Think you need another car? Consider an e-bike instead.
When Kawthar Duncan immigrated to Detroit from Syria at age 12, she couldn’t ride a bicycle. With no money to buy a bike, she learned how to ride at local parks or friends’ houses. But by the time she arrived in San Francisco at age 26, Duncan hadn’t touched handlebars in years.
“The thought of bikers being in the same area as cars always freaked me out,” she says. “So I never looked into it.”
But with one child in kindergarten and another in day care, the family needed ways to get around. A second car would create nearly as many problems as it solved, from expenses to parking headaches. So Duncan’s husband suggested an electric bicycle, or e-bike.
Skeptical, she walked into the New Wheel bike shop in San Francisco for a test ride in April.
“If you’d seen me on the first day, you’d think I would never come back,” says Duncan, a former third-grade teacher. “I was nervous. The bike was heavy. I couldn’t lift it up. I told my husband, ‘This is not for me.’”
As she was leaving, however, a staff member offered to let her ride as many times as she liked. So she did, once a week for three months. This summer, she brought home a Riese & Müller Nevo electric cargo bike. “Before I know it, I’m riding 20 miles a day,” she laughs. “I never thought it was going to be me.”
Duncan’s experience hints at the promise of e-bikes in American culture. For more than a century, bicycle revivals have come and gone in the United States, each one presaging a return to gasoline vehicles.
But the appeal of e-bikes, especially among people who haven’t ridden a bike in decades, may help change cities’ car-centric ways. Cities are under growing pressure to reinvent themselves after the pandemic shifted how we live and work.
From New York to Cleveland, city officials have rolled out measures to prod drivers to leave their cars at home, from closing streets to traffic to creating “15-minute cities” where life’s essentials are just a walk, bike or transit ride away. Vast networks of safe bike lanes are becoming mainstays of downtowns and business districts.
As cities build protected bike lanes, research shows, more people like Duncan are likely to ride, especially women and low-income residents, increasing the demand for cities that serve people using two wheels, not just four.
“I’ve been able to go anywhere, anytime,” says Duncan. “It’s the new minivan.”
