E-Bikes in the City: Battle for the Sidewalk (#728)
There is something wonderfully contradictory about the electric bicycle.
It represents freedom, efficiency, exercise, reduced emissions, and a way of moving through a crowded city without sitting inside a two-tonne automobile.
And yet, in some cities, the e-bike has become part of the clutter it was supposed to help eliminate.
I was reminded of this recently while comparing two cities I know well: Sydney and Paris.
Walk around central Sydney and you can encounter shared e-bikes almost anywhere. They stand against walls. They congregate around street corners. They appear beside bus stops. Some are neatly parked; others seem to have been abandoned wherever their last rider lost interest in them. Occasionally they lie on their sides across the footpath like large, brightly colored animals that have decided to take a nap.
For an able-bodied pedestrian, they are irritating.
For someone pushing a stroller, pulling a suitcase, using a wheelchair or walking with impaired vision, they can be considerably more than that.
Paris offers a striking contrast.
There, the Vélib’ system is built around stations. You take a bicycle from a designated docking point and, importantly, return it to one. The bicycle therefore has a home.
That seemingly small distinction raises a much larger question:
When we redesign cities around new forms of mobility, who owns the space between journeys?
The E-Bike Is Older Than We Think
We tend to regard the electric bicycle as a distinctly twenty-first-century invention.
It isn't.
Electric bicycles were being imagined almost as soon as practical bicycles themselves became popular. In December 1895, American inventor Ogden Bolton Jr. received a patent for an electrical bicycle incorporating a battery and a direct-current motor mounted in the rear-wheel hub. Other electrically assisted bicycle designs followed during the 1890s.
The idea was remarkably modern.
The technology was not.
Early batteries were heavy, motors inefficient and electrical control systems primitive. For much of the twentieth century, attaching a motor and battery to a bicycle produced something that had many of the disadvantages of a motorcycle without necessarily retaining the beautiful simplicity of a bicycle.
The revolution came with improvements in electronics, compact motors and, particularly, rechargeable battery technology.
Suddenly electric assistance could be incorporated into a machine that still looked, handled and functioned largely like a bicycle.
The e-bike had finally found its moment.
What Exactly Is an E-Bike?
There is an important distinction between an electric bicycle and an electric motorcycle.
The most familiar modern e-bike is a pedelec: the rider pedals and an electric motor assists. Sensors detect the rider's effort or pedal movement and add power accordingly. Other designs incorporate throttles or combinations of pedal assistance and independent electric propulsion.
The result is deceptively transformative.
A hill becomes flatter. A headwind becomes weaker. Five kilometers begins to feel like two.
A person who would never consider cycling ten kilometers to work may happily do so on an e-bike.
And perhaps most importantly, electric assistance changes who can regard a bicycle as realistic transportation. Age, fitness and topography become less formidable barriers.
The e-bike doesn't simply make cycling easier.
It expands the population that can cycle.
Then Came Bike Sharing
The next revolution was not mechanical.
It was logistical.
Why own a bicycle at all?
A shared bicycle could become part of the city's transportation network: take one near your home, ride it to work, leave it there, and another person rides it somewhere else.
Paris became one of the great experiments.
Vélib’ was launched on July 15, 2007, initially with nearly 10,600 bicycles available around the clock. It became an immediate and highly visible part of Parisian life.
The system subsequently expanded beyond Paris proper, and electric Vélib’ bicycles arrived with the redesigned service in 2018.
Today the scale is extraordinary.
Vélib’ reports about 20,000 bicycles at 1,500 stations, with approximately 40 percent electrically assisted. In 2025, users made about 48 million journeys, travelling some 150 million kilometers.
Those numbers make an important point.
This isn't a novelty.
It is transportation.
Paris: A Bicycle Has a Home
What struck me in Paris was not simply the number of bicycles.
It was the infrastructure surrounding them.
The Vélib’ station makes an implicit statement:
This is where bicycles belong when nobody is riding them.
The concept seems almost embarrassingly obvious.
We accept that cars require parking spaces. Buses require stops. Trains require stations. Taxis have ranks.
Why would we introduce thousands of shared bicycles into a city without deciding where they should go when the journey ends?
The docking station imposes a modest discipline on both rider and operator.
You cannot simply decide:
I'm finished with this.
…and leave the bicycle wherever you happen to be standing.
That restriction slightly reduces convenience.
But it greatly increases order.
Sydney: The Dockless Experiment
Sydney illustrates the other great philosophy of bike sharing: the dockless bicycle.
The attraction is obvious.
There is no need to build thousands of expensive docking stations. GPS and smartphone technology tell you where the nearest bicycle is. You unlock it with an app, ride it, finish the journey and leave it within the permitted service area.
Ingenious.
Except for one problem.
Where, precisely, do you leave it?
Too often, the answer has effectively been:
Somebody else's footpath.
And when thousands of riders independently make that decision, convenience becomes clutter.
Sydney's shared-bike use has grown enormously. The City of Sydney reported 3.7 million shared-bike trips in 2025, a 91 percent increase over 2024. But it also acknowledged the accompanying increase in bicycles parked on busy footpaths and growing community demands that bicycles be moved off pedestrian space.
This is the strange paradox of dockless bike sharing.
It solves the last-mile problem for the cyclist by potentially creating a last-meter problem for everybody else.
