Just feet from where a white ghost bike marks the spot where Sarah Debbink Langenkamp was killed while riding her bike on River Road three years ago, new bike lanes are being installed.
New bike lanes are being installed on River Road in Maryland.(WTOP/Kate Ryan)
New bike lanes are being installed on River Road in Maryland.(WTOP/Kate Ryan)
Just a few feet from where a white ghost bike marks the spot where Sarah Debbink Langenkamp was killed while riding her bike on River Road three years ago, new bike lanes are being installed.
In 2022, Langenkamp, a diplomat and mother of two, was coming home from a back-to-school event when she was stuck and killed by a truck.
Three years later, her husband, Dan Langenkamp, walked along the sidewalk on the busy state road where Maryland State Highway Administration crews had been working on Monday.
Pointing to the upgraded bike lanes on the roadway, he said, “You can see that the bike lane is now wider,” noting the horizontal green stripes that stood out against the dark asphalt.
And, he said, there will be “plastic stanchions that will help alert cars that a cyclist is there.”
Incorporating the features designed to protect the most vulnerable road users while still moving traffic through a busy corridor, Dan said, is “the modern way of doing things.”
Since his wife’s death, he has become an advocate for improved road safety.
“What we’ve realized is that you can get a lot of traffic through, but also keep people safe,” he said. “I’m delighted to see that they’re moving forward with these kind of measures.”
As a couple, the Langenkamps had lived abroad for most of their working lives, and Dan pointed out how other countries design cities and neighborhoods around a number of transportation modes, prioritizing pedestrians and cyclists, not just cars.
By contrast, he said, “You cannot eat outdoors at a restaurant in America without the roar of traffic and honking horns behind you.” At that very moment, a nearby driver laid on their horn.
The River Road project will include bike lanes on both sides of the state road, from Brookside Drive to Little Falls Parkway. Weather permitting, the work should be completed by the end of October.
Each year since his wife’s death, Dan has led a bike ride called “Ride for Your Life,” which coincides with the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims.
“We start in downtown Bethesda and we’ll come by Sarah’s crash site and we’ll go to the Lincoln Memorial for a rally, where we’re going to be advocating for safer roads — so people like Sarah don’t have to die,” he said.
This year, that ride will take place on Nov. 16.
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The city’s optimistic plan to install more bike lanes across the city, from West Park to Glenville, is slated to get a little over $4 million to support the effort as City Council approved an ordinance to apply for a NOACA grant.
Fifteen streets identified by planners (and survey takers) as high-priority are set to see “quick-build” infrastructure installed—most likely those plastic posts used to separate car from bike rider seen lately on Prospect and Huron downtown — with the award.
The “high-comfort bicycle and pedestrian improvements” would be paid for by a $3.4 million grant from the Northeast Ohio Area Coordinating Agency, which scored the money from the Feds through a program designed to tackle poor air quality and car congestion.
A city spokesperson said that the money—$4.3 million total including the city’s own match—signaled that Cleveland Moves was moving right along as planned.
“This action reflects Mayor Justin M. Bibb’s continued commitment to building a greener, more connected Cleveland,” the spokesperson told Scene, “where all residents have access to safe, affordable, and sustainable mobility options.”
Cleveland Moves was approved in April as a kind of once-and-for-all initiative to give Clevelanders the option of biking safely anywhere in the city without the ongoing threat of being sidelined by a vehicle zipping by.
The city’s plans to put bike lanes on 15 street segments, as shown in red and purple. Credit: Cleveland Moves
Survey data collected earlier this year gave the Cleveland Moves team, led by Planning Director Calley Mersmann, a method of pairing together crash data—details on where bikers were getting hit a bunch—and where Clevelanders actually wanted protection on city roads.
They focused on 50 miles of streets, including lanes connecting Public Square and Lakeside, which pair with the city’s plans to remake the lakefront as a pedestrian-friendly area, along with a North Marginal Bike Trail set to link Downtown with University Circle.
Those 50 miles also include:
East 55th Street from Opportunity Corridor to Broadway Avenue.
Ontario Street from Lakeside Avenue to Huron Road.
Lakeside Avenue from West 9th Street to East 13th Street.
Berea Road from Triskett Road to Detroit Avenue.
