November 14, 2016

The love and hate with e-bikes in Chinese cities

Yanbo Ge

Seattle is considering bringing in an electric-assist bike (e-bike) share program proposed by Bewegen around April of 2017 to replace the Pronto bike sharing that is running currently in the city. But according to the Chinese cities that represent the first-ever widespread adoption of commercial electric bikes, they are far from perfect.

China has been growing out from a bike kingdom into an e-bike kingdom during the last decade. Estimation shows that 200 million Chinese used e-bikes in 2014. Shanghai’s household travel survey shows that during the year 2014 the mode share of e-bikes is 20.2%, 3.9% more than the year 2009, whereas the bike mode share fell from 14.1% to 7.2%. The low-cost (often between $125 to $375) and high-speed (up to 25 mph) e-bikes are becoming the key transportation mode of China’s middle and lower income classes, who tend not to live on high capacity transit corridors and cannot afford cars. Another reason for the proliferation of e-bikes in China is the increasing demand for deliveries of goods sold online.  With Chinese cities becoming more and more packed with private automobiles, e-bikes provide many benefits because of their small sizes and low energy consumption.

E-bike deliveries of online goods 

But this love with e-bike is not uniform. E-bikes are banned in more than 10 major cities such as Guangzhou, Xiamen and Shenzhen. There have been rumors it will also be restricted in Shanghai and Beijing in 2017, mostly due to safety problems.  One reason for e-bikes’ safety threat is that they are held under the same regulations as bikes, which means the riders don’t need a license, any training, insurance or even a helmet to operate one. All one has to do is to buy one from the shop, hop on and go. The lack of regulation regarding the road usage right of e-bikes also does not help with the road safety. In Beijing and Shanghai, you can always see e-bikes zipping through the traffic without worrying about breaking the law.

E-bikes trying to merge into traffic

E-bikes are dangerous on roads because they are really different from regular bikes when it comes to the weight and speed: they are a lot heavier and a lot faster; they are harder to stop and the speed is harder to control compared to regular bikes: they are called the silent killers on urban roads. A study conducted by researchers at Peking University and other institutions from October 2010 to April 2011 found that e-bikes were involved in 57 percent of serious non-fatal road accidents in a hospital in Suzhou.

E-bikes trying to cross the street

Another reason that makes e-bike less attractive is that they are not as environment-friendly as expected. Even though the energy consumption is much lower than motorized modes such as driving, bus and motorcycles, the batteries of e-bikes are a big problem.  Even though there’s nearly a 100% recycling rate, because the batteries are replaced every few years and China’s lead industry is poorly regulated, lead emissions are two orders of magnitude higher than those from buses. Since the most widely used battery is lithium-ion battery in the US market, this might not be a big problem here, but the government should pay attention to the regulations of the battery industry and life-cycle assessments should be considered before bringing in e-bikes to the city.

For cities like Seattle that are considering bringing in e-bikes to the transportation systems, the takeaway is that there should be clear regulations on road usage rights, speed and weight limits for e-bikes, and safety requirements on riders such as required helmets and license, and on the battery industry.