An Ode to My Family’s E-Bike
On a chilly morning last October, my 8-year-old daughter and I took our new e-bike, which she had named Toby, on its maiden voyage to school. We admired trees exploding in vibrant golds and flocks of geese soaring above. To amuse ourselves, we’d brought along a life-size Halloween skeleton, which sat in the back with my daughter, arms outstretched in a friendly wave. Along the way, people honked, smiled, and stopped to chat. I felt connected to our neighborhood in a way I hadn’t ever experienced.
Before Toby, mornings spent driving my daughter to school were monotonous and filled with traffic. Since the purchase, our commutes have become daily highlights. My daughter and I bond with each other and our community, and we get to appreciate the time outdoors, all while saving on car maintenance and mitigating our carbon footprint. But the e-bike has changed our life in many other ways too—some of them unexpectedly profound.
Our family’s motivation to get an e-bike started with climate concerns. Kids learn by example, and my husband and I often wondered if we were setting the right one by driving two gas-guzzling cars. But the alternatives were limited. We couldn’t afford to purchase an electric vehicle. Electric scooters were out of the question—they’re meant to transport only one person and can be dangerous for children. I tried biking to school once, my daughter behind me in a trailer. Many miles later, I showed up drenched in sweat—great as a workout, but impractical for day-to-day.
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So when our city introduced subsidies on e-bikes, we decided to give one a try. They’re fairly safe, cheaper than cars, and gentle on the environment. Plus, one study shows that they make for some of the happiest commuters. We chose one in a zippy sky blue, with two padded bench seats, metal safety bars, and oversize storage bags on either side. It’s cheerful and somehow charismatic, befitting its sweet name.
From our first trip that October day, it was clear how much easier and more pleasant getting around on Toby would be than driving in a car. We avoided the worst of the car traffic and all the huffing and puffing of cycling. E-bikes are still great exercise—riders burn only about 15 to 30 percent fewer calories on them than people on typical bikes do—but you probably won’t get sweaty enough to need a shower. I also felt good knowing that riding Toby enabled us to act more in line with our environmental values. Research from the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on energy, has found that if all drivers in the 10 most populous American cities switched from cars to e-bikes for trips shorter than five miles—a category that makes up more than 60 percent of all car trips in the United States—the emissions reductions would be “equivalent to avoiding the use of four natural gas plants over the course of a year.”
And the costs were affordable for our family. Our e-bike was $1,200 after the subsidy, requires an annual $200 tune-up, and accrues negligible electricity costs. They’re a bit pricier without the subsidies—good ones go for about $2,000—but savings on gas could add up fast.
More than the practicality, I’ve appreciated how much easier Toby has made it to connect with my daughter. Sitting directly behind me, she’s more involved in our journey than when she’s in the back seat of a car, so opportunities for learning come naturally. I alert her to upcoming bumps, narrate various turns and stops, and ask her to double-check for cars coming up behind us. We’ve discussed the satisfaction of using our bodies to get somewhere rather than letting the throttle do all the work. Toby can go up to 25 miles per hour, so I’ve explained the importance of slowing down for pedestrians.
Being out in the open air also gives us a chance to stop and say hello to people we recognize and to meet our neighbors, which we rarely did before. “We don’t belong in silo’d cars driving around our neighborhoods,” Arleigh Greenwald, a bike mechanic and the creator of the online community resource Cargo Bike Life, told me in an email. Whereas cars shut us off from other people, bikes open up opportunities to bond. Riding them is a step toward “creating a connected community,” Greenwald wrote.
[Read: The real reason you should get an e-bike]
Of course, e-bikes aren’t for everyone. Families in high-level apartments without elevators would struggle to lug them upstairs. Parking them outside takes some forethought and a good lock. Most batteries last for only about 15 to 60 miles, so the bikes are best for shorter travel. They won’t help much with moving either. Toby can handle Costco runs for our family of three, but probably not for a big family.
For those who do use an e-bike, getting around can be tricky. Cities weren’t built for e-bikes, and Greenwald pointed out that some roads aren’t safe for them. She recommended testing routes on your own before you bring your kids, asking local bike shops about safe options, and accepting when you’ll have to go with another mode of transport. “If I’m replacing as many car trips with safe e-bike trips as possible,” Greenwald told me, “I’m doing great!” In our rides, my daughter and I have encountered plenty of these infrastructural hurdles. Some routes don’t have bike lanes or have lanes that end at random spots; others expect us to go up stairs. When this happens, my daughter and I chat about why, and then we contact our local representatives together to request improvements—an important lesson in civic engagement.
But once we found our best route to school, these obstacles faded. It takes five extra minutes each way, but that time is spent along a river trail where we’ve spotted herons, kingfishers, and kestrels. Our time outside has otherwise decreased as my daughter has gotten older, so this tether to the outdoors has been a gift. Being in nature can help kids manage stress, grow more self-confident, and maintain their mental health, Pooja Tandon, a pediatrician and researcher at Seattle Children’s Research Institute, told me in an email. I see this in my daughter, who seems cheerful and refreshed most mornings, not half-awake like she used to be.
No matter how well her day starts, school can still be an interpersonal minefield. When I picked my daughter up in the car, she dealt with the residual stress by communicating through grunts. Now, perhaps energized by our rides, she tells funny or embarrassing tales, and updates me on the second-grade gossip. I’ve found that challenging conversations are easier on Toby too. When our cat recently passed away, my daughter waited until our commute to ask hard questions about death. Surrounded by nature and without the pressure of direct eye contact, I was able to think calmly about how to answer her in honest, age-appropriate ways.
It’s been about five months since Toby’s first journey, and we’ve ridden nearly 1,000 miles. These days, e-biking feels easier than driving, even in situations you might not expect. We recently biked home after school as dark clouds rolled in over the Rockies and the first snowflakes of a late-winter storm feathered the sky. At a red light, we heard my daughter’s name and saw her classmate’s family in an SUV next to us; they seemed shocked that we were biking in the cold.
I might have felt that way once too. But we were dressed warmly, and we didn’t want to give up our ride along the river path. That day, we watched waterfowl tuck into the river shallows for the evening and stopped to tell a neighbor with a new baby that we’d shovel their driveway in the morning. I worried that my daughter might have felt embarrassed about the stoplight encounter, but as we unbuckled our helmets in our driveway, she said she bet her friend had been wishing he was on an e-bike too. She clearly understood what I’d come to learn about e-bikes: Yes, our commutes were slightly slower and a little chillier than they once had been, but they were also so much richer.