There is a joke told in transit circles about those who ride electric bicycles: how do you know if someone has an e-bike? They’ll tell you. The idea, of course, is that users of the battery-powered two-wheelers tend to be proselytisers for the technology.

Take Monte Paulsen, a building energy consultant in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, who used to drive a car five days a week. A former “fair-weather cyclist,” he rode his bike maybe twice a month.

The pandemic, he decided, was a good time to buy a RadWagon, an electric cargo bike from Rad Power Bikes, a top-selling e-bike company. Now, Paulsen said, he makes 90 per cent of his trips on it.

“I started as a personal experiment to see how I could lower my carbon footprint,” he said. “I’ve stuck with it; it’s really fun.”

Indeed, e-bikes are everywhere. The pandemic bike boom boosted e-bike sales 145 per cent from 2019 to 2020, more than double the rate of classic bikes, according to the market research firm NPD Group.

And that growth does not seem to be slowing. Deloitte projected that between 2020 and 2023, 130 million e-bikes would be sold worldwide. At the moment, e-bikes — not cars — appear to be the world’s bestselling electric vehicle, or EV.

The exploding appetite for electrified rides is a product of three trends unfolding simultaneously, said David Zipper, a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, US, and a specialist in new forms of mobility technology.

The first is the rapid development of lithium-ion batteries. Used in electric cars, these batteries “have gotten smaller, more efficient and cheaper,” Zipper said, allowing their use in scooters, mopeds and, “for smaller applications, too, like a bicycle.”

The second, he said, is a resurgence of interest in urban cycling over the last decade. The third is the “gateway drug” of bike-sharing programmes that allow riders to try e-bikes without buying one.

Most e-bikes fall into three categories. With the first, pedal assist, riders are given a motorised boost, like an invisible hand is pushing them forward. The second, a throttle, allows the rider to zoom around, up to 20 mph, without pedalling, and is commonly used by delivery drivers and couriers. And the last is a faster pedal assist, allowing speeds of at least 28 mph.

For New York’s Citi Bike, the electric-blue pedal-assist bikes make up 20 per cent of the fleet but carry 35 per cent of all rides, according to internal data provided by Lyft, its parent company. Monthly Citi Bike rides have topped three million four times this year, and that’s a lot.

One study found that people cycle at least twice as much when they own an e-bike, which combats criticism that the ease of riding makes it a less effective activity. Riders may not be sweating as much, but if they’re biking longer and more frequently, they could be getting more exercise.

Greater regular use could also be critical to reducing car trips. In Norway, which has a national bike network, car usage dropped among e-bike users as they learned how far they could go on one.

In the US, getting more people to travel by e-bike does come with obstacles. E-bikes do not qualify for commuter tax benefits that cover public transit and parking, and they remain expensive (from less than $1,000 to nearly $10,000).

In Britain, the government is offering tax credits for e-bikes and funds local efforts to expand bike lanes. According to the market research company Mintel, the e-bike market there saw a

70 per cent jump last year, with 1,70,000 sold in 2020.

But there have been challenges — ones that entrepreneurs are trying to address. When he was studying electrical engineering at college in London, Adebola Adeleye used Santander Cycles, the city’s bike-share programme, to get around. But the design of the bike, then approximately 51 pounds and is now closer to 45, was hefty for new riders.

“The style and the weight actually limited the amount of people who could get onto it,” Adeleye said.

So he began building a prototype in his bedroom, leading to the CrownCruiser, that looks as if it rode off the set of “Blade Runner”. Adeleye is now the chief executive of CrownCruiser Motors, an e-bike startup.

If the bike can keep up and has ample space to move, then zipping past traffic becomes an afterthought. “Because then you won’t think about the traffic. You want to give people that freedom.”

NYTNS