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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?"
Unless most of the electricity comes from non-polluting sources, recharging electric bikes is going to produce more pollution than exhaling some carbon dioxide and using muscle power.
Has anyone else seen a hug increase in gas powered scooters around their neighborhood? They seem to be getting more popular than skateboards for kids now.
:)
I'm a little worried about kids without licenses driving motorized vehicles around on sidewalks, though they could be safer than those segways that would just tip over if the battery ran out going up a hill
A friend of mine who works for a city transportation planning organization and I were discussing tha they are scrambling to draw up some regulation on these things.
Find Boba / bubble tea in your zipcode.
When I saw the article link I was just imagining something like a portable battery charger; I am actually a little underwhelmed at what it turned out to be. I ride my bike to get places, but the exercise aspect of it is important to me; it would be cool if I could plug my iPod into the bike while i'm riding, though. What other devices would be useful on a bike with a renewable power supply?
I regularly report MSN spam to the Hotmail admins.
is ranked in 2003:
1. Japan
2. China
3. Europe
Gross rank is:
1. China (incl. Taiwan?) (500,000)
2. Japan (200,000)
3. Europe (10,000 and over)
according to this US dealer.
Shanghai is (as of Dec 2003) restricting bikes on its major streets.
"Bicycles have gone from carrying more than 70 percent of travelers in Shanghai as recently as 1990 to from 15 to 17 percent now, according to the Shanghai Urban Planning Bureau."
Upward mobility indeed.
As an avid cyclist, I couldn't agree more. Me on a 17lb road bike can cruise at 17mph for long distances or 25mph for short distances/passing cars (really fun in my congested little town). Plus, I get good exersize while commuting.
...Man on his feet is thermodynamically more efficient than any motorized vehicle and most animals. For his weight, he performs more work in locomotion than rats or oxen, less than horses or sturgeon.
...The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.
That said, for those not young, not in good physical shape, or just lazy, the electric bike would be great. It would also be good for those who don't work for bike-friendly employers since you can arrive at work without being all sweaty and needing to change.
On another bicycle note, I recently came accross this great short essay entitled, "In Praise of the Bicycle".
Excerpts:
Its a nice read if you like cycling, commuting via bike, or are stuffed in your car in rush-hour traffic.
I then looked up the stats for the 2003 Tour and Lance Armstrong's winning finish of the 2129.4 mile race in 83h41'12" gives him an incredible average speed of 25.45miles/hour.
While a thoroughbred can run a mile averaging 40mph, a long distance speed record for the Karbarda breed or horses (the only one I could find data on) is 50km at 18.5 mph. Its pretty safe to say that attempting to ride a horse or just entering any animal in the Tour would kill it in a
matter of days if not less.
Go bicycles!
In my opinion, anything that gets people out of their SUVs is a good thing for the world and these things are much better than nothing.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
Don't these little motorcycles we have now get 60+mpg? And they are tuned for speed/acceleration, not fuel economy. So we should be able to get even more than that if tuned properly. The extra weight would drop it down some, but the addition of better aerodynamics and lower resistance tires will up it some as well.
I can't see how this would be anymore dangerous to the driver than a motorcycle is, and those are allowed everywhere. Plus you could drive it in the rain, and feasibly have some storage space inside.
I've been envisioning this for about a year now, and would buy one if it were under $6000, went at least 65mph getting 55-60mpg, were legal on the highway, and had a 7-9 gallon tank (400-550 miles per tank).
My question is if there is anything like this out there, of if I should go ahead and start building one?
This is kinda on the topic, so please don't mod me down to hard!
BANISHED BICYCLES
"It as a milestone of sorts when Shanghai, China's biggest city, banned bicycles on its largest avenues last month, but also a belated acknowledgment of a change that has already transformed many large cities in China."
"Automobile sales in China, which reached two million last year, are growing at an annual rate of more than 50 percent. The growth of private car ownership has brought with it a car culture that increasingly resembles the American one, but with even worse traffic jams, especially in Beijing. Downtown parking spaces have become precious."
How did YOU get to work yesterday, my little AC troll?
Point one - China is also the world leader in solar energy. (As an Australian, I hang my head in shame).
Point two - point one notwithstanding, China gets most of its eletrical power ATM off brown-coal (very high sulfur content) which is why in Beijing you really can feel the air burning the the inside of your nostrils on a bad day.
On the local (ie Chinese) news last night, big stories on several chanels about China's eletrical power shortage, with factories having to only run night shifts, cancel big orders and subsequently lay off workers because they don't have the power to operate their machinery. I don't have exact figures at hand, but I believe well over half the population is yet to be connected to the grid.
Chinese diet is becoming westernised and obesity is starting to become common in the population.
A human-powered bicycle starts to look better again. But mainland Chinese are very physical-effort adverse as breaking a sweat is considered 'workerish'. Really! (This is, of course, a gross generalisation and all of my own Chinese friends here are exceptions).