St. Clair Avenue from East 55th Street to East 101st Street.
West 44th Street from Franklin Boulevard to Bush Avenue.
Randall/West 41st Street from Woodbine Avenue to Bush Avenue.
Fulton Road from Bush Avenue to Park Drive.
Detroit Avenue from Berea Road to West Boulevard.
Jennings Road from Treadway Creek Trail to the Towpath Trail.
West Boulevard from Detroit Avenue to Lake Avenue.
Community College Drive from Cedar Avenue to Outhwaite Avenue.
Abbey Avenue from West 11th Street to Lorain Avenue.
Walworth Avenue from West 53rd Street to Junction Road.
Dick Goddard Way from East 55th to Horizon Academy driveway
Last spring, Denver officials announced plans to upgrade the bike lane along West 29th Avenue from Sheridan Boulevard to Zuni Street, lining it with posts or other barriers . The creation of the new “protected” lane was part of a citywide effort to improve road safety.
But by August, the city had watered down its plans after hearing complaints from shop owners on 29th Avenue. And last week, officials announced a more dramatic change.
The final version of the project will only include a protected lane for about 1.5 miles of its 2-mile length. The section west of Tennyson Street will remain unprotected in order to save parking spots for nearby residents and businesses.
The 29th Avenue bike lane is already a main route for cyclists traveling between the Cherry Creek Trail, downtown, Highland and northwest Denver, and it will likely become more popular once improvements are completed by spring 2025. Other protected east-west bike lanes on the north side are few and far between.
The decision to pare the project back was immediately criticized by bicycle advocates, who saw it as city officials prioritizing the convenience of residents’ free on-street parking over cyclists’ safety.
“Protected lanes are better for both car traffic and bike traffic because … it keeps us from getting into the road and keeps them from getting into us,” said David Fay, who lives just a few blocks off 29th and often drives and bikes on the street.
Sloan’s Lake resident David Fay said he would’ve appreciated protected bike lanes for the entirety of West 29th Avenue.Nathaniel Minor / Denverite
Some residents, on the other hand, say they are grateful the city listened to their concerns after they say the project was sprung on them earlier this year.
City officials said they removed plans for protection from the half-mile stretch to “balance the needs of the community.” That part of the road will still see safety improvements like a lower speed limit and speed cushions. The city still plans to install bike lane protections in the eastern section, from Zuni Street to Tennyson Street.
“I totally understand that it doesn’t go as far as some of our bike advocates would like to see, but we are improving the safety of this corridor, absolutely,” DOTI community designer Molly Lanphier told Denverite.
The West 29th Avenue bike lane plans were on a fast track.
The city has long known that West 29th Avenue is dangerous. It’s part of the city’s “high-injury network” of roads that account for a disproportionate share of traffic deaths and serious injuries. Between 2018 and 2024, nearly 300 crashes were reported to Denver Police, with 11 resulting in serious injuries and one in a death, a city analysis says.
The city is trying — and so far failing — to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries through its ambitious “Vision Zero” plan. Mayor Mike Johnston has sought to jumpstart the effort through more automated enforcement and other relatively quick fixes.
On-street parking spots were full in front of a row of shops at West 29th Avenue and Tennyson Street on Monday, Oct. 21, 2024. Nathaniel Minor / Denverite
In January, 29th Avenue made it onto DOTI’s schedule for repaving this year — a perfect opportunity to upgrade the bike lane. Planners at the department began working up a slate of safety changes that could be baked into the paving project. Unlike a complicated project like the Broadway bike lane, which took the city years to complete, this one was on pace to take a fraction of that time.
“We do move really quick … when we have a paving-bike lane project,” Lanphier said.
The city sent out about 7,000 mailers and in April held its first public meeting on the project, where the top concern from residents was a desire to slow traffic, Lanphier said. Protected bike lanes can slow traffic by reducing drivers’ perceived space and encouraging them to drive more cautiously.
In July, the city collected more than 200 responses to a non-scientific survey that indicated support for removing parking and adding a protected bike lane. More than half of the respondents said they lived or owned a business within a few blocks of 29th or traveled the street daily.
But then city officials started to hear from worried residents and business owners.
