Do E-Bikes Actually Replace Car Trips? What Studies Show

TL;DR;

• Across personal e-bike studies, roughly 30–70% of e-bike trips would otherwise be car trips, with pooled estimates around 40–70% for utilitarian travel.^{1 2}
• A scoping review finds 20–86% of private car journeys can be substituted after someone gets an e-bike, depending on local travel habits.³
• Shared micromobility surveys in North America show 37% of trips replace a car trip and another 13% replace transit, with only ~5–9% being brand-new trips.⁴
• Experimental and incentive programs see participants ride several extra e-bike km per day while driving 2–3 km less, cutting car mode share by ~10% and emissions a few percent at city scale.^{5 6 1}
• E-bikes also replace some walking, transit, and regular cycling, but net physical activity and emissions almost always improve.^{2 3}
• Infrastructure, cargo capacity, hills/heat, and feeling safe mixing with cars (good lights, a loud horn drivers recognize, etc.) largely determine whether an e-bike really becomes a car substitute instead of an expensive toy.^{7 8}

“The environmental and health benefits of e-bikes depend on the modes they substitute, with the highest benefits obtained when motorized modes, notably private cars, are replaced.”
— Chevance et al., E-Bikes and Travel Behavior Change (2024)⁵

What We’re Really Asking: “Would This Trip Have Been a Car Trip?”

When people argue about e-bikes, they’re usually arguing about mode shift:

• Fans say: “My e-bike replaced my second car.”
• Skeptics say: “You just replaced a normal bike with a lazier one.”

The key question isn’t whether e-bikes are fun (they are), it’s what they replace:

For each e-bike trip, what would you have done without the e-bike — driven, taken transit, walked, biked, or just stayed home?

Most research tackles that question directly by asking e-bike users, or by tracking their travel before and after they get an e-bike. A smaller but growing set of studies runs proper experiments or incentive programs and watches behavior change over months.^{3 5}

Taken together, the evidence is surprisingly consistent:

• E-bikes do replace a lot of car trips, especially for everyday errands and commutes.
• They also replace some transit, walking, and regular cycling, and create new trips.
• At scale, even modest mode shifts meaningfully cut driving and emissions.^{2 1 8}

Let’s unpack that.

What Personal E-Bike Studies Actually Find

Most of the best data comes from people who bought or borrowed an e-bike and then reported how they used it.

How Often Do E-Bike Trips Replace Car Trips?

Several key studies try to answer exactly that:

• A North American survey of e-bike owners (used in McQueen et al. 2019) found that about 68% of utilitarian e-bike trips would otherwise have been made by car, with the rest mostly taken from conventional cycling, transit, and walking.¹
• A UBC REACT Lab meta-estimate (Berjisian & Bigazzi 2019) pooled multiple studies and concluded that, for the “average” e-bike adopter, displaced travel breaks down roughly as:²
  • 44% car trips
  • 30% conventional bicycle
  • 12% public transit
  • 6% walking
  • 8% new trips
• A scoping review of 76 e-bike studies (Bourne et al. 2020) reports that acquiring an e-bike leads to substitution of 20–86% of private car journeys, depending on how car-dependent the person or city was to start with.³
• A systematic review and meta-analysis of 10 experimental/quasi-experimental studies (Chevance et al. 2024) finds that giving people access to an e-bike leads to 2.4 fewer car km per day and about a 10% drop in car mode share, on average.⁵

Here’s a simplified snapshot of what those studies say.

Table 1 — How Often Do E-Bikes Replace Car Trips?

Big picture: if you use an e-bike the way most people do — for commuting, school runs, and errands — somewhere between a third and two-thirds of your e-bike trips are trips you’d otherwise drive.

It’s Not All Cars: What Else Gets Replaced?

The same UBC and Portland work show that e-bikes also pull from other modes:^{2 1}

• Conventional bikes: 13–30% of replaced trips
• Transit: ~12–13%
• Walking: ~6–7%
• New trips: around 5–8%

That mix matters:

• From a climate perspective, the biggest win is when you go from car → e-bike, because cars have much higher emissions per km than bikes or walking.¹
• From a health perspective, swapping some walking for e-biking is a “downgrade” in intensity, but you usually make up for it by riding longer and more often, so total physical activity goes up.^{2 3}

UBC’s synthesis estimates that an “average” e-bike adopter ends up with about 21 extra minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week, while cutting ~39 km of car driving per week, yielding roughly 460 kg less CO₂ per year.²

So yes, some walking and regular biking are cannibalized — but not enough to wipe out the health or environmental gains.

Shared E-Bikes and Scooters: What About Rentals?

Most of the numbers above are about privately owned e-bikes. What about shared systems — docked/dockless bikes, e-bikes, and scooters?

Here the best data comes from system-wide user surveys:

• A North American survey synthesized by the US Department of Energy (DOE) found that from 2020–2023, 37% of shared micromobility trips replaced a car trip, another 13% replaced a transit trip, ~35% replaced walking, 9% replaced a personal bike, and 5% were new trips.⁴
• NABSA’s 2023 State of the Industry report similarly concludes that about a third of shared micromobility trips replace a car trip, with most of the rest replacing walking, transit, or taxis.¹⁰
• NACTO notes that in 2023, people took 133 million trips on shared micromobility in the US, with continued growth driven largely by e-bikes on large, station-based systems.¹¹

Two things to notice:

1. Replacement rates are lower than for personal e-bikes (≈35–40% vs ≈40–70% for car trips). That’s expected; shared systems skew more toward “last-mile” and spontaneous trips.
2. Even so, shared systems are key in dense cities where you might not own a bike at all, and they can still soak up tens of millions of short car journeys per year.

