E(ww)-biking

I was just reading about ebikes, which are bikes that have electric motors on them. Why? Well, interestingly enough, I was contacted by a policy advisor to the Ministry of Transportation in Ontario, Canada. Apparently, he is conducting a review of electric bike use and safety issues, and wanted some data from Los Angeles and California.

Anyways, I was just looking at this one site, and was reading some of the FAQs. One of them was "Environmentally speaking, isn't this a step backwards from the regular bicycle?" (refering to ebikes).

The author of the site then proceeds to describe how ebikes actually leave a smaller ecological footprint than a regular biker because the conversion efficiency of the fuel into motor work is greater than the metabolic efficiency of humans (note: I'm not sure what his sources are). Additionally, there is much more energy that needs to be inputed into the collection of food (agriculture, transportation, processing, etc.) than with the electicity coming from the battery. Again, I'm not quite sure as to the validity of those statements.

These are his exact statements:
"Surprisingly, electric bikes can have a smaller environmental footprint than pedal-only bicycles. Not convinced? Look at it this way, a human powered vehicle is using the human metabolism to convert food energy into work, with a conversion efficiency of about 25%. That's the first part of the picture, then we have to step back and look where the food energy comes from. In north america and europe, the food is grown with the aid of chemical fertilizers and machinery, it is then transported, processed, packaged, transported, sold, transported again, and finally cooked before consumption. In the end about 10 times more primary energy went in to producing the food than is actually stored in the food itself. The net effect is that for every unit of human energy used on a bike, about 40 times that much was consumed.

"By comparison, with an electric vehicle you are taking primary energy from the grid and storing it in a battery at between 60-80% efficiency, and then converting it to work through an electric motor with roughly 75% efficiency. That's a lot more direct than the human route. Once you take into account the energy to manufacture and recycle the batteries, e-bikes end up consuming from 2 to 10 times less fossil fuel energy than their human-powered equivalents."

Ebiking opens up better alternatives for those who don't want to drive a car, but don't have the physical capabilities of riding a true bike, but come on -- don't say it's better for the environment than actual biking. He doesn't take into account the greater picture of benefits from regular biking, including health, air quality, and the environmental impacts that the development of electicity have (even in small quanities, it is there). Yeah, I think e-biking is excellent; I'm not arguing against it. I really just want to leave my metabolic efficiency out of the picture.