E-bikes are becoming more and more popular. It opens cycling to older people, those with disabilities, people who live in hilly cities where regular cycling requires serious effort.
Three things are needed to make e-bikes popular—a safe place to ride, good affordable bikes and a secure place to park. Safety comes first. For bike lanes (车道) to work, the network has to be continuous, not just forcing cyclists into the middle of a busy street. It should be well protected so that the cyclists won't feel they'll be knocked down by cars. It's necessary to provide good affordable e-bikes to customers either in physical stores or in online stores. Only in this way can people consider buying one as their means of transportation. Parking remains an avoidable problem if we want to encourage more people to ride e-bikes. In Netherlands or Copenhagen, large bike parking lots at train and bus stations encourage varieties of transport. People can easily find bike parking everywhere. This is going to be needed in other cities too for e-bikes to really become a form of transportation.
As a matter of fact, people have found that e-bikes are effective transportation choices. A recent study shows that people who ride e-bikes increase their travel distance from 2.1 to 9.2 km per day on average. That is sure to do good to their health. It's also believed that if just 15% of a city's population turn to e-bikes, it would reduce the carbon emissions (排放) from transportation by 12%.
All of these lead me to conclude that e-bikes are a far better way of dealing with transportation emissions than electric cars. They won't work for everyone, but they don't have to.
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