How Much Driving Actually Disappears?

Counting “trips” is one thing. Counting kilometres not driven is even more important.

Household-Level Changes

A few studies and programs give us real before/after numbers:

• In the Portland “E-Bike Potential” modeling study, based on detailed survey data, roughly 72% of utilitarian e-bike miles would otherwise have been car miles. At city scale, a 15-percentage-point e-bike mode share could cut car person-miles by ~10% and transportation CO₂ by ~11%.¹
• The Chevance et al. 2024 meta-analysis finds that in experimental trials, people with access to an e-bike ride about 5 km more per day by e-bike and 2.4 km less per day by car, while overall car mode share falls by about 10 percentage points.⁵
• A 2025 travel-behavior study of an income-qualified e-bike incentive program (Bigazzi et al.) reports that participants increased daily e-bike use by 5.3 km and reduced automobile use by 2.1 km and transit use by 2.9 km per day.⁶

In human terms: give someone an e-bike and they don’t quit driving entirely, but they chip away at the edges — especially shorter trips.

City-Scale Potential

On the modeling side:

• RMI’s E-Bike Impact Calculator looked at 10 US cities and found that shifting 25% of short car trips to e-bikes would cut overall vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by about 3% on average.⁸
• Because car emissions are so skewed toward short, cold-engine, stop-and-go trips, shaving off just a few percent of VMT can over-perform in terms of emissions and congestion.

For climate and congestion, that’s big. We happily deploy expensive freeway widening projects for much smaller percentage changes.

When Don’t E-Bikes Replace Cars?

The studies are clear on one point: context matters. E-bikes are not magical car erasers. They’re tools whose impact depends on the city around them.

Infrastructure and Safety

Bourne’s scoping review and the Chevance meta-analysis both note that mode shifts are largest where:^{3 5}

• There are safe, continuous bike routes for key origin–destination pairs.
• Riders can cross big roads and intersections without feeling like a target.
• Secure parking is available at home and at destinations.

The UBC REACT Lab emphasizes that many factors — infrastructure, weather, terrain, age, physical capability, and attitudes — shape how much car travel e-bikes actually displace.²

In other words: if the only way to reach school or the supermarket is a 45 mph strode with angry SUVs, an e-bike is capable of replacing your car, but you may still reach for the keys.

That’s where visibility and communication tools come in. Good lights and reflective gear help drivers see you; a horn that sounds like a car horn can make them mentally classify you as “serious traffic” instead of “optional obstacle” when you need to be noticed. Customer stories on Loud Bicycle’s reviews page include multiple e-bike riders who say a car-like horn is what makes them comfortable using busy arterials for daily errands — a prerequisite for replacing those trips by car.¹²

Trip Length, Terrain, and Cargo

Research also finds that e-bikes:

• Extend practical cycling distance — people ride farther and more often than on regular bikes.³
• Are less sensitive to hills than conventional bikes, making hilly trips more feasible.¹³
• Really shine on trips that are too long or too sweaty for walking, too annoying for transit, but still short enough to be comfortable on two wheels.

Cargo e-bikes and trailers are especially powerful for replacing grocery, school, and kid-shuttling trips, which make up a big chunk of suburban driving.⁷

But for very long commutes, trips on limited-access highways, or where origin–destination pairs are just badly served by bikeable routes, you’ll still see a lot of car use.

Not Everyone Starts from the Same Baseline

Bourne et al. and Chevance et al. both highlight that what e-bikes replace depends heavily on what people used before:^{3 5}

• In already bike-heavy cities, e-bikes may initially pull more from regular bikes and transit, with a more gradual impact on car use.
• In car-dominated regions, new e-bike users are often people who “never would have biked that route” otherwise — so the substitution is much more strongly car → e-bike.

That’s why substitution rates span such a wide range (20–86%). If your default is “everything by car,” an e-bike has more car to eat.

So… Do E-Bikes Actually Replace Car Trips?

Putting it all together:

• For personal e-bikes used for errands and commutes, expect something like half of your e-bike miles to be miles you didn’t drive.
• For shared systems, expect closer to one-third of trips replacing car trips — still a lot of displacement when scaled across a city.
• In cities willing to combine e-bike adoption (including incentives and loan programs) with safer streets, experiments suggest realistic reductions of 10%+ in car mode share among participants and a few percent drop in total citywide VMT and CO₂ if adoption scales.^{5 1 8}

The real story is less sexy than “cars are over” and much better than “it’s all hype”:

E-bikes nibble away at the edges of car use — school runs, grocery trips, short commutes — and those edges add up.

If you’re a rider wondering whether an e-bike will actually replace car trips for you, the research suggests you’ll see the biggest impact if you:

• Live where you can reach most daily destinations within 5–10 km.
• Have at least some comfortable bike routes to those places.
• Invest in practical gear — fenders, racks, bags, lights, and a horn drivers actually react to — so bad weather and busy roads don’t push you back into the car.
• Consciously decide which specific trips (school drop-off, work commute, errands) you’re going to treat as “e-bike by default.”

And if you’re a city or employer wondering whether to subsidize e-bikes, the evidence is pretty straightforward:

• Yes, they actually replace car trips.
• No, they’re not magic on their own. Pair incentives with safer streets and you unlock a surprisingly powerful, very cost-effective way to chip away at car dependence.

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