In August, the city adjusted its plans — saving parking spots in front of businesses by eliminating some of the bike lane buffers in the western stretch of the project. That left just two-and-a-half blocks of protected bike lanes between Sheridan and Tennyson. Protecting cyclists in that section would have removed around 17 on-street parking spots.
But residents were still upset. Lanphier said more than 100 people reached out to the city even after the August design was supposedly final.
One of those worried residents was Alicia Wilkinson, a homeowner on West 29th Avenue. Wilkinson said she often bikes with her husband and six-year-old son in the neighborhood and was initially excited to hear that safety improvements were planned.
Then she learned she would have lost the on-street parking in front of her house, forcing her to park on a side street about a block away. On some days, she said, that would be a minor inconvenience.
“But other days, carrying a sick child or an elderly parent trying to get them to a car, that impact — that’s what seemed unreasonable,” she said.
So, she went door-to-door in her neighborhood, talking to other residents about the city’s plans.
“A majority of the people that we talked to had no idea this was happening,” she said.
Amy Ford, DOTI’s executive director, met with residents and ultimately made the decision to cut the protected bike lane and keep the parking on those few blocks, Lanphier said.
Wilkinson said she appreciates the change, even if she was disheartened by some of the heat she took from internet commenters after appearing in earlier news stories about the bike lane.
“I think with community input, all community input, the cycling community and the [local neighborhoods] such as Sloan’s Lake working together, maybe there could have been a more holistic design and end result,” she said.
The city says a protected bike still might come to the western end of 29th Avenue, eventually.
DOTI will try to do better outreach for future projects earlier in the process, Lanphier said. Still, she maintained that planned changes like the addition of 20 speed cushions along 29th Avenue will make the entire span of the project safer.
“At the end of the day, we’re not going to make everyone happy,” she said. “And our ultimate goal is to try and make streets safer for everyone.”
The city is still dedicated to “transformative” bike infrastructure projects, she said, and has stood by some of its controversial works, like a protected bike lane on East Yale Avenue in south Denver. That got “very mixed reviews,” Lanphier said, but early data shows that crashes along that corridor have fallen by 20 percent since it was installed.
If speeding remains a problem on 29th Avenue after the project wraps up, Lanphier said they’ve told residents that a protected bike lane is “still on the table.”
“We will look at our evaluation and the data that it gives us and continue to make decisions that do work us toward Vision Zero,” she said.
Fay, the neighborhood cyclist, said protected lanes make a big difference to him. He used to commute into downtown on 23rd Avenue. The city added protected bike lanes there about four years ago.
“That feels so much better,” he said.
The city eliminated dozens of parking spots for that project, telling concerned residents that safety was more important than convenience.
Denver has built hundreds of miles of new bike lanes over the last decade or so, mostly on side streets.
But that strategy could soon change.
City planners are floating a draft update to their long-term bike infrastructure plan that calls for more than 230 miles of new bike lanes — many on car-dominated major arterial roads like Speer, Leetsdale, Broadway, Colorado Boulevard and others across the city.
They have published a new map showing exactly where and what kind of bike lane the city is proposing over the next two decades. Plans will almost certainly change as individual projects are designed, funded and go through a public feedback process, said Taylor Phillips, a senior city planner at the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure.
But before that happens, Phillips is hoping to get buy-in now for the overarching plan from the public and political leaders.
“This is exciting,” Phillips said, “… to be able to kind of think about what will Denver look like in 20 years and how can we really push the envelope and push the vision to be a city that people want to live in, that people want to visit and find it easy and comfortable and safe to get around — no matter how you choose to get around.”
The South Broadway bike lane, at Cedar Avenue. Aug. 8, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
If it were to be fully built out, the new lanes would require the removal of long stretches of vehicle lane miles and parking spots. Phillips couldn’t provide an estimate of how many. But given the controversies that often come with street changes, transformations at this scale would surely draw opposition from some of Denver’s many motorists.
But city officials say the new lanes would go a long way toward helping Denver various city goals, including those on climate, traffic safety and transportation generally. The plans around those goals all envision a different kind of Denver: one where residents drive much less than they do today.
The new plan would help get cyclists closer to their destinations.
Some of the city’s current bike lanes and low-traffic “neighborhood bikeways” abruptly end. Or, as with the 16th Avenue bike lane in the Uptown neighborhood, they run a block or two parallel to busy commercial corridors full of shops, restaurants and other destinations.
