City Life

I love my electric bike, and largely agree with the sentiment of this article. My bike has has saved me a fantastic amount of gas.

However, I think calling them the "most climate friendly" is reasonably accurate, but has some issues.

If you're including the human power, a regular bike is more efficient electrically, using none, but the calculation for climate friendly is much harder.
If you're not, there are more aerodynamic electrical vehicles that are more efficient, but given their rarity, I can understand why they're not included.
If you're not including human power, the other more common electrical vehicles, scooter, onewheels, etc. Are likely about the sane efficiency, but have less environmental costs to make (smaller) and can be integrated into many peoples lives easier.

It's a tricky blanket statement to make.

I like that this article preemptively acknowledges that ebikes are not always the right transportation mode for every single thing, but they don't have to be. Too often whenever ebikes come up you get those people going "but what if I need to bring a couch which derails from the real point. It's like saying trains aren't an efficient way to move people because those people can't also move furniture.

There are still a lot of trips that can be replaced by ebikes and they can do more than most people probably realize

No, an e-bike is not going to get you to the beach. You’re not going to be able to transport a couch sectional. And it won’t work for your six-kid carpool to the soccer game. But there is no reason that a single vehicle needs to accomplish every transportation need. Use the car for the carpool, and use the e-bike for shorter trips in-town, to the pharmacy, out to dinner, to meet friends, or even to the grocery store, You’d be amazed what you can carry with the right equipment.

@crisisingot I'm not sure if you can call them the most climate-friendly way - they still use (probably Li-Ion, never checked) batteries in them, which are quite costly for the environment to extract and to dispose once their life cycle has ended.

I might have an unpopular opinion (as many people brag to say nowadays), but I think we should contain Li-Ion batteries to cars until battery technology matures enough in order to get something less polluting powering our stuff. Otherwise, in 10-20 years (or earlier) we will see a lot of such batteries disposed.

So no, I think I'll keep my non-assisted bike going forward even though I have to break a sweat sometimes (I have gears on it, tho, so it's easier, plus my city is not that hilly).