novaBBS - uk.rec.cycling - UK ministers urged to promote e-bikes to tackle health and climate crises

Ministers should consider subsidising e-bikes as they do electric cars, campaigners have urged, after a study found that mass use of such bikes could create more than £2bn in health benefits and cut a million tonnes of emissions annually.

While grants of up to £1,500 are available for low-emission cars, vans and motorbikes, there is no such assistance for electric-assist bikes, which help propel riders up to a maximum powered speed of 15mph when the bike is being pedalled.

According to an evidence review by academics at Westminster University, commissioned by the campaign group Bike is Best, boosting e-bike use would bring other benefits not created by electric cars, including reduced road congestion and fewer potentially dangerous particulates from tyre and brake wear.

E-bikes have become increasingly common in the UK, but sales are still well below levels seen in many other European countries, where studies have shown they are particularly popular with older riders and with women.

The study included polling that shows 67% of Britons who might be interested in buying an e-bike are put off by the price. But of these, the poll said, 53% would be likely to buy one if there was a hypothetical subsidy of £250 on a £1,000 model.

The study used the Department for Transport’s so-called propensity to cycle tool, based on detailed data about work trips and used to inform decisions on cycling schemes, to calculate that mass bike infrastructure and access to e-bikes could prompt up to 25% of commuting trips to be made by bike.

Such a switch would produce overall economic health benefits in England and Wales of £2.2bn a year, most of this coming from better health due to e-bike use, but also because of lower levels of staff absence through illness.

While e-bikes provide less of a health benefit per mile than unpowered bikes, studies have shown that users tend to end up with similar overall levels of physical activity because e-bike riders travel longer distances on average.

The latest study found that promoting e-bike use would mean a particular rise among people who live in more rural or hilly areas.

Both the £2.2bn health dividend and the estimated saving of a million tonnes a year in carbon emissions are based just on commuting, as that is the data on which the propensity to cycle tool is based. The overall savings could thus be significantly greater, the authors said. The statistics are for England and Wales only, as they are the source of the propensity to cycle data.

While fully electric cars produce no carbon emissions while in motion, the million-tonne saving was calculated from the lower power requirement to recharge an e-bike – studies have put this at 2% of what is needed for an electric car – and substantially lower emissions associated with their construction.

As well as commuting, the study notes, the development of e-cargo bikes could create even more emissions reductions through urban freight use, a significant contributor to road transport emissions. Studies have suggested e-cargo bikes could replace up to a quarter of all so-called last mile deliveries currently done using vans. Consumer models can be used to carry children and heavy shopping.

Scott Purchas, of Bike is Best, said the UK risked lagging behind other European countries on e-bike use. “The future is electric but not in the way people might think. All of the focus for subsidies has been for electric cars, but this new report demonstrates the substantial benefits of electric bikes and how essential they are for rapidly decarbonising transport, improving our health and cleaning up the air at the same time,” he said.

A Department for Transport spokesperson said the government was investing £2bn in cycling and walking, and that e-bikes for commuting were already subsidised under the tax-saving Cycle to Work scheme.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/mar/13/uk-ministers-urged-subsidise-e-bikes-tackle-health-and-climate-crises

Hackney’s experimental cargo bike hire scheme.

Some unusual looking bikes have come to Hackney and Shoreditch recently – offering an alternative to hiring a small van or car to move stuff around the area.

These are cargo bikes, and they were deployed a couple of months back by e-bike firm, Beryl, with support from Hackney Council for a one-year trial, and far from the days of Granville on his ricketty bike in Open All Hours, these are specially designed for carrying reasonably large loads around safely.

Although cargo bikes have been around in various guises for many years, these are the first in the UK to be offered in a way that’s similar to London’s existing cycle hire scheme — that is they can be hired.

Just as for many people who today are regular casual cyclists but were put off by the upfront costs and lack of practice in cycling until the cycle hire scheme normalised cycling for many people, Beryl hopes that the same could happen for cargo bikes. A cargo bike hire scheme to act as a gateway for casual and occasional users, and then maybe some regular commercial users will invest in buying a cargo bike as a permanent addition to their business.