That can leave cyclists like Anthony White with a last-block problem. They can walk to their destination, slowly roll down the sidewalk, or take their chances in mixed traffic on high-speed, highly trafficked roads.
“One-ways — they’re fun to smash down,” said White, who delivers DoorDash orders and Jimmy John’s sandwiches on his bicycle and says he’s been hit by a driver before.
Anthony White holds his bicycle on East 17th Avenue, where the city now says it wants to install a protected bike lane at some point in the next 20 years, on Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024. Nathaniel Minor/CPR News
“But,” he added, standing next to the three-lane East 17th Avenue one-way thoroughfare in Uptown, “it would be safer if there was a bike lane.”
Seventeenth, and many other busy streets like it across the city, may one day have just that.
Denver’s new plan calls for new protected bike lanes on highly trafficked roads including 17th and 18th avenues, 13th and 14th avenues, Speer Boulevard and Leetsdale Drive, York and Josephine streets near Congress Park, Park Avenue, West Evans Avenue, Monaco Street, Quebec Street, and Colorado Boulevard.
It also calls for an extension of the Broadway bike lane, Denver’s preeminent example of a protected bike lane on a busy street.
Such changes would likely cost vehicle travel lanes or parking spaces, and could mean slower travel times for drivers. At least one told Denverite that the trade-off would be worth it.
“I would hate to lose the three lanes for the mobility of driving cars,” said Scott Ruggiero, an Uptown resident who was gassing up his SUV at a neighborhood Conoco. “But I would say the safety of the bikes and people would be nice to have as well.”
Scott Ruggiero smiles for a portrait in Denver on Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024,Nathaniel Minor/CPR News
The plan also calls for upgrades to existing bike lanes, like converting the painted bike lane on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to a protected lane.
Some of the new bike lanes would be part of a new “core network” that would help cyclists travel more directly over longer distances. They would use high-quality, permanent materials like concrete and would accommodate a high volume of cyclists, planners say.
Given how dangerous many of Denver’s arterial streets are, advocates say any new bike lanes on them will need “extra measures” like that to keep cyclists safe.
Denver will have to work with the state to make some of these changes.
The plan calls for a protected bike lane on some state highways, including Leetsdale Drive and the entire length of Colorado Boulevard in Denver city limits. That often-congested thoroughfare is 11 lanes across at its widest and carries some 68,000 cars a day at its busiest point.
As a state highway, any changes to it must be approved by the Colorado Department of Transportation. And CDOT is ready to make significant changes to the road, said executive director Shoshana Lew.
“We all share the vision that Colorado does not function as a city street the way it needs to right now,” she said in an interview.
Colorado Boulevard, pictured here Oct. 28, 2022.Hart Van Denburg/CPR News
CDOT is planning a bus rapid transit line on the boulevard, which may include converting some car lanes to bus-only lanes. Lew said improving the shoddy, narrow sidewalks along some stretches of Colorado is also a top priority.
CDOT wants to improve bike crossings across the boulevard as well, she said.
But she was skeptical that Colorado would be the best choice for an on-street protected bike lane.
“It may be that the best option for that area is to do the dedicated bike lane on a somewhat quieter street,” she said.
Phillips acknowledged that a bikeway along the entire length of the corridor may not be feasible, but they might be possible along “critical lengths” where there aren’t good alternatives nearby.
“Just drawing that line and making sure that that intent is set now really helps us kind of fight for that in the future,” she said.
One controversial connection didn’t make the cut.
In 2020, the city backed off a plan for protected bike lanes on Washington and Clarkson streets after residents complained about the loss of hundreds of on-street parking spaces.
Advocates have pushed for it as a north-south route through Capitol Hill. And as recently as 2023, city officials said the Washington-Clarkson project wasn’t dead.
It’s now been abandoned, Phillips said.
“The trade-offs on Washington and Clarkson were high,” she said. “The parking removal would’ve been very difficult for some of the folks that live and own businesses along the corridor.”
The city is now planning for neighborhood bikeways on Emerson and Pearl streets, where bikes will share space with cars on those lower-trafficked streets. Phillips said those bikeways will be high-quality and rival, “if not exceed what we could build on Washington and Clarkson.”