Sydney Is Beginning to Respond
The good news is that Sydney is not ignoring the problem.
The city is increasingly creating dedicated micromobility parking bays. As of July 2026, it reported 85 on-road shared-bike parking bays and another 166 on footpaths, with 300 more planned by mid-2028. Importantly, the city says it looks for on-road locations first, rather than automatically surrendering more pedestrian space.
New South Wales has also developed a broader regulatory framework for shared e-bikes, including parking rules, operator responsibilities and powers for councils to establish no-go and reduced-speed zones.
In other words:
Sydney appears to be discovering something Paris understood from the beginning.
Shared mobility requires shared rules.
Technology alone does not create an orderly city.
The Sidewalk Is Not Empty Space
This is where the debate becomes more interesting than bicycles.
We have a peculiar tendency to regard the sidewalk as leftover urban space.
It isn't.
It is transportation infrastructure.
A footpath belongs to the child walking to school, the elderly woman with a walking frame, the blind pedestrian with a cane, the parent pushing twins in a stroller, the tourist dragging a suitcase, the worker carrying parcels and the person using a wheelchair.
An e-bike lying across that space is not merely untidy.
It represents a transfer of inconvenience.
The rider gains convenience by being able to abandon the bicycle almost anywhere.
Someone else inherits the obstruction.
That is not really sharing.
It is outsourcing.
The Great Urban Promise of the E-Bike
None of this diminishes the extraordinary potential of electric bicycles.
Quite the opposite.
They may be one of the most sensible transportation technologies ever developed for cities.
Consider the absurdity of using a large automobile to transport one person a few kilometers through a congested urban center. The vehicle must be manufactured, fueled or charged, driven through traffic and then stored somewhere at the destination.
An e-bike occupies a fraction of the road and parking space.
It requires dramatically less material than a car.
It produces no tailpipe emissions.
It is quiet.
It incorporates physical activity into everyday transportation.
And unlike an ordinary bicycle, it allows many more people to contemplate journeys involving hills, longer distances, shopping or simply ageing knees.
That last point may become increasingly important as populations age.
The e-bike could become not merely an environmental technology but a mobility technology for older adults.
But Success Creates New Problems
Every transportation revolution brings unintended consequences.
More e-bikes mean more competition for limited street space.
Speed differences become important. A pedestrian may travel at 5 km/h, a conventional cyclist at 15–25 km/h, and an electrically assisted rider may readily reach 25 km/h. Paris's electric Vélib’ assistance, for example, operates up to 25 km/h.
Mix all three together carelessly and conflict is inevitable.
There are other questions.
Where do we charge thousands of batteries?
How long do those batteries last?
How are they recycled?
How do cities prevent modified machines from becoming de facto electric motorcycles?
How do we design bicycle lanes for commuters, tourists, delivery riders and inexperienced occasional users simultaneously?
And who pays for the public space occupied by private bike-sharing companies?
These aren't arguments against e-bikes.
They are signs that e-bikes have become important enough to require serious urban planning.
From Docked to Dockless, and Perhaps Back Again
There is a fascinating irony here.
Digital technology promised to eliminate the docking station.
GPS would know where every bicycle was. Apps would handle payment. Geofencing would tell riders where they could and couldn't park.
The physical infrastructure could disappear.
And yet cities such as Sydney are now painting designated bicycle bays onto streets and footpaths.
We have travelled from:
Dock → no dock → virtual dock → designated parking bay.
Perhaps the future lies somewhere between Sydney and Paris.
Not necessarily thousands of expensive mechanical docking stations, but clearly defined parking areas enforced digitally. A rider ending a journey outside one of those areas might simply be unable to complete the rental.
Technology could provide the flexibility of the dockless system while preserving the order of the Parisian model.
What Comes Next?
I suspect the e-bike will gradually cease to be regarded as an alternative form of transportation.
It will simply become transportation.
Future cities may have networks of protected lanes carrying conventional bicycles, electric bicycles, cargo bikes and other small electric vehicles. Car-parking spaces may increasingly become micromobility hubs. Apartment buildings and workplaces will need secure bicycle storage and charging facilities.
Cargo e-bikes may replace vans for many urban deliveries.
For families, an electric cargo bike may replace the second car.
For commuters, the combination of train plus e-bike may compete with driving door-to-door.
And for tourists, shared electric bicycles will make cities accessible in an entirely different way.
But their success will depend on something decidedly low-tech.
Good manners supported by good urban design.
Sydney and Paris: Two Philosophies of Public Space
Walking through Sydney and Paris provided me with an unexpected lesson.
The bicycles themselves were not really the issue.
The difference was what happened after the rider got off.
In Sydney, the dockless philosophy initially emphasized individual convenience:
Finish your ride and leave the bicycle.
Paris asks something slightly different:
Finish your ride and return the bicycle to its place.
One system maximizes freedom.
The other accepts a small restriction in exchange for order.
Sydney's growing network of designated parking bays suggests that the two philosophies may ultimately converge.
Perhaps that is the broader lesson of the e-bike revolution.
A successful city cannot simply ask:
How can we make transportation more convenient for the individual?
It must also ask:
What happens to everyone else when we do?
The electric bicycle has been waiting for its moment since the 1890s.
That moment has finally arrived.
The challenge now isn't inventing a better bicycle.
It is learning how millions of us - and thousands of bicycles - can share the same city.
Comments