Name: How e-bikes are challenging green transportation
Uploaded: 2022-11-21
Duration: 6 min 18 s
Description: Shared e-bike companies like Citi Bike aim to improve their goals towards sustainability.

Shared e-bike companies like Citi Bike aim to improve their goals towards sustainability.

How e-bikes are challenging green transportation 

Environment

So our focus on sustainability starts with the product itself. And so we're really focused on getting and putting the best products on the street. And so I think what a lot of folks are advocating for and what they see as the future is that we go from a two car household to a one car household with more trips taken on public transportation by foot, by bike, by electric bike, by cargo bike and by all the other future modes that will be smaller and more efficient. I'm Laura Fox, I'm the general manager of city bike for lift. Citi bike is a part of lift and it's a core part of how lift provides the world's best transportation services in new york city. We've been here for about 10 years already. Uh, D C boston over 10 years. The transportation is the largest sector for emissions that cause climate change and private car ownership is the largest portion of those emissions, so we need to get people to drive less. I really think that e bikes are car killers in the best of ways. Um, there's been a number of studies that have shown that when people buy an e bike themselves that they reduce their driving habits by about 70%. And a lot of the analysis in this space shows that if people just took about 15% fewer car trips, we could reduce overall transportation emissions by at least 12%. Electric micro mobility is the term that's used to describe 2 to 3 wheeled vehicles that are powered by electric battery and typically under a certain weight e bikes, electric scooters. Um, some folks would even call certain lighter weight electric mopeds, electric micro mobility, even though electric bikes have been around in china since the eighties, it really just started taking off in the US about five years ago and really picked up even more during Covid. And during the lockdown oftentimes you can imagine I'm the bike lady in the room who is getting people telling me, oh, that's nice. But no one's going to ride bikes. And I love saying, you know, last 3, 28 million rising 1.3 million unique riders at a time when not many new Yorkers were riding. We really have to optimize the operations themselves to ensure that we're being even as sustainable as we possibly can within the core operations first is one of the core problems of bike share is how do you match supply and demand? Um, and the term that we use to, you know, try to do that is called rebalancing. So bringing bikes from one location and taking them to another, um, or creating more capacity in one location itself. And so bike angels, which is an innovation that we've had in the system for about six years now is a core way that we reduce the vehicle trips required to take bikes from one place to another. My name is Rachel met and I think I started with the bike angels program soon after I became a member last fall, it's just a Gamification of the program where it will show you on the app, all of the docks and it will give a point value to each of the docks. So now I've been a member for over a year, but my membership has been extended by over six months, so I did not just have to pay my annual fee. Again, I don't have to do that for another six months, but I'll continue getting points and that will probably be pushed out and we see that for all the rebalancing work that we need to do across the system to meet supply and man by angels are a third of all of that work, if that reduces the number of lift trucks that have to move bikes around, that's fewer cars on the streets. And I love that as a cyclist and pedestrian to make our streets safer for everyone. A second piece within operations on that sustainability metric is how do we repair as many bikes in the field as we can to reduce the number of bikes that have to come back to depose. And then third is we think about the longevity of the hardware itself. The large majority of the emissions over the life cycle of the bike would be from manufacturing. So to get the lowest greenhouse gas emissions per mile of, over the lifetime, you want to expand the lifespan of that vehicle and that's often a challenge in the context of, because the vehicles are used very intensively, they're kept outside, you know, and sometimes that goal of expanding lifespan is intention with other pressures they might be facing, such as replacing the current fleet with new models that might have improvements or you know, be safer in other ways. And so we continue to bring that mindset of how do we design and pressure, test and reliability, test those products and bring in all of our operating knowledge to know what's going to really last at left in Citi bike, the need to be green and to make money are, you know, combined, right. If we were to put out a bad product or to have inefficient operations, we would lose money. And so really there's great incentives built into the program to deliver on outside of mode shift, which is a core part of the business model to ensure that we deliver the most sustainable operations um for the system. I think that there's a couple of different key parts. When we think about the future of micromobility for city bike, we're in the middle of $100 million investment to double the size of the city bike service area, bringing it to more and more new Yorkers at the end of it will cover 60% of new york city population, the more we can make these options available and make it easier to be environmentally conscious and be sustainable um the more likely more people are to do it. And I think in the future we'll see new types of vehicles, including some that are starting to come out that are enclosed three wheeled vehicles that have the, you know, the sort of footprint more of a bike but are actually like enclosed and protect against the elements. So we may see some evolution. But to date, micro mobility is primarily about electric bikes and electric scooters. And I think the transition toward electric micro mobility is only just beginning.