The South Broadway bike lane, at Cedar Avenue. Aug. 8, 2024.Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Editor’s note: This story has been corrected. Denver law prohibits riding a bicycle on a sidewalk under most circumstances, but it makes an exception for cyclists reaching their final destination. The law also says cyclists on sidewalks must ride no faster than 6 mph and must yield to pedestrians.
About 10,000 Northeast Ohioans toured the future ‘Low Line’ last summer.
A potential makeover of the former streetcar level of the Veterans Memorial Bridge will get $7 million in backing from the Biden administration, a press release announced Wednesday.
The so-called “Low Line,” a pet project of County Executive Chris Ronayne, would refashion this bottom section with a refurbished walkway, bike lanes and possible retail, a lá New York’s High Line or Atlanta’s Belt Line. Ronayne hosted a three-day public tour of the project last summer, as to garner fanfare in the redesign’s pre-development stage. The county will also open the space again this summer and plans to activate it with installations from local artists.
Wednesday’s grant announcement pairs with a total $3.3 billion hailing from Biden’s Investing in America Agenda, along with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s effort to bolster long-ignored urban infrastructure. Cleveland’s Low Line concept joined 132 other projects in 130 cities, in what is likely to be Biden’s largest push to revitalize urban areas before a tense general election in November.
Buttigieg framed the grant money as dollars intended to make up for the mistakes American planners and politicians made in the 20th century, when construction of parking garages and city-slicing highways took precedence—on a federal and local level—over human-scale design.
“While the purpose of transportation is to connect, in too many communities past infrastructure decisions have served instead to divide,” Buttigieg said in the release. “Now the Biden-Harris administration is acting to fix that.”
A 2019 rendering drawn by Kent State’s Urban Design Collaborative depicts the feasibility of a two-way bike lane.
transportation advisor, told Scene in an interview Wednesday that the $7 million would cover the rest of the bill for a “more detailed design and engineering study,” an update to a NOACA’s study it orchestrated back in 2013.
And, as presented via renderings stacked along the line last summer, the Low Line would be host to a two-way cycle track, a walkway for pedestrians, along with High Line-esque furniture, like benches with river overlooks. Because the bridge could be a hazard to nighttime or early morning joggers, Pease foreshadows a security study in the future, as well.
“Safety is going to be a priority for us, in the physical design—as well as lighting,” she said. “And with activations. Making sure it’s a space that feels welcoming. Making sure people use it.”
A long-time steward of Low Line’s build, Ronayne himself sees the federal dollars that will round off the Line’s feasibility stage as a natural byproduct of political legwork. From leading tours of the bridge with Congressman Max Miller to lobbying at the Department of Transportation in D.C., the executive has been making local and national pushes for progress.
“Honestly, I think we’d be slowed down a lot if we didn’t have [political] alignment,” Ronayne told Scene in a call Wednesday. “From the U.S. Senate to the Congressional offices—we’ve had this on people’s radars for a while now.”
And that $7 million check? “It takes us really far,” he added. “Takes us far with a ready build plan to look for capital.”
The original bridge, originally called the Detroit-Superior Bridge, was completed in 1917 for a price tag of $5.3 million.
It was Cleveland’s first fixed, high-level bridge, and was a host to plenty of walkers and streetcar riders until the final street car ride on January 24, 1954. Portions of the bridge’s sidewalks were also shortened in the 1970s and 1980s to expand car access.
The bridge’s bike lanes, one of the first ones downtown, just got protective dividers from the city in January.
There was 75-year-old Mike hit while walking a crosswalk on West 14th St. There was 15-year-old Sariya hit near East 105th by a driver with a suspended license.
And there was the driver in a stolen Jeep trying to escape police on Lee Road, one who crashed into the front of the Keratin Barber College. Four people were injured.
“Oh, the car went through the entire front door,” Tracy, a Keratin employee, said, recounting that day last March to Scene. “I watched the whole thing. The car came right down the street and right into our business.”
Last year, 550 Clevelanders were hit by bars while cycling or walking around the city, Bike Cleveland found, according to a report released Tuesday. Nine of those involved in accidents died, a relative unchanged statistic since Vision Zero, Cleveland’s attempt to eliminate fatal pedestrian and biking accidents by 2032, was implemented two years ago. (In 2023, there were 10 deaths.)
