another problem with e-bikes is that they are mostly powered from lead acid batteries, which emit lead into the environment at every stage of the mining, smelting, manufacturing, and recycling process. These lead batteries are also prone to losing their charge relatively quickly and need to be replaced every year or two. When we consider that each e-bike has a battery that’s about the same size as a car’s, with 10-15 kg of lead, and the sheer number of e-bikes on the roads of China and how often these batteries need to be replaced, this form of transport is one of the biggest drivers of the global lead industry, which has had a very pernicious ecological impact.
However, Cherry points out that battery-source pollution can be reduced by converting to lithium-ion batteries and through proper regulation of lead mining and battery recycling operations — the latter of which are already starting to happen in China.
A better solution?
Cherry believes that the e-bike itself is not inherently to blame for the public nuisance that has resulted from its use, but rather from a lapse of proper infrastructure and government regulations.
“There are no “right” or “wrong” tools, if you kill an official with a knife, no one says that the knife was in the wrong…” one netizen recently wrote on Weibo in response to Guiyang proposing a ban on e-bike use in the city.
To these ends, Cherry has outlined a plan for China to be able to leverage the benefits of e-bikes while mitigating their nefarious attributes. These include safety laws, which require the use of helmets; uniform safety standards for e-bike production, such as the setting of a maximum speed; traffic laws for e-bikes as there are for cars; the requirement of a driver’s license to operate an e-bike; mandatory insurance; and enhanced road safety management — i.e. traffic police who actually enforce rules for e-bikers.
“The challenge is in road management and better regulation,” Cherry said.
The social impact of e-bike bans in China are often dire on the urban working class and poor who rely on this form of transportation to commute to work.
“If the government doesn’t want to support green transit that’s fine,” wrote another user on Guiyang’s e-bike Weibo discussion, “but do they also want to ruin the lifestyles of lower-income citizens?”
“It’s important to notice that the selection bias of the most vocal advocates in favor of banning e-bikes are often middle or upper middle class residents who drive, live within close vicinity of a public transit line, or might even have a chauffeur,” CC Huang of Energy Innovation, an advisory firm on progressive urban design, added.
The e-bike allows people to get to where they need to go cheaply, efficiently, and without directly spewing emissions, all the while reducing the pressure on China’s already crowded public transportation networks and taking up far less road and parking space than cars. As China now sits on the cusps of an environmental catastrophe, with its cities choked in smog — which up to a third of which can come from vehicle emissions — will the country continue slamming the brakes down on the largest transition to cleaner transportation and alternative fuels ever known? Or will the e-bike be cultivated into the clutch transportation solution that it otherwise could be?
“The issue of e-bikes in China has become incredibly complex, it speaks to China’s congestion, public transit, rich-poor gap, and inefficient government management,” said CC Huang. “But it also offers a choice for a number of cities – do you choose bikes or cars? Sadly, a number of large cities have recently decided to choose cars."
