Of the estimated 165 million bicycles sold globally in 2020, a quarter were e-bikes. That exceeds every other category of bicycle, including road bikes, mountain bikes, and youth bicycles, according to PwC. 

Clearly, the powered pedalers are a bona fide phenomenon, but what does their popularity mean for the planet? 

E-bikes contain batteries and motors and need to be charged with electricity from a grid powered largely by fossil fuels, making them more resource-intensive than traditional bikes. But new research from Lyft, the largest bike-share operator in the United States (and the company that publishes Rev), finds that e-bikes can be as eco-friendly as regular bicycles — and, in some ways, far better.

E-bikes, like regular bikes, do not produce any greenhouse gasses while in use, but that doesn’t mean they’re free of emissions. So in order to calculate their environmental impact, engineers need to perform a life-cycle analysis, which is a measure of the energy that goes into producing, operating, and disposing of a vehicle, and the associated emissions at every step. 

Lyft did this calculation for all of its shared micromobility vehicles over the past year. The company operates approximately 9,000 new, larger-battery e-bikes, 23,000 older e-bikes, 52,000 pedal-powered bikes, and 13,000 powered scooters under local names like Citi Bike (NYC), Bay Wheels (San Francisco), Capital Bikeshare (Washington, D.C.), and others. 

First, Lyft tallied the energy used and emissions produced when assembling each vehicle. Then, analysts determined how much went into and came out of transporting bikes and scooters to warehouses, distribution centers, and, finally, to riders. (This typically happens by way of fossil-fuel-powered aircraft, cargo ships, trucks, and vans.) 

Once in service, micromobility vehicles must be periodically repaired and “rebalanced,” a term for when employees manually move bikes or scooters between docking stations or parking corrals to ensure they’re evenly distributed across the network. Here come the vans and trucks again. 

Finally, once they’ve been ridden until they are no longer usable, vehicles go to a facility for disposal or recycling. (Lyft recycles.) More energy and emissions. And don’t forget about recharging — unique to powered vehicles like e-bikes and scooters — which happens in much the same way as rebalancing: Someone collects the vehicles and charges them, or swaps their dead batteries for fresh ones at warehouses. (Most docking stations can’t charge batteries yet.)

All those calculations deliver a snapshot of a vehicle’s overall environmental impact. But the more meaningful figure is impact per mile. Lyft can estimate how far every vehicle it owns travels during both transportation to stations and while in use by customers, so the team divided the emissions and energy for each vehicle model by the average number of miles each model traveled in its working life, then broke those results down into three categories: 

1. Amount of particulate matter generated, per mile, for each vehicle type.

2. The vehicle type’s global warming potential per mile traveled (a measure of how much it could warm the Earth in comparison to one ton of carbon dioxide). 

3. The amount of fossil fuels used, per mile traveled, for each vehicle type.

As expected, the pedal-powered bike took home gold in the first two categories, delivering the lowest particulate matter and lowest global warming potential per mile of all the vehicles. 

But Lyft’s newest e-bike, with its increased battery capacity, came in a close second. And it actually exceeded the environmental efficiency of the traditional bike in the final category: fossil fuel depletion per mile. In other words, it used less fossil fuel per mile than a traditional bike. 

How is this possible? Lyft’s data shows that riders on the new e-bike model travel twice as far per trip, on average, as those on a traditional bike.

By traveling farther, riders move the new e-bikes between docking stations more than Lyft’s traditional bikes, which means the company spends less fossil fuelrebalancing them with vans and trucks. Riders are rebalancing the new e-bike model more effectively on their own. 

The larger capacity battery — 1,000 watt-hours compared to its predecessor’s 500 — is a big reason. It gives Lyft’s new e-bike model as much as 60 miles of range, which is on the high end for this type of vehicle.

But e-bikes’ biggest environmental benefit may be the miles that riders don’t travel — by car. University of California, Berkeley professor Susan Shaheen has found that, altogether, 37% of e-bike, bike, and scooter rides replaced car trips, avoiding 54 million pounds of CO₂ emissions. In the U.S., e-bikes have a good shot at replacing cars in many cases; according to independent research, about 65% of e-bike trips replace a ride in a car or truck. 

It doesn’t take a data scientist or a life-cycle analysis to see that as a positive trend.

Carl Franzen is Rev’s contributing editor.

The content provided in this article is for informational purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, Lyft is not affiliated with any businesses or organizations mentioned in the article.