The report, which Bike Cleveland compiled using 911 calls and data culled from the Ohio Department of Public Safety, details a city still reaching for safe infrastructure.
The numbers are likely obvious to routine navigators of Cleveland’s hardscape. Most of 2023’s accidents occurred in dense areas with wide streets, where drivers have ample room to change lanes and flout speed limits. About a third of all accidents occurred downtown, or on the city’s inner West or East sides. (Seventy-nine of these involved children.)
At least as far as we know.
Jenna Thomas, the data analyst at Bike Cleveland who helped produce the bulk of the report, said that many accidents with pedestrians and cyclists often go unreported, either due to hit-and-runs or police skepticism. That, and the city of Cleveland, she said, submits actual crash reports, called OH-1s, about “45 to 60 days after crashes occur.”
Other Ohio cities like Cincinnati, Columbus and Toledo, she said, send those reports “within one to five days on average.”
“And Vision Zero relies on those reports,” Thomas said in a phone call. “I mean, we don’t really have good data. Like, in 2023, about half of all crashes, I think, don’t ever get reported.”
Like 40 other U.S. cities, Cleveland dove into Vision Zero, a safer-streets initiative first adopted in Sweden in 1997, as a focused way to best spend dollars on buffered bike lanes, speed bumps and other traffic calming and safety efforts.
And, save for ten speed tables, roundabouts and some walker-friendly signals, most of Vision Zero’s progress since 2022 has been policy-oriented, with Cleveland’s Complete & Green Streets law last summer doing most of the guiding. As did $3 million in American Rescue Plan Act money put aside for street reshaping: into narrowing roads, building better walk signaling.
“All this takes time,” Thomas said. “But we’re certainly anxious to see more things installed.”
In 2020, eight years after installing its own Vision Zero policy, Chicago’s traffic fatality rates pretty much matched those in 2012. From 2015, when Los Angeles implemented its own, to 2018, pedestrian fatalities increased by 75 percent. The only major applause heard might be in San Francisco, where crashes “decreased significantly” in 2019 and 2020, after two years of policy changes. (Mind you, in a city where 40 percent of its commuters use public transit.)
“Claiming that no price can be placed on human life is a noble approach,” Jay Derr, a transportation policy advisor at the Reason Foundation, wrote, “but one that is unrealistic in a world where policymakers have limited resources to solve problems.”
But don’t tell that to Ward 3 Councilman Kerry McCormack. The writer of the Complete & Green Streets legislation in 2022, McCormack believes that Cleveland will see a decline in such accidents soon after construction is cleared—like the $30 million Lorain Midway, or the supposed four to five buffered bike lanes, he said, that could pop up downtown this summer.
“And you don’t even have to have the data,” he said. “People are out of control in their cars, they’re out of control. Your signs can be great. Marks on the road. But we still need real road infrasture to force drivers to pay attention.”
As for that infrastucture, McCormack and Thomas turn to the suggestions from Vision Zero: to new pedestrian wait isalnds, to raising crosswalks and adding curb extensions to high risk blocks. Or, as the report says, matching “evolving national standards for street design.”
Today’s happiness and personal-finance gurus have no shortage of advice for living a good life. Meditate daily. Sleep for eight hours a night. Don’t forget to save for retirement. They’re not wrong, but few of these experts will tell you one of the best ways to improve your life: Ditch your car.
A year ago, my wife and I sold one of our cars and replaced it with an e-bike. As someone who writes about climate change, I knew that I was doing something good for the planet. I knew that passenger vehicles are responsible for much of our greenhouse-gas emissions—16 percent in the U.S., to be exact—and that the pollution spewing from gas-powered cars doesn’t just heat up the planet; it could increase the risk of premature death. I also knew that electric cars were an imperfect fix: Though they’re responsible for less carbon pollution than gas cars, even when powered by today’s dirty electric grid, their supply chain is carbon intensive, and many of the materials needed to produce their batteries are, in some cases, mined via a process that brutally exploits workers and harms ecosystems and sacred Indigenous lands. An e-bike’s comparatively tiny battery means less electricity, fewer emissions, fewer resources. They are clearly better for the planet than cars of any kind.
