The electrical bike has develop into a crowd-pleaser amongst not solely cyclists but in addition mobility and concrete planning advocates who see it as a catalyst for constructing extra bike infrastructure and addressing points like site visitors congestion.
Count town of Nashville, Tenn., as one of many native areas that contemplate e-bikes a vital half of their transportation future.
“It’s taking bicycling out of this very niche, you might say, group of riders that are either Sunday riders or … hard-core commuters, and expanding it a lot more across the board,” mentioned Chris Cherry, a civil and environmental engineering professor on the University of Tennessee, throughout a March 9 panel organized by bicycle advocates.
The e-bike market has been booming, each earlier than and after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The worth of the e-bike retail market has tripled over the past three years, rising from $236 million in 2019 to $770 million in 2021, mentioned Ash Lovell, electrical bicycle coverage and marketing campaign director at PeopleForBikes, a nationwide bike advocacy group that works with federal, state and native officers.
Most notably, bike-share operations have been fast to transition fleets to electrical amid falling costs for the bikes and the lithium-ion batteries that energy them. In 2021, BCycle, a Nashville-based bike-share operation, transitioned its fleet to electrical. At the identical time, transit operations are teaming up with e-scooter and bike-share companies. WeGo, the general public transit system within the Nashville metro, lately introduced a partnership with Bird scooters to share knowledge to be taught extra about transit gaps.
“The thing that I’m most excited about when I think about how e-bikes can make Nashville a better city is the potential for bike-share … and shared mobility devices,” mentioned Lindsey Ganson, director of advocacy and communications at Walk Bike Nashville, through the panel. “I think there’s a huge opportunity in Nashville for those first-mile, last-mile connections.”
In July 2021, Nashville launched its new Department of Transportation and Multimodal Infrastructure (NDOT) as town started implementing the Metro Nashville Transportation Plan. With an working price range of greater than $120 million and 42 further workers, NDOT is ready to develop into a completely multimodal division that places security and fairness on the forefront, say officers.
“Nashville’s success as a city is reliant on a smart, future-oriented and performance-oriented department of transportation,” mentioned former NDOT Interim Director Faye DiMassimo in an announcement.
As Nashville plans for the longer term of transportation, e-bikes may also help inform the position of transit stations and mobility hubs and the planning and design of bike paths and different infrastructure, mentioned Ganson.
“We have a lot of opportunity to integrate a bike-share fleet with our transit system and really expand our ability to move around the city,” Ganson mentioned.
At a time when the United States is poised to drastically broaden transportation infrastructure, the emergence of e-bikes is initiating conversations round bicycle infrastructure and urging policymakers to suppose extra significantly about not solely standard bikes — which Nashville bike advocates playfully discuss with as “acoustic bikes” — but in addition autos like electric-powered cargo-delivery bikes.
About two-thirds of the inhabitants “would love to ride a bike if many of the barriers that are in front of them are taken away,” mentioned Cherry, including that some complaints from commuters middle on the gap being too far or the terrain being too extreme. Safety and infrastructure are different points that may preserve folks off bikes.
“I think the common goal here is that we see that there are definite benefits to getting people on bikes, and on e-bikes, across the board,” he added. “We want to try to knock down those barriers. And some of those barriers get knocked down by an e-bike.”
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