01473376

Component

For this project, the authors interviewed 27 electric bicycle (e-bike) users in the Sacramento/Davis, California area. They found three significant benefits relative to conventional bicycles: functionality (speed, acceleration, ability to carry cargo), adherence to green values, and enabling bicycle transportation to be feasible for more people, and more trips. E-bikes are faster than conventional bicycles, so e-bike users can cut down commute time and ride more frequently than if they were using a conventional bicycle. The ease of acceleration makes obeying stop signs and riding uphill less onerous and provides e-bike users with more confidence interacting with automobiles. E-bikes also provide an option for green transportation for people who can’t or don’t wish to participate in conventional bicycling. Finally, they enable people with certain disabilities, illness, symptoms of aging, or time constraint, to continue to bike. The barriers to the expansion of e-bike ridership are high cost, heavy weight, lack of safe infrastructure (unsafe roads and communities, and lack of emergency charging), and policy (separated bike paths are not open to e-bikes) . However, those barriers could be overcome with government and business interventions, if expansion of e-bike mode share is a desired outcome.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANF20 Bicycle Transportation.

01470560

13-1709

English

0000-0003-1173-1872

0000-0001-5224-3408

17p

2013

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Benefits; Bicycles; Costs; Cyclists; Speed; Travel time; Weight

Barriers (Challenges); Bicycle safety

Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-1709

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 5 2013 12:25PM