Policy & Planning Dir. @marinbike.org • UCLA Urban Planning • AICP Planner • Baltimore ➡️ LA ➡️ East Bay • 🚫🚗Car-free commuting since 2015 • Missing middle renter.
📍Berkeley, CA
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The thread demonstrates the magic secret of e-bikes...
...which is that they are mostly just *a bike* (the most efficient mode of transportation devised by any of god's creatures) with a small battery and motor attached.
It's all just a rounding error at this point, but I will note that CA utilities charge about 70% more for electricity than the US average.
Meaning that elsewhere those same 600 miles on the cargo ebike would cost closer to $1.20.
That's a penny every 5 miles.
E.g. a random trip to the shop for an oil change revealed a fix that cost us about 1/3rd of what we paid for the cargo bike.
bsky.app/profile/warr...
There are certainly other costs to bike ownership. We haven't had to take it to the shop yet, but brake pads and tires will need replacing.
But the costs of this are miniscule compared to the maintenance we pay on the 12 year old car we also own.
bsky.app/profile/chri...
Nearly every one of those miles is replacing a car mile (we do 4 miles/day of daycare pickup/drop-off).
Just looking at fuel costs of the car vs bike, assuming a generous 20 mpg for city mileage, 600 miles would be 30 gallons of gas.
At the average CA gas price of $5.85, that would be $175.
Twitter/X is an enormous national security threat on a global scale, and a lot more nations need to grow a spine and start blocking it (and taking other active, aggressive measures).
E-bikes are just ridiculously efficient.
We've been riding for 3 months and have put a little over 600 miles on it.
The bike has a range of ~120 miles and battery capacity of 1.2kWh.
So, we've used about 6kWh of electricity. In CA a kWh costs $0.35, so that is a total cost of...$2.10
