A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single E-bike

Stepping off the curb to cross a street in Chinese cities, sounds of squeaky brakes are the only signal you hear to warn that you are about to be hit by an electric bicycle. They travel quite quickly in comparison to foot travel, but congest traffic because they don’t move as fast as cars.

What does being hit by an e-bike in China have to do with Peak Oil and declining conventional oil supplies? In order to answer that question we have to take a look at electric infrastructure that is currently used to power transportation on a mass scale in Asia. More importantly, we have to ask whether it can work on a much larger scale.
With the current limited range of electric powered vehicles, could a society exist in a 25-kilometer radius bubble for e-bikes and a 200-kilometer radius bubble for cars? If electricity is the final power source that our societies will transition to after we go through the compressed natural gas phase for our cars, buses and trucks around the planet, how will society accommodate the need to charge batteries and then continue on our journeys?

Consider the problems: you own a Chinese-made e-bike and wish to travel 50 km. After the first 25 km, you have to stop and recharge for 2-3 hours before continuing on your journey. Finally arriving at your destination you have to recharge again for another. At the midpoint of your return, for a third time you have to stop and recharge. Just a simple 100-km round trip journey would involve 6-9 hours of wait time – provided there are recharging stations along the way. And they would have to be spaced exactly at the halfway point. In practice, to accommodate everyone’s electric vehicle maximum radius the charging stations would have to be far more numerous than petrol stations we are familiar with today.

Electricity to power our vehicles sounds great in theory, but take into consideration the environmental problems. We have seen throughout history that lead is poisonous. With the amount of lead around us in our daily lives that would be required to keep our transportation systems functioning, the health effects would be staggering. Lead is lost back into the environment as you use a battery-powered vehicle. Christopher Cherry at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Transportation Studies puts the loss of lead at that contained in an entire e-bike battery for every 10,000 km travelled. Worldwide, how many kilometers do we travel each year? Dividing that huge number by 10,000 gives the amount of lead per year added to the air we breathe and the land and water that sustain us.

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