Can We Make Bicycles Sustainable Again?

I've commuted about 3000 miles on my bike so far over the past year or so. I'll happily sell the excess I offset by biking instead of driving as a carbon credit to anyone that feels really bad about the horrible environmental impact that their very inefficiently manufactured bike has, same way companies do when they want to pretend they have a much lower environmental impact than they actually have.

Thank you whoever wrote this piece to remind me how trash the old steel frames have been. I managed to break a few in my time.

These days, we do still get badly made frames. The cheap poorly made composite being the key failures. Of course, every now and then someone makes a void in an aluminum frame so it won't live 20+ years.

Stainless always was a joke, titanium almost nobody makes because it's pain to weld.

I will also kick the "researchers" for using lifetime mileage of people who do not use their bikes to do everything. It's not particularly easy to put a car on a train, for instance. 20000 km seems almost funnily short for someone doing a daily commute on a bicycle. What, replace a bike every 2 years?

Considering the lifetime emissions of a product makes an interesting point. Seeing that an electric cargo bike only has more than 10x the emissions per kilometer than a steel bike was unexpected for me.

It's easy to forget how expensive the manufacturing of the electric engine and the battery is.

Manufacturing emissions are just nuts. There must be so many low hanging fruits in emissions reductions there -- there's just almost zero incentive to implement them.

For athletes and co., sustainability isn't even an idea thought about. Like, I've built quite a few bikes and I've rode with some of the world's best MTBers/cyclists: not once has someone proposed, "How can we make this bike more environmentally friendly?" It's a concept that exists squarely within the minds of some commuters and environmentalist nerds. I'm not making a counterargument: I'm saying, don't expect to win over the enthusiast market if your suggestion is "Buy a heavier (i.e. non-carbon) bike."

> In addition, many carbon-intensive bicycles are bought for recreation and are not meant to replace cars at all – they may even involve more car use as cyclists drive out of town for a trip in nature. In all those cases, emissions go up, not down.

I'm impressed: In discussions about cycling, cyclists always get lumped together, and the default assumption is cyclist = commuter, and cycling = less emissions = good. Except that in reality, Dave is transporting 1-2 $10k+ bikes on his 8-15 MPG modified Jeep Wrangler, 3-7 times per week, for drives that he otherwise wouldn't perform.

One flaw in this reasoning is much of the emissions seems to be from making aluminium with the assumption it is scrapped after a while and more made, but most aluminium gets recycled. You can actually get paid for it unlike most recycling.

I enjoy pointless nitpicking about details as much as the next person, but low tech magazine seems to always combine that enjoyment with some wrongheaded but feel-good opinions that spoil it for me.

> The globalization and automation of the bicycle industry make bikes less sustainable.

He doesn't really support this claim.

Later:

> Reverting to local and less automated bike manufacturing is a requirement for sustainable bicycles. The main reason is not the extra energy use generated by transportation and machinery, which is relatively small. For example, shipping from China adds around 0.7 to 1.2 gCO2/km for shared bicycles. 8 More importantly, domestic and manual bike manufacturing is essential to make repair and refurbishment the more economically attractive option. By definition, repairing is local and manual, so it quickly becomes more expensive than producing a new vehicle in a large-scale, automated factory.

This seems a bit of a broken window fallacy. We need to stop importing automated bicycles so that bikes are more expensive and expensive manual repairs are price competitive.

Personally, I'd like to see more automated manufacture of e-bikes.

Sure, make the parts standard and interchangeable but frankly absolutely nothing brought up here rises to the level of an actual problem. More bikes is basically an unalloyed good regardless.

The emissions created from producing one bike (55kg CO2) is ~6 gallons of gasoline. That’s 120 miles at 20mpg. Or the distance of 3 days worth of commuting for the average American.

I feel like there are bigger fish to fry.

Like the fact that you can’t even safely bike in many American cities. Or that there are people working desk jobs driving to work in a Ford F-350.

Putting a price on carbon gets rid of the need for all of these complicated analyses. Things that emit less carbon will be cheaper, and people will only buy things that emit more carbon to whatever extent it is worth it to them. And if you have set the price on carbon correctly, then that price includes all the externalities that they are creating by making that choice.

> The main reason why I have opted for old bicycles is that they are much better than new bicycles.

Uh no. New bicycles weigh less, are more aerodynamic, have safer disc brakes, and can have electric assist. The parts are engineered with better tolerances and use more appropriate dimensions for bottom brackets and handlebars. They use materials that don't rust or fatigue, like carbon fiber and titanium. Disc brakes alone are such a game-changer for bad weather riding that it's not worth owning a bike without them unless it's a novelty or antique. E-bikes are a big deal for getting people to switch to bikes for everyday trips.

> The most detailed life cycle analysis sets the carbon footprint for an 18.4 kg aluminum bicycle at 200 kg CO2, including its spare parts, for a lifetime of 15,000 km.

200 kg CO2 is equivalent to burning about 23 gallons of gas, something like 500 miles (800 km) for a typical car. My bike commute is 60 miles per week, so in terms of carbon my bike pays for itself every two months.

> Disc brakes, which are now on almost every new bicycle, all have different axle designs, meaning that every vehicle now requires proprietary spare parts.

I don't know what they're talking about regarding axle designs. The brake standard is independent of the axle design. It's true that different brake manufacturers have incompatible parts, but the parts being proprietary doesn't have anything to do with sustainability. They still cost the same to manufacture, and the spare parts are used eventually so it doesn't even matter if everyone has to keep some extras around.

> The rise of proprietary parts makes it increasingly hard to keep a bike on the road through maintenance, reuse, and refurbishment. As the number of incompatible components grows, it becomes impossible for bike shops to have a complete stock of spare parts.

Again, I don't know what they're on about. Bike shops carry the common manufacturers like Shimano and SRAM. Aside from Covid supply-chain problems I've always been able to get parts for all my bikes online.

To the extent that individual choices are effective for reducing carbon emissions, switching from a car trip to a bike trip is way more effective than switching from a less-sustainable bike trip to a more-sustainable bike trip. Advocating for bikes that are attractive to regular people is going to be much more effective than scraping meager wins in bike manufacturing.