And all that hard breathing of Beijing (or Shanghai, or any city, really) air probably does more health damage than two packs a day. I doubt it is coincidence that major respitary illnesses come out of this part of the world mostly, what with the pollution, the dense population and everyone spitting like lamas everywhere!
My unit leader was saying the other day that when he was a boy there was spring and autumn (fall) in this region but there isn't anymore. And if you can see Venus on a 'clear' night, you are going well!
A bit ecclectic above, sorry, I'm in a rush to catch the university bus into the city for weekend grocery shopping.
The man with no surname and a silly hat
On the universe: It's bunk.
I drive an e-bike to work.
I'm quite happy with it.
I find it to be a marked improvement on the pedal only model - appropriate for my less energetic mid-life self.
Proper paths in which biking were safe combined with access to mass transportation would i think may transportation a community event (think train station as the quientessential town hall of the industrial revolution)
Details - Good bike in the States will set you back $1100. Giant Lite is (a) leader stateside.
There are two modes (Throttle and Pedal assist)
Throttled is less appropriate for kids and pedestrian places.
Pedal Assist is impossibly easy to control since it only amplifies the pedal movements.
Mine is the latter.
Here's wishing for a little more speed allowance - not for me - butto reduce the impatience of the cars behind me on narrow roads.
At this gas crunch time - we should encourage our local law to embrace this option by:
1. Granting higher speeds (-30 MPH perhaps) -
2. special rights of way -
3. efforts to keep the roadside clear of glass, potholes, manhole covers, and gravel from gravel drives.
I suggest we name them Vbikes as a means of resisting the influence of the middle east crowd.
AIK
By charging the bike up at home,you are only transfering the location of which the poluting chemical reaction takes place.
Now, if the bike was charged up like a hybrid car, charging the battery as the bike was being pedalled, or such, this technology would be wonderous. But there is the matter of having to create the bike itself, or atleast the battery, which isn't so good for the environment.
Place something witty here
When are you people at Slashdot going to realize that electric vehicles do not stop air pollution, they only move the place it gets made?
You have to charge up the battery. That takes electricity from the wall. Which comes from a power plant. Which BURNS something, usually coal in China. Really gawdawful brown coal too, not the nice hard stuff we get in the USA and Canada.
Smokestack or exhaust pipe, take your pick. You want to be green, you better pedal it yourself. True, you will be burning sugar and making CO2 while you pedal, but unless you plan on going "back to the land" by stopping breathing on a permanent basis, you'll be doing that anyway.
I have a dynamo on a bicycle headlight, and let me tell you, it's a real drag when it's engaged (no pun intended.) They'll definitely have to improve the technology somewhat before that's viable.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
No one said China should 'never advance'. The point being made is that these electric bikes are decidedly not 'greener' than the mechanical ones the country is known for.
This isn't just a swipe at the editors. China has, what? 4 times the population of the US? The large increase in oil imports to that country is partly responsible for the current ~$40/Barrel oil prices (because reserves are tight). Like the US, they also burn *a lot* of coal. Unlike the US, the Chinese economy is raging right now. It is, to a large degree, propping up the economies of many others.
There are about 30 golf courses built, or planned for, in and around Beijing alone. This is the boom many economists and traders have been talking about for years. The rest of Asia, including India, will follow. It'll be interesting, to say the least, how the Chinese deal with all that comes with a bustling commerce. Think of the shear waste that the 'first world nations' have already generated. Hopefully, the popularity of electric bikes is a sign that the path they take won't be so littered. One can hope.
btw, I don't drive, i cycle. And i'm not typing this on a P4, either.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
What's greener, a bike powered by human-power, or a bike powered by electricity (which has to come from somewhere....fossil fuels, anyone)? I vote human-powered bikes.
I crunched some numbers and the answer for a typical north american diet is... electric-powered.
In summary, it consumes about 10 calories of energy to produce, process, transport, and cook one typical calorie of food. The human body can then convert this into muscle energy with a maximum efficiency of about 25%, so the total ratio is 40 units of primary energy for 1 unit energy seen by the bicycle.
Batteries similarly take energy to manufacture, transport, and recharge. The electric motor is usually about 75% efficient at converting the battery energy into mechanical output. Overall it works out to a total energy ratio of 4:1 - 15:1 depending on the battery chemistry, so up to 10 times more efficient than a human-powered bike (40:1).
The details are spelt out here:
http://www.ebikes.ca/Ebike_Energy.pdf
They're replacing regular bicycles. And regular bicycles run on a good meal, and there's no avoiding the pollution that causes, whether or not you have the bicycle. China needs to get better electric production before trying to replace everybody's legs.
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I'm told that the top bicyclists (no doubt including lance) .5HP = 378 W
have a power output of 1/2 hp (for once, that's actually a somewhat
relevant figure), so he's not that far behind.
And before anyone flames me,