Just as the increasing sight of people cycling around London, especially compared to a decade ago, has changed people’s awareness of cycling, people who switch from hiring a cargo bike occasionally to buying one for their business are going to help normalise the sight of such bikes on the streets.

Wider visibility of the cargo bikes creates a virtuous circle that means more people will be hiring them on an ad-hoc basis simply because they know the option exists.

Right now, not many people know you can hire a cargo bike.

So, a few months ago, four bays were set aside by Hackney Council, and Beryl set up eight cargo bikes for their initial trial at London Fields, Stoke Newington, and two in Shoreditch.

They’re proving to be popular.

To use the bikes, you need to download a smartphone app, and the map will show you the four areas where they have cargo bikes to hire. At the hire point, tap in the bike’s six-digit code and the bike is released. Unlock the rear wheel, and then a bit like a motorbike, you push the bike forward so that it drops off its stand and then it’s just a normal, if rather larger than normal, e-bike.

The cargo container is a single lid box and fortunately, you can’t cycle with the lid open, as that would be daft, not to mention unsafe. I dropped my camera bag into the cavernous space, for want of anything else to test the cargo-carrying capabilities of the bikes.

Cycling around Hackey a bit with Beryl’s co-founder and CEO, Philip Ellis, the bikes take a little bit of getting used to, but within a minute or so it’s just like riding a normal bike, except for the battery assist and the big white box in front of you.

The most noticeable difference is that the cargo box obscures the front wheel, and it’s not until you use one that you realise how unconsciously dependent we are on seeing the front wheel as we turn corners or as a forewarning of bumps in the ground. There’s also an oddly amusing effect that when turning corners, the bike handlebars turn, but the cargo box hides the wheel in front turning as well. That’s the sort of thing you get used to very quickly and is probably not unlike an aircraft pilot who can’t see their front wheels either.

The battery assist is also pleasingly subtle and didn’t have the jarring acceleration I’ve experienced on some other e-bikes. That smoother acceleration is quite reassuring when cycling in London’s crowded streets.

The unsettling bit is that while the bike isn’t any wider than a normal bike, it feels it, so you’re a bit warier when cycling. Then again, it keeps you alert, and that has to be a good thing – zoning out while cycling/walking/driving being a major cause of accidents. No chance of that with these bikes.

Maybe because they’re new and unusual, or because the big white cargo box is so noticeable, but people do tend to look up a lot more as you go past them. In a way, it reminded me of when the cycle hire bikes were first launched in London and as an early adopter, I’d often hear comments as I cycled past on the blue bikes about these new things. Today no one blinks if you use a hire bike.

Whether cargo bikes will reach that level of familiarity is for the future, but the arrival of the cycle hire scheme certainly changed London and cycling. Before the cycle hire scheme, cycling was something that was limited to fitness fanatics going to work or couriers zooming around in lycra dropping off envelopes and racing off again.

Cycling is vastly more popular now, and its appearance has changed. Yes, there’s still lycra for the long-distance commuters, but people grabbing a hire bike are wearing normal clothing and pootling around town. A lot of that is thanks to the ease of just grabbing a bike and using it for a bit then dropping it off.

The cycle hire scheme acted as a gateway into cycling for a lot of people, and what Beryl hopes is that the cargo bike hire could do the same for deliveries.

A fascinating difference between a normal bike and a cargo bike, apart from their obvious appearance and ability to shift large amounts of cargo, is the behaviour shift they can create. Candidly, someone hiring an e-scooter or normal bike is unlikely to be switching from car to cycling, but likely to be using the bike instead of a bus or train, or walking. The buses and trains still run though, so the cycle hire doesn’t reduce CO2 emissions or local pollution.

A cargo bike almost always replaces a car or a van.

