The Problem with "E-bikes"
Depending on your point of view, e-bikes are either:
A revolution in transportation that will remake our cities and empower people to go farther and do more with cheap, clean technology while getting healthier and happier.
Or they might be:
A menace to cars, cyclists and pedestrians alike that need to be regulated out of existence before they kill again.
But of course, they’re neither. Or maybe both. Confused?
That’s not your fault, and it’s not my fault either. The problem isn’t technological or societal, it’s linguistic. Because of the sudden surge in popularity of bicycles with electric motors, we’ve ended up giving them all the same name regardless of capabilities or uses: e-bikes.
When people get excited about how an e-bike has transformed their golden years by letting them get out in the fresh air and spend time with their kids and grandkids and get fit along the way, they mean one thing. When people tell you that an e-bike has ended the soul-crushing torment of their car commute while getting them to work without breaking a sweat, they mean something else. When angry people tell you that delivery drivers on e-bikes in big cities are racing through bike lanes and onto sidewalks scaring the life out of pedestrians and cyclists, they mean a third thing entirely.
So what exactly is an e-bike?
- A $1,700 off-road bike that will help you explore gravel trails while keeping up with faster riders with a top speed of 20mph? That’s an e-bike.
- An $800 folding bike that you can carry onto a train as part of a multi-modal commute in car traffic with a top speed of 28mph? That’s an e-bike.
- A $5,000 mountain bike with a 5,000W motor that looks like a motorcycle straight out of Mad Max that can exceed 60mph? That’s an e-bike.
The vast differences in bikes and behaviors between commuters, recreational riders and speed demons are all collapsed into one word. E-bikes are already (in most jurisdictions) divided into 4 different categories by capability. You can pedal any of them like a regular bike without engaging the motor, but given how heavy they are, you probably don’t want to. The big differences are a) the top speed of the motor, and b) whether the motor can be controlled by a throttle or if you have to pedal to make it go. Some places have different rules for different classes of bikes, but they aren’t consistent or well-enforced.
- Class 1: motor you have to pedal to engage that cuts out at 20mph.
- Class 2: motor with a throttle that cuts out at 20mph.
- Class 3: motor with a throttle that cuts out at 28mph.
- Class 4: motor with a throttle that has no speed limit.
[Edited to add: this is a simplification, so here's an explainer from Wired and one from Aventon that will lay out how incredibly complicated it all is, while still being a simplification.]
Somebody once said that nothing radicalizes a person faster than e-bikes, but that cuts both ways. People who buy an e-bike start watching urbanist YouTube channels and showing up to city council meetings to demand more separated bike lanes. And people that nearly get run down while getting out of their cars by inattentive jerks going too fast on e-bikes end up at those same city council meetings to shout down anyone daring to mention bike lanes, and demand that the city ban e-bikes. As a guy who wants more bike lanes in my city, and more people on bikes in general, that’s a real problem for me, and not just linguistically, but societally.
Laws are being proposed all around the world to address e-bikes, and people are arguing about them from every angle. I think e-bikes are fantastic, but when I try to have a discussion, it means spending 10 minutes getting everyone on the same page about what each of us mean when we say "e-bike" before we can get down to what problems people perceive and how to address them.
A lot of people focus on bikes with throttles as the problem, because that lets you ride the bike like an electric scooter without pedaling, but I think that’s a distraction. If you’re worried about safety, you’re worried about collisions, and what matters is speed. Besides which, in cities a throttle helps you get a heavy e-bike up to speed from a stop to get through an intersection more safely.
My problem is with the top speed. I’m a pretty quick cyclist for my age, and in a sprint I can get my bike over 28mph (#humblebrag), but it’s work. It’s not something I can do safely in a bike lane or on a busy city street, – so I don’t. 20mph is faster than you need to go in a bike lane, but is very reasonable for spending a short distance in traffic. I think Class 3 e-bikes don’t belong in bike lanes, but I’m ready to be convinced otherwise. Class 4, not so much.
So what’s the solution? I think it has to start with the words we use, but I don’t think there’s an easy answer. People will use the words they like to mean the things they want them to, and there isn’t much to be done about it. If the kids want to use verbs like “cringe” as adjectives, we can’t stop them.
And trying to talk about e-bikes colloquially as Class 1 or Class 4 is never going to work. We need an easy way to differentiate the ones that have about the same capabilities as a regular bike from the ones that go faster than a pro racer in peak conditioning.
But, it turns out, we already have a word for bikes that you can pedal around on but also break the speed limit without breaking a sweat: mopeds. And we have laws about mopeds! In 45 states, you need at least a driver’s license, and sometimes a motorcycle license to ride a moped. That means training, that means testing, that means taking the time to learn how to use a machine so that you aren’t a danger to yourself or others. It also means that we can make laws about whether mopeds are allowed in bike lanes. Want to escape traffic entirely on a bike lane? Get a bike that stays under 20mph. Want to keep up with the cars? Keep your moped out of the bike lane. Feel like pushing yourself on a regular bike to keep up with traffic? Have at it.
How we actually manage that, is of course, a nightmare. A lot of Class 2 e-bikes can be trivially modified to be Class 3. And with the explosion of cheap e-bikes, knowing which models are which is impossible. Cops with radar guns? Nobody wants that. But I think getting our terminology right so that we can discuss all of this is the first step to making everyone safer without stopping people from getting all of the benefits from e-bikes.
That’s my suggestion. And, I’ll admit, it’s not perfect. "Moped" sounds old-fashioned, it sounds slow, and it doesn’t exactly fit with what we see when we look at e-bikes. But if you agree with my premise, maybe you can come up with a better term. If you do, let me know on Mastodon or Bluesky.
(The next question is, what do we call non-e-bikes? When this happened to guitars we ended up with the terms electric and acoustic. Anyone want to go for an acoustic bike ride?)
