My living situation
I live in a village located in the so-called “rotten banana” of Denmark, that is, the banana-shaped area of Denmark which swoops around the economic powerhouses of Copenhagen, Aarhus and Odense.
There is not much in the village anymore, the supermarket which used to be here closed last year, the school has been closed for much longer, and the old train station hasn’t seen operation in living memory. All that remains is a church from the 12th century, a bunch of old people who came here back when jobs existed in this area, and lots of farming on all sides. “Rotten” really is the term to use here. Rotten, cheap, but somehow with very affordable gigabit internet, which makes everything worthwhile for the modern work-from-home employee. (If living in Denmark or a rural area appeals to you at all, do come here!)
As a work-from-home person, I’m physically somewhat unfit, think your typical IT/software/deskjob person who doesn’t do sports.
Getting stuff is varying levels of difficult: Groceries I can either get from the farmer himself, or from a small supermarket 2 villages over, both being some 5km away. The nearest town is 20km away, but some services are in a more distant town at 30km away and if I actually need to get some real specialty stuff, the next city is 60km off.
Deliveries are an option, though international delivery companies (UPS, DHL, etc) have a tendency to not bother actually driving out to here, but instead doing the “sorry we missed you” thing via email – so no need for them to get anywhere near me. If that happens, the package ends up at aforementioned supermarket.
Food deliveries are a thing too, though the choices are between 2 restaurants: “generic asian” (with the standard chinese, thai, vietnamese dishes) and “generic western” (burger, pizza, kebab). The quality is predictably mediocre and the temperature predictably lukewarm when it arrives. As they have a pretty tight window of opening hours, they’re by no means lifesaver that you get in cities if you get the munchies in the middle of the night.
I have lived like this for a year and a half and can quite comfortably say:
I don’t need a car.
I have an eBike
My eBike is a RadPowerBike RadCity 5 Plus, for which I would plop an affiliate link here, but I don’t have one as they have focused on operating in the US only nowadays. It’s the slow kind of eBike, officially called “pedelec”, limited to 250W and 25 km/h speeds, which mustn’t have a throttle.
There’s a faster kind too, the “s-pedelec”, which is limited to 45 km/h and generally has legal requirements more akin to a moped in terms of insurance, driving permissions and such. I haven’t tried those yet.
Short-distance groceries, carrying capacity
While the 5km trip to the groceries probably would be possible using a normal bike, with an eBike it is comparable to a car. Cruising at 25 km/h, getting to the supermarket takes me 12 minutes, finding a parking space takes me 0 minutes as there always is room for a bike right in front of the thing, and the shopping takes as long as it takes. All in all, I tend to be done with the groceries in just a little under an hour. With a car, I could cut down the 12 minutes of one-way driving to 5 minutes, but then would need to find a parking space, which probably is not directly in front of the supermarket’s door. I might be done 10 minutes faster had I used a car, but I also would not have been outside for half an hour at that point.
I have a front and back basket. The front basket takes regular shopping bags, usually with enough food for a day and a half, the back basket takes a 30x50x50 cm (~75L) bag which I probably can stuff an entire week worth of food into, but typically go for 2-3 days. It’s worth pointing out that this is on a “commuter”-type eBike, not a “cargo”-type eBike. The cargo things have enough capacity to transport 2-3 children in addition to the rider, and I’ve seen commercial eTricycles which lob around 1000L freezers (for fishmongers).
Comfort
I sometimes need to cross “the mountain”, a pretty steep 30m-ish change in elevation.
With a normal bike, even in the lowest gear, I’d completely exhaust myself and maybe puke by the time I clear that, only to realize I have another 5km of mild uphill to go after that. By the time I’m at the destination, I’m completely sweaty, can barely walk anymore and need quite some time for recovery.
With an eBike however, I can put the motor on maximum support (250W in the EU), and climb that “mountain” in a middleing gear even. This does take some physical work, sure, but it’s essentially equivalent to riding a non-e bike on flat ground.
During rain and snow, a car certainly would be more comfortable, but rain-proof and warm clothing is easily available. The only specialized gear I needed to get for riding a bike was gloves, as I can’t really (safely and legally anyway) ride a bike with both hands in the pockets. As the saying goes: There is no bad weather, just wrong clothing.
But in the summer? Sweet baby Jesus, wind across the face, beautiful fields, birds chirping, one with nature – some people would call that a vacation, but for me it’ll just be a quick grocery ride. I dread the days where I needed to sit in a hot car without AC, and even sitting in a car with AC during summer hardly is the pinnacle of pleasant.
Middle-distance runs
The 20km and 30km towns are not an issue either, one way taking around an hour. The 20km town does have public transit available, but I actually am comparatively fast with my eBike. For the town that’s 30km away, there is no direct public transport, so eBike is the only convenient option that is not a car. At 60km round trip, and suboptimal wind and terrain, it’s right at the edge of what the battery can handle in one go. But then, I could just buy a second battery and easily make that range, all while still carrying around less battery than a normal car (2×3.5kg for my batteries, 10kg+ for car batteries, many 100kg for electrical cars). I could buy a second one, but I actually dont’t need to, because my appointment there takes 1h, so I simply can take the battery out of the eBike, go to the appointment, quickly ask “is it OK if I charge my battery here?” and, once done with the appointment, put it back into the eBike and make it back easily.
