Ten years ago I was a pretty avid cyclist; I’d done a century ride, biked all the way around Lake Tahoe, and semi-regularly commuted 40 miles to work by bike. Then I became a parent, and found it much more difficult and less rewarding to try and sustain regular bike riding. I wondered if an electric bike could help keep me riding at least some of the time and reduce my carbon footprint too, by making it possible to replace a significant chunk of car trips with bike trips.
Turns out that yes, it could. I can highly recommend e-biking for errands, visiting friends, schlepping a young child around, and commuting— all things people commonly use the family car(s) for. E-bikes are expensive compared to regular bikes, but very cheap compared to cars, and the latter is the more appropriate comparison: if yours is a small-to-medium-sized family in a reasonably bikeable area, the right e-bike can make it substantially easier to do without a second car. Taking the American suburban dream as a baseline, that’s a big footprint reduction. So e-bikes are great tools for incremental green retrofitting, which is what this blog is all about.
People with physical limitations that impair their ability to bike may want to consider an electric scooter instead. I have no personal experience with these, but I see them more and more often around town, and they have a lot of the same advantages of e-bikes: they are carbon-free transport that is easier to park, much more efficient, and much cheaper than a car.
Cargo vs non-cargo
E-bikes come in two basic types:
the type that looks like a normal bike and has a normal bike’s affordances
the type that looks like a pedal-powered hauling vehicle and has space for kids, suitcases, large numbers of grocery bags etc.
There are various subtypes of (2) depending on e.g. whether you want the big cargo area in front of you or in back. But any of them will have basically the same advantages and disadvantages: ease of carrying kids and doing large grocery runs, difficulty of carrying up stairs or putting on a bike rack behind your car.
I’ve owned both types. The cargo hauling kind was awesome for when I needed to ferry a little kid back and forth to preschool. The normal bike kind is awesome now, when said kid is now big enough to ride his own bike around town. There are people who put a kid on the back (or even on the front) of a normal bike, but I would find that terrifyingly wobbly and precarious; cargo bikes usually put their storage/kid compartments much lower to the ground, thus making the load and the bike much more stable.
You could also get a normal-bike kind of e-bike and hitch a trailer to the back when you need to haul heavy things/people. I tried using a trailer a few times on my old non-electrified bike and found it really awkward both to ride with and to attach/detach, but YMMV.
Motor size matters
Most e-bikes have a motor rated at between 250W and 750W. More watts = more oomph in general, but note that the torque rating of the motor, usually given in newton-meters (Nm), also matters, especially for hill climbing. 40 Nm is a pretty light assist, enough to help you up a hill but not make it anywhere near effortless; 75 Nm is going to give you much more pull up that hill.
Motor placement also matters: some motors are mid-drive meaning they sit between the pedals and add force to your pedaling; others are hub motors which can also be synced to your pedaling, but more indirectly, or which on some bikes can move you with a throttle scooter-style and pedaling-free. If you’ll be pedaling most of the time rather than just twisting the throttle, mid-drives are generally better: they are more effective on hills, because when you shift down to climb a hill, both the motor and your legs get the mechanical advantage of the gear ratio, whereas with a hub motor, only your legs do. The weight distribution is usually more conducive to a good steering feel, too, especially if the battery is also near the center of the bike (e.g. on or in the down tube) rather than perched on the back.
Specific recommendations
In 2015 I bought my first e-bike, a Yuba Spicy Curry squarely in the “cargo bike” category, from a retailer that has sadly since closed. Yuba still makes a much-revised version of the Spicy Curry, and you can get them from REI now.
Things I liked about it:
The stability and groundedness. The front wheel of the Spicy Curry is big enough to avoid the twitchy steering typical of small-front-wheel e-bikes I’ve tried, but the back wheel is small so that the cargo/kid platform is low to the ground.
The sense that it’s built like a tank. The frame is really, really sturdy and the bike in general can take a lot of bumps and abuse. I even got rear-ended by a car at an intersection once on my way to drop off my son at preschool (I do not recommend this experience for a person’s blood pressure or general stress level) and not only was my son fine, but the bike wasn’t even scratched.
The practicality for San Francisco hills. The motor is a really torquey Bosch mid-drive and it’s geared low, so it’s never going to be fast but it’ll climb whatever you need it to climb and chug along with steady, light pedal effort.
The cargo and kid space. There’s a big front basket and then a rear platform that you can put kid seats, pillion-ish cushions, running boards etc on along with panniers.
Things I disliked:
It was too heavy to carry any distance and too long to ever go on a car rack.
The chain was longer than a normal bike chain and prone to skipping and wearing out from all the torque that was put on it, and expensive to replace when it did wear out.
The brake pads squealed loudly enough that I had to get them replaced a couple of times because the sound was so annoying.
The battery, like all batteries, eventually lost some of its capacity, and I could not find a replacement; apparently Yuba switched to a different battery maker with subsequent models and stopped selling the old first-gen batteries. A local Yuba dealer said they could special order one, but their special order never arrived. There was a guy on the internet who claimed to be able to refurbish them, but had a months-long waiting list. Yuba may now have a more stable battery provider, but in general this is a reason to be skeptical of boutiquey manufacturers.
Earlier this year I sold the Yuba and bought a Specialized Turbo Vado SL, squarely in the “normal bike” category. I love the lightness, sleekness, and quick steering of the Specialized; it’s one of the few e-bikes that can easily go on a hitch rack, and it feels much more like my old road bike than like the Yuba. The pair of big Ortlieb panniers I got holds a surprising amount, too. The small, light motor’s lower torque means I do have to work more on the hills than with most e-bikes, but it still makes what would otherwise be a slog into a pleasant light-to-moderate bit of exercise, easily doable in street clothes at the beginning and end of a long workday. And Specialized is a big enough manufacturer that I’m not worried about finding parts or dealers.
The particular model I bought (the 5.0 EQ) seems pretty hard to find these days. I was going to buy one from the New Wheel, a very slick high-end e-bike store in Bernal Heights, but they said they were backordered indefinitely. So I ended up finding a slightly used one online and taking it to the New Wheel anyway for tuning and outfitting. I’m glad I did; great shop, can recommend.