Show me the rulebook. Many ride bikes/ebikes for reasons primarily other than exercise, myself included—"cheating", is a feature, not a bug.
One could argue "walking" is even more environmentally friendly than biking as there are minimal manufacturing byproducts (shoes?) and end waste. Does that mean we should all ditch bikes? If an ebike can take a car off the road, I'm all for it!
Most e-bike usage does effectively mean one less car on the road.
The problem I (and many others) have with e-bikes is that they're putting extra strain on the already-insufficient (in the US at least) pedestrian/cyclist infrastructure. Many of those paths could barely support the users they already had safely; the addition of even more users and yet another speed mismatch has been a bit of a disaster. The real answer, of course, is more such infrastructure, but it's a bit of a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Nobody's going to build such infrastructure (which is terribly expensive due to the fact that it would generally require exercise of eminent domain) without demand, but demand is going to be limited until the infrastructure improves. I don't know of a good way out of that bind, unfortunately.
My impression of america is that there's super wide four-lane roads everywhere, including the middle of cities. Use one of the lanes?
I'm sure that's not true everywhere, but it seems to be true everywhere there's currently far too many cars, so...
Yes, definitely. They'd have to be physically isolated from the heavier higher-speed traffic, and there's some complexity around providing safe on/off ramps for both traffic types, but it's all solvable. The bigger issue is that it only addresses riders' longer-distance travels. The more difficult issue is shorter distances in cities and on secondary suburban roads. Shuttling kids around and various other day-to-day errands constitute a majority of non-commute driving for huge numbers of people. What do you do when the road only has one lane in each direction already, directly abutted on all sides by private property? That's the part I don't see a solution for. The only thing I can think of (which also helps address some of the "borrowed highway lane" issues) is fully elevated bikeways, which is hardly cheap or visually appealing but at least seems feasible financially and politically.
One can't argue that walking is more environmentally friendly because bikes maximize efficiency so you have less waste.
I believe in 20 years you'll agree with me that spent batteries are a huge problem for humans and the environment
Until then have fun.