The 60km city would be a problem though. Here, public transport actually would be significantly faster and more convenient. But still: It’s an eBike. I can put that in the cargo hold on a bus, or in the bike carriage of a train. If all that’s required is to get me, a backpack and some luggage to a place, I can go literally anywhere that public transport can get me, plus some 50km without needing to worry about charging.
And let’s not forget, if I do run out of juice, I can just keep going with what then is a regular bike that happens to be a bit chunky. The eBike is an assistance which makes my life easier, but the pedals are perfectly capable on their own.
Economy
All in all, I’m now at 2000km on that thing. That’s hardly impressive, but then, I am work-from-home and don’t actually need to go anywhere on most days. If I had a car, it likely would have a similar mileage on it – perhaps more because I’d have use it more liberally, perhaps less because I am environmentally conscious.
The bike itself was 1600€.
There’s some lubing to be done every now and again (20€, still on my first bottle of the stuff). I have worn through my first pair of brake pads now (a ~20€ replacement I can probably do myself), and the battery (550€) is good for 800 charge cycles, which I don’t believe I’m anywhere near (at a conservative estimate of 50km for a full charge, 800 cycles are equivalent to 40000km). At a maximum capacity of 672Wh, the full lifetime of the battery would take 537 kWh, so at the height of Russia’s energy war which saw energy prices roar to 45ct/kWh, burning through the entire battery as fast as I could have, would have cost me 241,65€.
So, let’s say I get a second battery right now to be sure to get the extended range and more charge cycles. Let’s further say that I burn through my pads and lube every 2000 km.
Across an 80k km (or 80 megameters, if you will) range, riding this thing will have directly cost me… 3683.30€.
The German car club ADAC has run some studies for the cost of ownership of cars. At the same range, you’d sit at 31k€ for a Fiat Panda hybrid, or 57k€ for a Tesla Model 3. At under 4k€, an eBike is an order of magnitude cheaper to operate.
Freedom, responsibility and safety
The personal freedom to go anywhere anywhen is something you gain once you get to drive your first car. Or at least that’s what has been described to me by several people. I personally think that this freedom is outweighed by the freedom to play games, read books and do whatever you want really on public transport while someone else has all the responsibility to get you from A to B. I don’t particularly feel free while driving a car, as I’m hyperaware of my responsibilities to stay in lane, keep my distance, be ready for someone or something to jump in front of me at any moment and so on.
With an eBike meanwhile, the responsibility placed on me is much less stressful and mainly concerned about personal safety. I still do my best to be safe, but this time around I’m not in a big box capable of killing others. I’m not nearly as fast, and really the main thing I have to be careful of is myself – which I do as best I can by always wearing a helmet, and hiviz when I’m out after dusk. Being in Denmark, it really does help that cycle paths are reasonable common even in rural areas, but even on roads where they are not, the speed limit is at “only” 80 km/h, so the cars are much easier to deal with.
With these considerations, it occurred to me: Bikes are a really good way of teaching children and teens responsibility. You can teach them the basics at an early age, bike with them together until they’re old enough to go out on their own, and once they reach the 15-18 year-old bracket, they can get an eBike which will increase their speed a bit and their range a lot, to the point where they can experience pretty wide-reaching freedoms while being both safe, autonomous and, hopefully, responsible.
Where I did need a car
All of that said, I did require help from a car on several occasions:
- To get a dishwasher from a store into my flat
- To get a gaming chair from a store into my flat
- To get a gaming chair back out of my flat into the store because I should have known better to not buy a gaming chair
This is the complete list. A year and a half of living, and I needed to use a car thrice. This isn’t to say I have sat in a car more often, I certainly have snagged a ride with parents, grandparents and friends on various occasions. But those 3 times were the only times where I actually required a car to do something which would have been impossible otherwise. And yes, this includes travels; I’ve been to both Stockholm and Breslau/Wrocław with no car, using only trains.
It would have been perfectly viable to me to rent a car for the day where I need to transport aforementioned things.
eBikes: The underestimated mobility revolution
When saying “mobility revolution”, the mind instantly snaps to electric cars, perhaps of the self-driving variety, or perhaps flying taxis, gadgetbahns and other quasi-sci-fi stuff. The eBike often doesn’t come up in this discussion at all. Yet, as I’ve seen, it solves a ton of problems:
- Compared to normal bikes, eBikes can be used by a wider range of people, for a wider range of terrains.
- eBikes don’t cause range anxiety. Once out of juice, you can just keep going as if riding a normal bike.
- Charging can be done anywhere and is not restricted to just the immediate vicinity of a parking lot.
- eBikes are an order of magnitude cheaper than cars.
- eBikes provide freedom, especially to teens, while being safer to operate than cars.
And all of that is without even factoring in the use you can get out of riding bikes recreationally.
In a rural context, I’d say that eBikes are possibly the best solution for short-range transportation, ie anything within 20-30km. Much cheaper to build, operate and maintain than cars, buses and trains while serving almost all needs along the way. If the upgrade from pedelec (25 km/h) to s-pedelec (45 km/h) scales as I expect, my recommendation for eBikes as the best transportation method increases to 40-50 km.
So if you feel like saving a lot of money in the long run and usually operate within the radii mentioned above, do get yourself an eBike.
Leo Wattenberg 