I knew all of this. But I also viewed getting rid of my car as a sacrifice—something for the militant and reckless, something that Greenpeace volunteers did to make the world better. I live in Colorado; e-biking would mean freezing in the winter and sweating in the summer. It was the right thing to do, I thought, but it was not going to be fun.
I was very wrong. The first thing I noticed was the savings. Between car payments, insurance, maintenance, and gas, a car-centered lifestyle is expensive. According to AAA, after fuel, maintenance, insurance, taxes, and the like, owning and driving a new car in America costs $10,728 a year. My e-bike, by comparison, cost $2,000 off the rack and has near-negligible recurring charges. After factoring in maintenance and a few bucks a month in electricity costs, I estimate that we’ll save about $50,000 over the next five years by ditching our car.
The actual experience of riding to work each day over the past year has been equally surprising. Before selling our car, I worried most about riding in the cold winter months. But I quickly learned that, as the saying goes, there is no bad weather, only bad gear. I wear gloves, warm socks, a balaclava, and a ski jacket when I ride, and am almost never too cold.
Sara Hastings-Simon is a professor at the University of Calgary, where she studies low-carbon transportation systems. She’s also a native Californian who now bikes to work in a city where temperatures tend to hover around freezing from December through March. She told me that with the right equipment, she’s able to do it on all but the snowiest days—days when she wouldn’t want to be in a car, either. “Those days are honestly a mess even on the roads,” she said.
And though I, like many would-be cyclists, was worried about arriving at the office sweaty in hotter months, the e-bike solved my problem. Even when it was 90 degrees outside, I didn’t break a sweat, thanks to my bike’s pedal-assist mode. If I’m honest, sometimes I didn’t even pedal; I just used the throttle, sat back, and enjoyed my ride.
Indeed, a big part of the appeal here is in the e part of the bike: “E-bikes aren’t just a traditional bike with a motor. They are an entirely new technology,” Hastings-Simon told me. Riding them is a radically different experience from riding a normal bike, at least when it comes to the hard parts of cycling. “It’s so much easier to take a bike over a bridge or in a hilly neighborhood,” Laura Fox, the former general manager of New York City’s bike-share program, told me. “I’ve had countless people come up to me and say, ‘I never thought that I could bike to work before, and now that I have an option where you don’t have to show up sweaty, it’s possible.’” (When New York introduced e-bikes to its fleet, ridership tripled, she told me, from 500,000 to 1.5 million people.)
But biking to work wasn’t just not unpleasant—it was downright enjoyable. It made me feel happier and healthier; I arrived to work a little more buoyant for having spent the morning in fresh air rather than traffic. Study after study shows that people with longer car commutes are more likely to experience poor health outcomes and lower personal well-being—and that cyclists are the happiest commuters. One day, shortly after selling our car, I hopped on my bike after a stressful day at work and rode home down a street edged with changing fall leaves. I felt more connected to the physical environment around me than I had when I’d traveled the same route surrounded by metal and glass. I breathed in the air, my muscles relaxed, and I grinned like a giddy schoolchild.
“E-bikes are like a miracle drug,” David Zipper, a transportation expert and Visiting Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, told me. “They provide so much upside, not just for the riders, but for the people who are living around them too.”
Of course, e-bikes aren’t going to replace every car on every trip. In a country where sprawling suburbs and strip malls, not protected bike lanes, are the norm, it’s unrealistic to expect e-bikes to replace cars in the way that the Model T replaced horses. But we don’t need everyone to ride an e-bike to work to make a big dent in our carbon-pollution problem. A recent study found that if 5 percent of commuters were to switch to e-bikes as their mode of transportation, emissions would fall by 4 percent. As an individual, you don’t even need to sell your car to reduce your carbon footprint significantly. In 2021, half of all trips in the United States were less than three miles, according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Making those short trips on an e-bike instead of in a car would likely save people money, cut their emissions, and improve their health and happiness.
E-bikes are such a no-brainer for individuals, and for the collective, that state and local governments are now subsidizing them. In May, I asked Will Toor, the executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, to explain the state’s rationale for a newly passed incentive that offers residents $450 to get an e-bike. He dutifully ticked through the environmental benefits and potential cost savings for low-income people. Then he surprised me: The legislation, he added, was also about “putting more joy into the world.”
