E-bikes will kill the bike industry as we know it

 We're witnessing the beginning of an evolutionary shift in the bike industry and in popular bike usage. Where people used to talk about the dangers of riding on the streets, now they talk about the dangers of sharing the sidewalk with numbnuts on e-bikes. But that's not what will kill the bike industry. The sheer ease of riding a smokeless moped, combined with the popular misconception that you can neglect them they way you used to neglect your meat-powered bike, have driven sales at a phenomenal rate.

In our shop just this year, a few callers asking about bikes we carry have asked about gravel bikes, and dozens have asked about e-bikes. Then we've had a smattering of calls for kids' bikes. Maybe one or two for technical mountain bikes. Repair business is steady, but it's only enough to overload our understaffing. If we had one more mechanic we would worry about paying them. General retail, mostly clothing, used to cover a lot, but those sales are flat, too.

Yesterday I was working on the firewood piled in my driveway when I heard the buzzing of tires on the road out front. Two riders on fat-tire e-bikes blazed past at full throttle, pulling close to 30 miles per hour. Bareheaded, in shorts and tee shirts, they flashed past, headed north. The only sound was their buzzing tires and Dopplered conversation. Nothing could go wrong. They were only riding bikes after all.

In more congested traffic situations, grim accidents are piling up, but only grumpy outside observers blame the bikes themselves. Guns don't kill people. People kill people. E-bikes don't cause crashes. Unprepared riders on e-bikes cause crashes.

Yes, the mass and speed of the bikes make the crashes worse, but they only combine with the lack of street smarts among the riders.  Bad riding habits lead to more dangerous situations. The motor assistance just makes it easier to get there. People will ride the e-bike who would never consider riding the rapids of a busy street on a bike powered entirely by themselves.

I see riders on e-bikes on the street below the backshop windows. Most of them have bikes with a throttle option, which appears to be their default. Looking across the bay toward the train station where the rail trail terminates, I can see many other moped riders. They jet up effortlessly to a cruising speed a purely pedaling rider would train hard to achieve and maintain.

I pull out of my driveway and warm up at maybe 10-12 miles per hour. The smokeless moped rider hops on and spurts away at 20. Who would put up with the snail's pace of a bike without a motor? What do they gain in the short run by giving up the power assist? There is no long run. People flit from place to place and thought to thought. If the bike is cheap transportation, and a few dollars more gets a faster machine requiring less effort, who will bother to work harder?

Demand for bicycles was already falling fast as the 21st Century began. The decline accelerated, with only a brief plateau when 2020 brought a surge of demand coinciding with a dearth of supply. The bike industry was struggling after its profitable bender through the 1990s. E-bikes will end up being a bigger category than mountain bikes were at their height, but the profits won't go to traditional bike companies unless they seriously retool into motor vehicle companies. How much money will be left over for the far less popular non-motorized bikes?

Legend has it that bike manufacturers in the 1880s and '90s were surprised by the high level of demand from working class people to buy what were considered luxury items. The manufacturers hadn't recognized yet that they had created a revolutionary transportation device that needed very little maintenance for the amount of mobility it provided to people formerly limited only to shoe leather. The same calculation drives the market in e-bikes now.

Change happens faster and faster in the technological world, but pedal-powered bikes won't disappear overnight. Especially if laws and regulations restrict the age of riders on motorized bikes, pedal power will remain the child's first experience on a two-wheeler. However, I have already had to deal with motorized balance bikes for a couple of richie rich little kids whose parents want them to have the latest greatest thing. On private property, anything goes. Buy your 12-year-old a Lamborghini and let them blaze around your private race track. Meanwhile, out in the slums, kids may have to settle for the time-honored ritual of learning to wobble along under their own power until they're old enough to get a real grownup vehicle that doesn't require them to sweat.

My parents, and other adults born between the world wars, recount their experiences riding bikes. Very few people carried the habit into adulthood in the United States. In the 1950s and '60s, the bike was just a step on the way to becoming a driver. You could even buy an accessory for your bike that looked like a motor and made varoom noises. No one knows what the future holds for our species. Maybe we cover the planet with our sprawling cities, through which we dart on our motorized little bikes. The only wide-open spaces will be the ones utterly inhospitable to life. Nature will consist of cockroaches, rats, bacteria, and viruses. So will our diet.