Electric bikes aren't cheating, says research into health benefits
cyclingindustry.news
cyclingindustry.news
One of the best correlates for bicyclist safety is... how many other bikes there are around. The most plausible explanation for this is the habituation of drivers to the presence of bicyclists. If electric assist bikes add to the numbers of bicyclists on the road, then this is a win.
Bicyclists also tend to feel safer and thus ride more when there is dedicated bicycle infrastructure. This is particularly true for certain classes of rider (moms on bikes with kids in tow are considered the indicator species for a healthy transportation system). If electric assist bikes increase rates of bicycling, then it also helps generate the political will to create dedicated infrastructure.
This all leads to a virtuous cycle (no pun intended) of more bikes, more safety, more infrastructure, more bikes, greater mobility, more health.
Living in Seattle, I can very much understand why the hills might be an impediment for bicycling. We have the technology to flatten out the hills via power assist. Shaming power assist users just hurts the overall bicycling ecosystem. By all means, power up the hill under your own steam, but don't begrudge the person who needs a little help or who just doesn't want to arrive sweaty.
If I lived further up the hill, or had more hills that I regularly dealt with, I'd very much own an electric assist.
In Dutch cities, especially in Amsterdam, you now have a problem with the slower class of mopeds. Legally they can only go 25 km/h. In practice they go faster, but not as fast as a regular moped. But they tend to be as big and bulky as scooters.
Too big for narrow cycle paths. So people on bikes feel unsafe.
Currently, electric bikes still look like bikes. Just like the really early mopeds. But there is no reason for that. You can make them big en bulky. Completely protect the person riding them from the elements.
And then people on regular bikes not only have cars to fear, but also electric bikes.
Only solution is to have really wide bicycle paths. Which turns into 'bike streets' where bicycles and cars share the road. And then we have come full circle.
We have this issue today in Seattle with regular push bikes—no electricity needed. We have people who are more than capable of maintaining speeds in excess of 15mph on facilities like the Burke-Gilman Trail. And those people strike me as jerks when I watch them exasperatedly blow past slow-moving families.
Most of the "Burke-Gilman Racing Team" eventually figures out that they'll have a better riding experience mixing with cars on the road. When you have a lot more people riding, you start to see those kinds of norms reinforced.
Last, bike-on-bike serious injury / fatality collisions are rare. If, in the United States, we get to this dystopian bicycling hellscape of... Amsterdam... that you describe, I'll gladly throw my all into helping to mitigate the problem you describe.
Bike paths are good for avoiding accidents where car and bike travel in the same direction. Certainly outside cities they are much better than having bikes on the road.
Unfortunately, they don't help much on intersections. So that's where lots of accidents now happen. In fact they make the situation worse, because when a truck tries to take a right turn, bikes continue going straight on the bike path.
Bidirectional bike paths are even worse. In Montréal I've crashed into a couple cars which were turning left across a bike path--but the bike path was on the wrong side of the road!
This also only includes mass produced bikes. The world record for human power is much much faster again--last year Aerovelo Eta broke the world record, reaching 144 km/h on the flat with no assist. Most bike lanes aren't designed for this.
> [R]esearchers recruited a pool of twenty sedentary commuters... These commuters were then asked to shift their transport to work to the e-Bike fleet
> After a month, volunteers revisited the lab and had the very same tests conducted again. Notable improvements to the 20 subjects’ cardiovascular health were evident, with improved aerobic capacity and blood sugar control noted in all cases.
Twenty subjects and a month of testing? They don't mention how notable the improvements are other than "improved". They don't necessarily take into account that them being studied for health benefits might have made them more active overall not just in commuting. There are so many other reasons that could have changed them into having more healthy results. With all those possibilities, I cannot see how twenty participants and one month of changes can be considered confirmed.
Riding a pedelec 5 miles feels to me about the same as walking 2 miles. It's less exercise than riding a normal bike, but it's far more than sitting on your ass. I'm not at all surprised that someone replacing a 10 mile round-trip commute experienced health improvements. It's the equivalent of walking ~4 miles a day.
They measured some basic indicators of metabolic health, and found that e-biking is moderately effective cardiovascular exercise. The metabolic response they saw is well outside the noise, which is typical for these experiments: Sedentary humans respond remarkably well to exercise. (If that's not good enough for you, they also analyzed heart rate and GPS logs and found that their e-bikers were averaging about 5 METS for 40 minutes a day, 3 days a week. This is roughly what a doctor will recommend to an office workers who wants to lose some weight.)
Thus, you are not 'cheating' by pretending to exercise. If you want to know whether e-biking is "cheating" compared to regular biking, you can look up similar studies on the health benefits of biking and compare the numbers.
Controls are necessary when you're looking for more subtle effects, but the health benefits of replacing no exercise with moderate exercise are not at all subtle. All this experiment had to do was establish that e-biking elevates one's heart rate. Which is a gigantic 'duh'.
So what exactly are you hoping to accomplish by kvetching in the comments about their lack of scientific rigor?
The problem is that when you have sedentary people do any kind of activity that increases heart rate regularly, they will come out of it with improved markers. The learning curve here is pretty steep. It tells us nothing about the actual activity you were trying to test.
The study was large enough to disprove the hypothesis. It failed to disprove the hypothesis. Science has advanced.
My Mountain Bike club has worked for years to get access to these areas. Other land users (hikers and equestrian riders) are not very keen for MtB use. The worry is that E-Bikes will be used as a excuse (Motorized vehicle) to kick out all MtB use in the areas.
I am totally ok with road use and on private property though.
I highly recommend it to anyone who lives close enough and can find a safe route.
Some people will define cheating as "anything easier than pedaling without any electric assistance".
Some people will define it as "not pedaling at all".
Most reasonable people don't care either way, because lets be honest - they just want to get to their destination (and perhaps do a bit of exercise) without sweating like a pig and exerting themselves to exhaustion.
I feel like the only people who get hung up on the cheating aspect are some of those super serious spandex bikers going 25mph on their $8000 bike at 6AM on a Saturday. Thank god they're in the minority.
This article is poorly written, and with no control group of normal bike-riders I don't think the study can say much one way or the other about how electric bikes compare to normal bikes.
Personally I think the things are noisy and unpleasant to share a path with, but I understand why some people might want to use them.
The irony.