Well, here's some math on that. The battery pack I have in my kit-built electric bicycle has roughly 624 watt-hours in it, and being generous/lazy and not accounting for conversion and charging losses, thus costs about $0.049 to charge from zero to full (which I never do since I don't run it flat) at my current grid rate of $0.0789/kWh. That is, 4.9 cents. Slightly less than a nickel.

It'll propel my ass (along with the rest of me, usually) about 18 miles without pedaling, albeit not any faster than about 25 MPH.

Even owning two electric cars, I've only seen my electric bill increase by about 30%. I live in the United States FYI.

My e-bike battery is about 1-2% of the capacity of my car's battery.

yep my 750w/h battery gives me up to 200km range (real world uses usually about 130km) and costs less than a dollar to charge from empty to full

E-bikes are kind of a red herring here anyway; there’s little practical use-case for them that isn’t already covered by unpowered bicycles unless you live somewhere very hilly.

Even in a place that isn't very hilly, an e-bike could make the difference between arriving to work sweaty or not, which can easily mean the difference between biking or not. The extra help also expands the available user base to those who are less fit, and expands the range of what is doable for any given person. And, again, I want to emphasize the sweat difference, which also ties back into range (how far can you bike on a regular bike versus an e-bike without breaking a sweat?)

E-bikes are kind of a red herring here anyway; there’s little practical use-case for them that isn’t already covered by unpowered bicycles unless you live somewhere very hilly. (Even in moderately hilly places you get used to hills quite quickly).

I got a cargo e-bike specifically because I got tired of hauling two kids up hills in a trailer pulled by my regular bike.

E-bikes make things less daunting for certain people to get on a bike for their commute. Anything that gets us there is a win in my book.

My city has <5% bike usage for commutes. It was dropping from a high of around 8% prior to the pandemic. Post-pandemic, work from home is now at around 25% while bike usage is still low. These numbers are pretty typical of cities in the US. If we could get bike usage to 20% while maintaining work from home numbers, that would be transformative. It's basically what is naively expected to happen when you add a lane of traffic, except without (hopefully) the induced demand problems. Which you can avoid by adding a full sized bike path with physical dividers for all those new bicyclists to use.

Basically, if you can get to 20%, the next 20% becomes much easier, and at that point, combined with work from home, you're down to the cars that actually need to be there for one reason or another (deliveries, disabled people, etc.)

You know, I thought that but now that I've been riding an e-bike for about 3 months I completely disagree.

You can write about three times further on an e-bike than you can on a regular bicycle and still be 100% fine at your destination. It's basically a range extender for a bike.

But it also makes you go faster and makes you less tired, and you can conquer any hill no problem at a pretty good rate of speed. Not to mention that I can carry about 200 lb of cargo on my bike with no issue at all.

There are hills in my city that I cannot bicycle up. I would have to walk my bike. Find my e-bike, I can go uphill with 200 lb of cargo on the back no problem.

commuting without breaking a sweat is a big plus