Road fools - Electric bikes and the k-ching! of pollution By A.C. Thompson] Road fools | May 23, 2001 | SFBG News Last week I got a call from an enthusiastic P.R. flack for the Ford Motor Company. The venerable automaker was rolling out a new line of electricity-powered bicycles [http://www.thinkmobility.com/products/bike_traveler/] ; did I want to pen a fluffy piece about these fun and eco-friendly vehicles? So the Model T company, after a century of manufacturing atmosphere-wrecking, petroleum-guzzling cars and trucks, has had an environmental epiphany and decided to push the envelope of clean-air technology? Not so fast, Grasshopper. Even though plug-in vehicles don't spit out noxious fumes, they do, in fact, pollute. Electric cars, and now electric bikes, run on lead-nickel batteries that have to be recharged frequently – which means plugging the vehicles into a socket and sucking juice. As the e-vehicle charges up, a power plant somewhere is cranking out wattage and sending it down the line. That's where the pollution comes in. Eighty percent of the electricity-generating plants in this country run on fossil fuels, and a huge number of those plants are archaic and filthy. Juice-generating plants, according to calculations by green group the Natural Resources Defense Council [http://www.nrdc.org/air/default.asp] , are the worst industrial source of the four horsemen of air pollution: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon dioxide, and mercury – toxins responsible for respiratory disease, acid rain, and global warming. When it comes to electric cars, the trade-off – power plant emissions instead of tailpipe emissions – makes sense: even when you factor in power plant pollution, battery-powered autos still produce less toxic spew than gas-fueled cars do. But electric bikes are a different story. Conventional bicycles don't emit anything, but a juice-guzzling bike can produce only more filth. Not necessarily, argues Jason Mark of the Union of Concerned Scientists' green vehicle program [http://www.ucsusa.org/vehicles/veh-home.html] , who says it's too soon to slap the "EVIL" label on the new machines. "If an electric bike is replacing a pedal-powered bike then, yeah, there's going to be a net increase in pollution," Mark reasons. "If instead the electric bike is replacing some of your car trips, then you have got huge reduction in pollution." Ford's plastic-and-aluminum Th!nk cycles [http://www.thinkmobility.com/products/bike_traveler/] can be pedaled like regular old-fashioned bikes, or riders can sit back and rely on the juice. The machines cost about $1,000, run on a 12-volt battery, boast a top speed of 20 miles per hour, and can travel up to 22 miles before they need to be plugged in and recharged for six hours. "These are comfort bicycles," says Jonathan Richards of Ford's Th!nk division. "There are an enormous number of people out there who are concerned about the environment. They recycle their waste. They look at the fuel economy of a product. But they're less than willing to sacrifice dramatically for the planet." One irony here is that Ford, along with the rest of the Detroit heavies, has spent the past 10 years fighting California's strict clean-cars rules that will require the car makers to put 4,600 electric autos on the road by 2003. Ford isn't the only company churning out battery-driven bicycles. Former Chrysler boss Lee Iacocca is producing them under the Ebike [http://www.evglobal.com] name (slogan: "efficient and environmentally friendly"), and Zapworld [http://www.zapworld.com] , a Sebastopol-based company, posted $12.4 million in revenues last year on sales of electric bikes and scooters. Consumers – including San Francisco mayor Willie Brown – snapped up 500,000 electric bikes during 2000, and Ford estimates, perhaps overly optimistically, that a billion people will be using the cycles by 2020. Now that's a whole lot of power and whole lot of power plant fumes. Billing it as a feat of "eco-green" engineering, Ford is also hawking the 72-volt Neighbor [http://www.thinkmobility.com/products/neighbor/] – essentially a glorified two- or four-person golf cart built for farting around "resorts and closed communities." As with plug-in cycles, the question with these things is whether people – in this case the gated-community set – will trade in their auto for the Neighbor, and whether they'll drive the polluting mini-cars instead of walking or cycling. The electric scooter, that fave of dot-com geeks, is also a growth industry. Last year there were 3 of the things on the market; this year a consumer can choose from 15 models retailing from $200 to $700 each. At SoMa bike shop Road Rage on Folsom Street, Nick Rothman, an affable 23-year-old entrepreneur with a bushy red goatee and a love of all things AC/DC, sells juice-powered bikes and, in far qreater quantities, electric scooters. With stoner-rock band Kyuss blasting in the background, the young business owner points out the features on a trio of rubber-wheeled, shock absorber-equipped e-scooters that go 15 miles per hour and are, as we speak, drawing watts from the power grid. The energy meltdown and attendant monster utility bills haven't put a crimp in sales, Rothman says. "[Scooters] don't consume much electricity in comparison to a refrigerator," he tells me, pointing to a pair of '80s-era arcade games sitting across the shop. "Our old video games suck way more than the scooters do." Rothman is the consummate hot-rodder, a guy who's been in the garage building and suping up vehicles since childhood. In his case, though, the machines all happened to be electric. In the back of the shop he's got one of Iacocca's top-of-the-line Ebikes (it'll set you back $1,700), motors that can be bolted onto conventional bikes, and, overshadowing all the other technology in the joint, his own personal ride. It's a midnight black low-rider with exaggerated swept-back handlebars, huge chrome wheels, hydraulic disk brakes, and a pair of plastic-encased motors on either side. The undeniably cool-looking cruiser will hit 40 miles per hour without complaint. Declining a test drive (I'd crash the thing for sure), I wonder if Americans really need a new, battery-powered way to be lazy. Creatures of artery-clogging, heart-exploding convenience, we are the world's most obese people. We think nothing of driving our gas guzzlers two blocks to pick up Twinkies and soda from the Quicky Mart. "I'm cashing in on laziness," Rothman admits. "People aren't scared of getting run over on their bikes. They're scared of getting tired. They think that next hill is gonna kill 'em." E-mail A.C. Thompson at ac_thompson@sfbg.com [ac_thompson@sfbg.com] . [http://www.sfbg.com/searchit.html]