It's marginal gains all the way here but genuinely if you're an omnivore the E-Bike might work out more enviromentally conscious
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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traingang
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Can someone explain how an e-bike is better than a regular bike?
They're basically the same thing, but one has a battery and requires charging (burning fossil fuels in most places) and the other doesn't. E-bike almost certainly requires a replacement battery way before a regular bike would ever need to be replaced.
Is it like...the person on a regular bike breathing more heavily and needing more calories? Surely this adds up over time, but is it really worse than mining lithium and charging using fossil fuels?
Edit: I found a very detailed article on this. Reading it now, but I think my guess about calories is correct based on this table
https://www.bikeradar.com/features/long-reads/cycling-environmental-impact
yeah nailed it. vegan acoustic biker clears every other mode of transport but otherwise burning a lot of oil might net you more energy than converting meat, cheese and eggs through a human.
The only thing that just seems wrong is the manufacturing emissions of e-bike versus analog bike. E-bikes weigh more, so shipping them around has more emissions as well. I think it's probably very close, but like you said, it depends a lot on what the food is too..
Idk, I rarely trust emission numbers because a lot of companies fake that shit in various ways and many of the numbers are self reported.
I don't mean to attack you but there's a point to be made here as per the slavery conditions battery ressource miners minors are subjected to but like a shipping crate full of batteries ain't it. Like look it up, the "shipping" part of most goods is like in the cents regions because a container ship is pretty damn efficient.
I mean, it's more than just the batteries. E-bikes weigh about twice what a regular bike does. So if the max capacity is 1000 bikes it would be 500 e-bikes (made up numbers here). To ship the same number of e-bikes would take two separate trips.
I know sea freight is very efficient, but there's no reason not to account for the difference if we're making the comparison?
Just because I am the type of person that I am I have to point out as to whether an e-bike weighs more than a regular bike depends highly on the regular bike and also the e-bike honestly. They made some heavy ass acoustic ones, they make some lightweight e-bikes. Latter with little range, mostly, to be fair. I say this to ask if somebody shipped some heavy ass steel bikes, would you be concerned as per CO2 Output?
I mean it's there, but it's genuinely just marginal. Like 0,03% of the CO2 Budget of any given bicycle were it ridden.
Now the resource extraction I don't have numbers on and it probably sucks. People buying E-Bikes to ride them 200km over a 10 year period probably also isn't great for CO2-output - in the context of bicycles - but if we assume what gets shipped gets used it doesn't matter
I think you've mistaken my comments if you think I'm trying to make e-bikes sound bad or something. When I made that comment, I looked up how much a few bikes weigh and found several articles that said e-bikes typically weigh about twice as much. Obviously this isn't applicable across the board to every bike, but there's really no way to make that kind of comparison without using rough averages or doing way more research than I'm prepared to do.
Again, I'm just saying if we are going to compare the emissions of e-bikes and bikes then we should make the comparison for everything. We're already talking about a pretty small number, so even if it only requires 1.5 extra trips or whatever there would be a difference.
Also, a container ship isn't the only thing required to get a bike to people. Trains, trucks, and planes are used as well. If the truck going from Seattle to North Dakota or whatever has to make a second trip or 1.33 trips or whatever, that is an increase in emissions. I'm not sure why we are going back and forth on this because it seems incredibly obvious that this would have to be accounted for to make an accurate comparison.
The frame of reference here, to me at least, isn't the utopia where we get to squabble about the ecological merits of e-bike vs. acoustic bike, it's where one car getting shipped anywhere from anywhere eats up the logistical CO2-equivalent of about 50 bikes (55 for e-bikes).
There's a couple of issues at play which mean it doesn't work exactly like that.
Firstly larger ocean freight don't scale proportionately to weight linearly. So even if we assume that ebikes would mean a full doubling of the weight of a given trip it wouldn't require double the energy and therefore emissions to do the trip. It will depend on the exact vessel but an estimate from here is for each additional 100 ton of mass to a container ship it would use an additional 0.0714 of a gallon of fuel. Its very cool physics which is largely just down to the sea doing most of the work carrying the weight itself (the same works for different reasons for rail but all other modes have much closer to linear scaling).
The other factor is that in practice the energy and emissions are the result of whole systems and trips are not always operating at ideal conditions. So its quite hard to judge what actually changes in a while system if there's an increase in some weight of some products.
These are the reasons that additional weight in ebikes doesn't come out to a huge increase in shipping emissions when its all worked through.
edit: paper uses imperial ton not tonne - corrected
Also a result container ships scale on volume not mass so a trip that has a capacity for 1000 acoustic bikes largely has a capacity for 1000 ebikes since when shipped they use up the same volume (excluding cargo bikes)
One way to look at it is to compare it with the EV debate- the carbon expenditure to create a new EV far outweighs the net emissions of keeping an old combustion vehicle running for a year. But say you drive 20,000 miles a year. At some point (I forget the math but it's 5-10 years) you've closed the gap and now you've got a real net deduction of emissions per year (vs driving the ICE). It's gonna be a lot more variable with humans and the types of food we eat but there should be a similar crossover point there too.