Yes, some people will swap a morning of going back and forth on a bus carrying a few carrier bags at a time for a single trip with a cargo bike, but the majority of trips would have previously needed a car or van to do the journey. So the environmental benefit of cargo bikes can be far greater in some respects than conventional bikes.

There’s also thinking that the cargo bike hire will open up opportunities for more regular smaller movements rather than waiting until there’s a car/van’s worth of stuff to move in one go.

The cost of hiring a cargo bike is slightly higher than standard e-bikes, as you would expect, but to make it more appealing, a person can stop/start as many times as needed for up to 2 hours without being charged for the extra time. That’s aimed at people cycling around an area doing lots of drop-offs of deliveries, but it could just as easily be of use to a shopper picking up their weekly groceries.

The cost for my cycle ride last week was £1.50 to unlock, then £1..50 for 15 minutes of cycling so £3 in total. More than a standard hire bike, but a lot cheaper than shifting stuff around in a taxi or renting a van.

If the scheme covered where I live, I could easily see myself swapping the monthly home shopping delivery of “heavy things I am too lazy to want to carry home” with a cargo bike instead.

The only slight downside at the moment is that you need to return the bike back to the place you collected it from – you can’t drop it off at another docking bay, mainly because they only have four bays at the moment. So the bikes are very good at moving objects, but not people, as the cyclist has to return to the starting point. But it’s not as if anyone is going to be cycling halfway across London with them. Well, not yet.

The cargo bike trial has been running for a couple of months now, and they’re seeing roughly a 50:50 mix of commercial users and private users. The commercial users tend to be small shops sending or collecting deliveries. For example, a sandwich shop might worry about investing £4,000+ in owning a cargo bike but can test the market by hiring a cargo bike when needed instead.

Private users seem to range from anyone carrying plants home from the Columbia Road flower market to people carting large bags of stuff between places.. It’s probably just a coincidence that the box on the bike is about the same size as those famous Ikea blue bags, the sight of which on buses filled with domestic clutter is the classic sign of someone moving between flatshares.

And well, it’s this part of town, they’re being used for carting a few crates of beer from the microbrewers.

The ability to simply grab a cargo bike for an hour or so to move stuff around rather than the rigmarole of hiring a car or a small van is opening opportunities to move stuff around without waiting until you simply have to do it, and grudgingly stump up the cost of the man-and-van.

In just the past couple of months, the cargo bikes have proven popular, and while numbers were not offered, Phil confirmed that just two months after it launched, they are already eyeing up expanding the coverage area.

The bikes themselves were made in Nottingham by Raleigh, and are a customised version of this off-the-shelf model, which was then adapted by Beryl for hiring out. The main changes are obvious such as adding GPS and the cycle hire hardware, but also some less obvious such as making the bike secure to be left outdoors without being vandalised or nicked.

The bikes are stationed in four dedicated temporary bays, but they don’t have formal docking stations to recharge the batteries. At the moment, Beryl is able to keep the bikes charged by swapping the batteries once a week. And they practice what they preach, as the batteries are driven around in one of their own cargo bikes.

One of the aims of the scheme is to replace vans and lorries on the streets, but as the cargo bikes are so much smaller, they are limited to smaller deliveries. However, that may not be the constraint it seems. There’s a growing interest in having local delivery hubs, so rather than lorries driving around streets, they all head to a local hub, and from there, small electric vans or bikes complete the delivery.

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Subject	Author
UK ministers urged to promote e-bikes to tackle health and climate crises	swldx...@gmail.com
The Guardian coyly avoids elaborating on the actual health benefits	Spike
Re: UK ministers urged to promote e-bikes to tackle health and	swldx...@gmail.com
Re: UK ministers urged to promote e-fairy-bikes to tackle health and	JNugent
Re: UK ministers urged to promote e-bikes to tackle health and	swldx...@gmail.com

Misery loves company, but company does not reciprocate.

aus+uk / uk.rec.cycling / UK ministers urged to promote e-bikes to tackle health and climate crises

aus+uk / uk.rec.cycling / UK ministers urged to promote e-bikes to tackle health and climate crises