Frequently asked questions
E-Bike City is designed for all types of movement, including public transport, walking, and micromobility such as scooters, bikes, e-bikes and cargo bikes. There will still be road space for cars, but this space will be greatly reduced. Micromobility modes occupy much less street space than cars so we aim to make more space for more people to travel safely and efficiently in micromobility. Bikes and e-bikes allow more people to move around while still transporting necessary items like groceries and children to destinations throughout the city (typically 10km or less). We call it E-Bike City because e-bikes have a high potential of pushing towards a future of sustainable mobility.
This is of course in combination with the well-known potential of conventional bikes, and public transport. The idea of E-Bike City is also about providing people a higher quality of life by reducing noise and air pollution through fewer cars while increasing physical activity by encouraging other, active modes of transportation (e.g. walking, biking, e-biking).
Overall, the use of e-bikes increases the frequency and duration of riding a bike compared to conventional cycling and may help overcome barriers associated with conventional cycling (e.g. hills, long distances, physical effort). One study shows that e-bikes used for commuting typically replace conventional bikes and private cars. E-Bike City aims to encourage people living in cities to substitute their car trips with trips with a bike or e-bike. For many people living in a hilly city like Zurich, an e-bike is a more realistic solution for daily transportation as it has similar capabilities of a car with their higher speed potential, ability to travel longer distances, capacity to carry heavy loads up hills, and potential to reduce physical effort when needed.
The redesign of the roads prioritises the safety of pedestrians and micromobility users such as bikes, e-bikes, scooters, etc. E-Bike City aims to ensure that all ages are safe while using the street. This will be achieved in 3 ways:
- By building separated infrastructure where possible,
- where modes must mix, we aim to reduce the speed of cars (and other street users, such as fast e-bikes) and the number of cars using the road,
- the cycling infrastructure will be designed to minimise the danger of single cyclist accidents by, for instance, making sure that cyclists can safely swerve to recover from momentary instability.
These improvements will increase safety not just for adults, but also for young and old alike.
No, all modes of transport will still be available.
We encourage cycling and e-biking as well as riding an e-scooter for those who live in a reasonable distance of where they need to travel. We encourage biking as the final link in your transportation journey, i.e. taking the train/S-Bahn to the city then getting on a bike to reach your final destination which may be 1-5 kms from your train stop.
Most major cities in Switerland offer public e-scooter and e-bike sharing system subscriptions so you don't need to buy an e-bike, but you may just prefer to own an e-bike so it is more accessible. One study in Norway found that people who purchased an e-bike increased their bicycle use from 2.1 km to 9.2 km per day on average, representing a change to biking from only 17% of all of their trips to 49%.
Within the city there are many people in a very small area. In this urban context, the space taken up by moving and parked vehicles is much more efficiently utilised when filled with small bikes rather than big cars. An e-bike takes up very little space and often gets you to places faster than a car in the city, and does this without making you sweat when you ride up hills. The idea is to allow as many people as possible (of all fitness levels and ages) to get around the city safely and conveniently by using modes of transportation that take up less space than the car. By reducing cars on the road there is more space for people using more efficient modes (bikes, e-bikes, scooters, as well as walking and public transport). E-Bike City aims to increase the supply (amount) of street space designated for micromobility to encourage people to use it. By shifting the number of people using cars into public transport or micromobility, we decrease the street space wasted by parked cars and moving cars transporting fewer than two people. This decreases the overall demand placed on road space. Simply put, E-Bike City aims to redesign streets to move more people in less space.
In an E-Bike City, we are exploring which regulatory changes coupled with new design approaches (much wider bicycle lanes and more of them) could ensure safer e-biking and overall safer roads. One possible regulation is to lower the speed limits for cars on most roads. Another is to also set a speed limt for the bicycle lanes in certain areas. A third possible regulation being investigated is forbidding fast e-bikes (s-pedelecs, capble of up to 45 kph) from using cycle lanes in certain areas.
Beyond regulatory measures, infrastructure design will ensure fewer accidents. For instance, wider cycling infrastructure will allow safe overtaking between users travelling at different speeds, helping to decrease the conflicts between different micromoblity users. Wider lanes also provide better maneuverability and less interactions with moving cars and less surprises from parked cars, which also improves safety.
In any case, a licence plate and moped license is still required for any e-bike that can reach a speed of 45kph, but the amount of room given to e-bikes will will be much wider than what is available today. The mix of fast ebikes, slower e-bikes, conventional bikes, e-scooters and cargo bikes will be less compllicated as the road space will be greatly increased for more people to move at varying speeds.
The E-Bike City aims to benefit everyone from pedestrians to public transport users and users of all types of micromobility. So if biking is not possible for whatever reason, you will still be able to get around and experience benefits from the redesigned, safer and greener streets. Everyone will benefit from less car noise, especially at night while you are sleeping, improved air quality, and a greener, vibrant city. Learning to ride a bike is part of primary education in Switzerland. Nevertheless, people who are out of practice or never learned how to ride elsewhere will be encouraged to take lessons to feel safe riding.
Yes, they are, but this needs to be considered in the bigger picture. E-Bike City is promoting a circular economy approach to help to mitigate environmental problems as they aim to reduce the emphasis on primary production and hence, reduce environmental impacts. The overall demand of resources needed for battery production is inherently lower on e-bikes due to the reduced size of the batteries in comparison to other uses like electric vehicles. For example, one typical electric car battery uses the same amount of battery cells as you could use to build over 100 e-bike batteries. The E-Bike City project is also assessing battery production and end-of-life scenarios from an environmental perspective.
In a truly sustainable urban environment with a lot of people using their bikes, bicycle traffic congestion can indeed happen. One of the goals of the E-Bike City is to ensure a congestion-free travel experience for cyclists by allocating enough road space to micromobility such as bikes, e-bikes, e-scooters and cargo bikes.
Public transport remains a priority in the E-Bike City as it safely moves a lot of people fast and far in a small amount of space. We aim to ensure that quality of service does not decline and that public transport will be able to handle strong fluctuations in demand, such as when bike and e-bike riders choose to take the bus on rainy days.