100million eBikes in China; how about USA? Europe?

[jag]

We saw in a previous thread that China has 4 times as many eBikes as cars, and eBikes are selling at a clip of 23 million a year. http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11000 http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1904334,00.html

Now how is the western world doing?
Portland's bike lanes and bike friendly intersections are good signs. Perhaps also that eScooters have become so prevalent in Toronto that people take notice (although sometimes in a negative sense).

But is there any statistic about eBikes, eScooters etc sold in the USA and Canada?
Europe?
Australia?
Any other e-hotspots in the world?

 

[dogman dan]

Bear in mind they only last a year or so in many cases. So at least half of em are replacing the last one.

 

[swbluto]

We saw in a previous thread that China has 4 times as many eBikes as cars, and eBikes are selling at a clip of 23 million a year. http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11000 http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1904334,00.html

Now how is the western world doing?
Portland's bike lanes and bike friendly intersections are good signs. Perhaps also that eScooters have become so prevalent in Toronto that people take notice (although sometimes in a negative sense).

But is there any statistic about eBikes, eScooters etc sold in the USA and Canada?
Europe?
Australia?
Any other e-hotspots in the world?

Is it becoming a logistic curve or is it the beginning of a parabola? The chinese craving of cars and the chinese's rising income may decide that relatively soon.

 

[spinningmagnets]

The current global recession has slowed everybodies purchasing and upgrading.

In 1992, China registered less than one-million cars, (Clinton dramatically expanded trade with China, Bush even more so) as of this year there are over 20-million. Their population is roughly 1,300-million (1.3-Billion), or one car out of 65 people. "IF" 1/3rd are under 18, then the car saturation would still only be about one-out-of-40 adults.

Their cities have been built up under the assumption that most people don't have a car, so most people live close to their job, have access to public transportation, or desperately want a scooter/E-bike as an upgrade.

 

[swbluto]

Their cities have been built up under the assumption that most people don't have a car, so most people live close to their job, have access to public transportation, or desperately want a scooter/E-bike as an upgrade.

That might make the transition to car-ization a little less rapid than it was in America, but *"progress" tends to be ineluctable in the long term. It'll be interesting to see how the construction of a large population based city not built around the car will affect it. I think what you'll probably see is something like New York city, where the street's width isn't scaled to the traffic in the area and so most people walk or take public transportation, but the car enabled living further outside the main city and there are tons of suburbs that were developed around New York city largely due to the transportation-enablement of the car. I think you'll probably see the "suburbification" of China and more work will spread out from the city center to sustain and encourage a car culture, but it might not develop to the same extent as in America.

*(Just stealing an association in The Beast of Yucca Flats. Cars and rockets seemed to be emphasized as Progress (Worthy of nounification by its emphasis) in the movie.)

 

[jag]

In 1992, China registered less than one-million cars, (Clinton dramatically expanded trade with China) as of this year there are over 20-million.

Their cities have been built up under the assumption that most people don't have a car, so most people live close to their job, have access to public transportation, or desperately want a scooter/E-bike as an upgrade.

It is difficult to say where China is going. Right now side-by-side there is a coexistance of three parts: traditional China that survived Mao, the remnants of communist China, and the current economic expansion continuing at a crazy pace.
Will China loose its traditional culture and values and become a copy of western materialsm?
Will there be a shift to greater awareness of what is Chinese? (To some extent Korea seems to combine materalism with a pride of their natural and cultural heritage.)

There's a whole National Geographic special issue on China. It is as usually a sampling of articles (with a bias to what makes selling pictures), and not so much analysis of where things are going:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/05/table-of-contents

A good doze of Chinese city reality can be absorbed by watching "Suzhou he (2000)"
The river Suzhou that flows through Shanghai is a reservoir of filth, chaos and poverty, but also a meeting place for memories and secrets. As a plus for endless sphere readers it features a motorcycle courier and plenty of 2 wheel street scenes.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0234837/plotsummary
There's another one about a bicycle courier, whoose bike gets stolen, but the name eludes me at the moment.

 

[spinningmagnets]

If we accept the figure of "approximately" 1-in-40 adults having a car (just for the sake of argument) then cars are really still somewhat rare in China. Few people have them, and the ones that do, likely have one car per family. This still leaves 39 out of 40 working adults who get back and forth each day to work and market by walking, biking, and E-biking or ICE-scooter.

From what I've read, most of the common families who are well-off "just enough" to own a car, use it only for week-end getaways. Traffic, parking at work, and the cost of fuel remain a daily pressure for car-owners. I am not suprised that E-bikes are soaring in popularity. All Chinese are very familiar with the bike culture, and once you try an E-bike, it can have a significantly positive impact on your everyday life for less than the cost of a scooter...much less the cost of an entire car.