The added weight may be a lot of emissions over thousands of bikes/batteries, but per bike its probably negligible. The only part that is usually not manfactured locally is the battery, which can be shipped in bulk on cargoships for very minimal CO2 per-item (and more space-efficient than a bike frame).
This is for food, but the point is the same; transport is done in such high quantities that very few food items here even register as significant sources of emissions. I dont think this chart is super accurate but I hope that gets the point across.
No way the carbon footprint of buying a new E-bike is lower than me going to a local upcycling place, fixing up an old bike from the 1970s using spare parts, and using that as my daily driver.
The logic of repairing and using an old beater car might work out on emissions, but not with acoustic bikes. There are a lot of assumptions being made in these calculations and there are a lot greener ways to acquire an acoustic bike than buying a new one from a store. Upcycling a bike will always be greener than a new one and the classic steel frames just keep going so long as you can find parts. I suspect their improved ergonomics over modern bikes also contribute to less human energy needed to drive them. I'm not really using significantly more calories biking to and from work than I am walking.
Creative assumptions and manipulations of data to reach conclusions that are obviously misleading and likely incorrect without these manipulations. In the long term, replacement batteries for an E-bike will easily make the manufacturing emissions outweigh those of a new analog bike.
I support more bikers and E-biking gets some people into it that otherwise wouldn't, but this reeks of attempting to justify and prop up tech in ways that it does not need and that will ultimately fuel more emissions in the long run. Better urban design and seasonal maintenance can largely offset the justification for needing an E-bike.
God, this comment goes so hard. "Vegan acoustic biker" fuck me, that's a hell of a username.
hell yeah
fuck the cArBoN fOoTpRiNt narrative to begin with and kill some BP executives in self-defense instead; but in addition to food calories stats like this should include "but are you actually using it though?" like how the "failure rate" of condoms as a bc method includes forgetting the condom.
a push bike you ride less often because of time, wind, hills, or workplace hygiene isn't better than an e-bike that replaces more car trips
I think it is most likely assuming people are going to be consuming extra calories. I'm sure most people have enough calories already.
I am a machine that converts beans into food related emissions.
You could argue that the increased energy burn from cycling is offset by not needing exercise elsewhere. Cos like people gotta exercise but if your transport is exercising then two birds one stone right? If you use an ebike and go to gym after that isn’t saving on my fart related emissions
I have a pretty hard time buying the claim that breathing is more than twice as impactful as producing a lithium ion battery and my job is literally calculating emissions.
Maybe they're including the extra laundry and showers from getting all sweaty? Or does manufacturing Lycra use a lot of fossil fuels?
Oh shit I'm really bad for the environment cuz I'm always sweating.
For me, it was a couple things:
I simply do more with it than I used to when I just had a regular bike.
Regular bikes are definitely not obsolete or anything. In an area where it's quite flat and there's a lot of density and transit options, I think a regular bike is a better option. And ebikes are very heavy, so they're not really an option if you're in an apartment and have to carry it up and down stairs every day.
I think it probably accounts for "likelihood of use within a distance" where the average person is likely to use an E-Bike for a 30 minutes ride but not a bike. So the regular bike only decreases your impact within a like 15 minute radius of travel.
So as an individual it would always be best to stretch the distances you go as far as possible with the least consuming mode, but as a population, the E-Bike prevents more driving/bus riding/ horse riding (?) than a bike does.
I was gonna say this. I imagine there's a lot of people for whom their lives wouldn't really be serviced by a regular bike, unless they were a super avid cyclist and okay with being tired and sweaty all the time, and would still end up using a car a lot even if they genuinely tried to bike as often as they could. But an e-bike fills up a lot of those gaps.
It's me, I'm the lazy bastard. (Not really, but I'm a absurdly sweaty bastard if it's above 20C and I have to exert myself above a light stroll, so E-Bike has saved me many times from relenting to a car ride to the city center)
These kinds of system analyses are extremely sensitive to system boundary definitions. As mentioned in another comment, the only things they accounted for were "food", charging electricity, and manufacturing. You burn more calories when cycling so they put in some estimate of the carbon footprint of diet.
Of course, they didn't know what cyclists eat so it's just some average cribbed from some other system analysis. If you're a Bean Head then the number will be much lower. Same for if you fuel with sugar when riding or just do vegan protein powder, etc.
But more importantly they didn't factor in what it means to regularly exercise that much. If a person is doing that they are going to improve their overall health substantially, live a better life, use healthcare less, and so on. No carbon footprint info was calculated for this because of the system boundaries, but of course all of these things are connected. By the logic of this system, the best form of transportation is sitting on the couch.
“Miles per square metre” fucking hell. Even when Americans try to do metric instead of football fields per Big Mac or whatever they normally do they still manage to fuck it up.
I like the added touch of using the British English spelling instead of American English.
Another argument is the land use associated with producing those calories (electrical or edible). The two images above are from the book "There is No Planet B" by Mike Berners-Lee
Hills
i've never worked anywhere with facilities, so the only bikeable commutes had to be leisurely
Maybe they use numbers from different sources, one that includes the production process and one that doesn't