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China's New Craze: E-bikes
lawrencekhoo writes "I was in Shanghai recently, and found to my surprise that bicycle crazy China is now electric bicycle crazy. Electric bikes were everywhere, and outnumbered normal bikes on the road. You could even buy them in the department stores.
Basic
models sell for about 1200 Yuan (about US$150), and more
elaborate
scooter-like
models
for up to 5000 Yuan. Apparently, this craze has been
building up for a few years.
Something like it is even
happening in parts of the US.
According to one user, electric bikes are popular because they're cheap, and can take you all around town on one charge. Who would have guessed that China would lead the way in green transportation?"
You're right about a lot of your points... all of it, in fact, but the question is always, not where does it begin, but, where does it end?
I used to live in Beijing, eons ago by Beijing's standards, in the late 80's and early 90's. Beijing's growth might have very well outpaced the Internet's. But when I was there, we had a lot of white furnature, and a housekeeper to keep it clean... one day she was sick following her weekend... the white furnature was BLACK with soot. I honestly don't know if things have gotten better or worse, but I'd suspect that they've gotten worse. China's economy is still coal powered.
The interesting question is who's buying these bikes, why, and what cultural impact they'll have. As pointed out before, its probalby people that are jsut starting to see wage growth, meaning that they're getting e-bikes to replace the human-powered variety, and that these require more electricity, which requires more coal, etc.
But bikes had long been part of Chinese culture. More than just being a mode of cheap, fast transportation, they were handy. They're easy to secure, they can fit in small places to store. it means that building planners didn't need to accommodate big garages and parking spaces, useful when you've got such density as there is along the coastal regions of China and inland to Beijing, where most economic growth is taking place (and therefore, where people are more likely to have money for e-bikes).
in this context, the shift from bikes to e-bikes is a small one, as they meet all of the conveniences of bikes without any major new hastles. (Most consumers, anywhere, have yet to make the 'big picture' association of energy usage == pollution == hastle for everyone, including me.) Now, this means that it postpones the growth of large numbers of cars for a while as people get these instead, perhaps delaying any shift to (as many) big garages, parking lots, etc.
That way, it could be a good thing. RIGHT NOW, its true that it looks like these e-bikes are just a stepping stone to bigger cars... but what if the 'e-bike' phase lasts 20-30 years, as it very well might? By this time, perhaps cars won't seem as desirable, or at the very least, will be less polluting. Additionally, coal plants can be MUCH less polluting with proper design/retrofitting than you'd expect. There was SOME evidence, of which there has been a partial refutation, that its possible to reduce CO2 emissions to almost nothing with a highly efficient deisgn and a method (using some sort of ceramic device??? can anyone inform?). In this way, perhaps China could be one of the first nations to benefit from economic growth without all of the eventual environmenal hastle. If China were to pollute at say, North America's levels, the planet'd get baked like a garage band on a lazy Saturday night, and that'd hurt the Chinese economy both directly and indirectly. I'd say that within the next 10-15 years, China will start retrofitting existing plants to pollute less. This is especially true as they start to get a skilled labour force that hates pollution and is costly to replace when they die young from inhaling half a kilo of coal dust every day. Not that the massive growth of Chinese cigarette sales is helping that any.
This *might* turn out to be an indicental step that prevents it, by postponing the onset of cars and keeping the 'bicycle culture', even if its currently powered by polluting coal plants.
Sometimes, we get lucky, unintended breaks. This could be one.