ELECTRIC MOBILITY IN OXFORD

This year’s E-Bike Summit was held at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. QUAD attended with an open mind having previously reported on various waves of Chinese hire bikes coming to Oxford (and then going again), and most recently VOI, the e-Bike and scooter operation whose salmon-coloured machines are a common site.

In effect a trade conference and networking event, the event was sponsored this year by Autotrader, the publicly-owned online used car giant.

That might seem disconcerting at first glance but it chimes with local Oxford knowledge.

You frequently see parents riding their kids to school these days on electrified cargo/’child mover’ bikes made by brands you probably haven’t heard of such as Tern. These ‘bikes’ – it’s not even the right terminology any more – can cost £10,000 and will often replace a second car.

Mark Palmer, Head of Strategy and Insights at Autotrader, spoke about modern micromobility (no pushbikes thanks) and how the company once owned by the Guardian newspaper wants to capture the future trade in used electric bikes and all the other e-machines that shade into what was once car territory but increasingly isn’t.

Kevin Golding-Williams, Head of Cycling and Walking Policy at the Department for Transport, spoke of a ‘change of tone’ at the new government, although there was little detail. The junior minister responsible for Active Travel, Simon Lightwood, brought things down to earth by saying first that electric bikes are wonderful, but there are real problems that must be addressed, including a proliferation of illegal, back-street-fettled e-bikes and scooters that go far too fast until they catch fire, typically the result of non-certified motors charged by ill-matching cables. These items are freely available online but haven’t passed usual safely checks.

At the heart of the discussion was the brutal question, why the UK adoption rate of e-Bikes is stuck at 9% while it is 27% in the EU 27 and 50% in Germany.

One might assume that in the UK crime is the problem, since it has become virtually unpunishable, and keep in mind the invariably higher value of these e-Bikes.

But the Active Travel Commissioner for Active Travel England, ex-Tour de France yellow jersey wearer and superstar bike racer Chris Boardman, told the conference that the leading problem is the perception of safety. The four big issues that the UK falls down on are safety (or its perception); ease of use; reliability and normalisation.

That last one, normalisation, is easy to underestimate and it galvanised conversation. If you live on the edge of the last roundabout out of town on a newly thrown up housing estate, everyone will be in a car and bikes are still cheap Christmas presents you buy for your kids. The bike infrastructure will be all but non-existent. This will mean no ‘peer factor’ to make it ‘normal’ to take the bike and probably nowhere to store or charge your e-bike either, although at least it will fit in garages now too small for our ever-larger cars and SUVs.

Boardman went on to mention that 14% of British daily traffic is still the school run, yet we are in theory going to decarbonise the whole transport system by 60% by 2050. For good measure he added that 70% of continental mainland kids ride their bikes daily, for both utility and fun; and that Germany has 24 times more bike lane than the UK (12,000kms vs 500kms).

Anyway those are the issues, plus of course UK train companies that refuse to take even non-e-bikes without a pre-booked, limited availability bike-reservation, and obviously no e-Bikes on what may be an slightly too-convenient fire risk policy.

Despite all of these seemingly negative items, there has been an invisible but swift revolution towards e-bikes and scooters since just before and during COVID, here in Oxford. The same has happened in London and the gig-economy is one major user category of electric bikes, Deliveroo and so forth.

One of the most promising developments is a freight consolidation hub where several participating colleges are asking their students to order all their online deliveries to a depot in Binsey Lane belonging to Pedal and Post, an e-courier company that has a large fleet of electric cargo bikes. The hundreds of daily parcels are ‘consolidated’ into a handful of cargo bike deliveries to the colleges in question (pictured, above right), eliminating hundreds of diesel van deliveries across the city. If it goes well the experiment is hoped to expand to all the colleges in the future.

An electric bike is unlikely to be part of a student experience, where frankly you just need the same old jalopy you ever did to get to a lecture, the cheaper the better. But with imminent bus gates preventing through traffic in Oxford we can’t help but see the local equivalent of Lime bikes (London) as a major growth area. Oxford’s cramp and winding medieval streets always suited bikes and they always will. Electrification will simply broaden the audience.