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
104 points (95.6% liked)
traingang
22906 readers
16 users here now
Post as many train pictures as possible.
All about urbanism and transportation, including freight transportation.
Home of train gang
:arm-L::train-shining::arm-R:
Talk about supply chain issues here!
List of cool books and videos about urbanism, transit, and other cool things
Titles must be informative. Please do not title your post "lmao" or use the tired "_____ challenge" format.
Archive links for reactionary sites, including the BBC.
LANDLORDS COWER IN FEAR OF MAOTRAIN
"that train pic is too powerful lmao" - u/Cadende
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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)