Today’s modern cities are still seriously lacking in effective ways to move people around quickly and efficiently. There are several reasons to move to an electrified 2 wheeler and these are just some of them.

Congestion

This is the obvious one. The average British driver spends 32 hours stuck in traffic jams (42 for Americans) every year which is the equivalent of wasting 4 full work days. This number is increasing and is up over 15% since 2011 and looking at current trends, isn’t going to change anytime soon. When you think about it, you are paying thousands of pounds a year for the privilege to sit in traffic burning fuel and time that you will never get back. The UK isn’t even the worst place to be stuck in traffic, after commuting in a car in Beijing, I don’t even want to know how much of my life I have wasted in the traffic.

Sitting in traffic is unhealthy

If you take away the idea that you are sitting on your ass for the duration of your stay in gridlock, the fact that you are sitting amongst a number of oil burning engines pumping out CO2, NOX and unburn hydrocarbons is pretty scary. Researchers have shown that drivers stuck in traffic were exposed to up to 29 times more harmful pollution particles than those driving in free-flowing traffic. The switch to electric vehicles and renewable energy will greatly reduce the pollution inhaled but there is still a fair amount of time before we reach that point. Until then, getting out of that cluster of fumes as quickly as possible is the best way to keep those fumes out of your lungs.

Parking

Trying to park a car in a city today is a nightmare. When a free space finally does become free, you have to pay an arm and a leg to dump your 2-ton metal machine. Did you forget to pay or overstay your payment? Just stopping for a minute? Enjoy a hefty parking ticket if you are lucky enough to live in a country that won’t clamp your car or tow it away. Parking is not a problem for those of us on 2 wheels.





Public transport is too expensive, over capacity or ineffective.

In an ideal world, everyone would use public transport to get to their destination but that is not the world we live in. Don’t get me wrong, there are certainly public transport systems that work very well but that is not the case for a lot of cities worldwide.

When I lived in Aberdeen up in Scotland, you only had one public transport option; the bus and it was horrendously slow, overpriced and unreliable. Your journey would take almost double the amount of time compared to a car from outside the city and an Adult return ticket would cost roughly the same as the amount of fuel to drive in a smaller car. They were frequently late and breakdowns were not uncommon.

The public transport system in Beijing is the polar opposite. When I first moved to China, I couldn’t believe how cheap and vast the subway system was but it didn’t take long to realise that everyone else in China knew this. During rush hour, commuters are literally cramming themselves into the carriages to the extent it is difficult to breath. The buses are a similar experience apart from the journey times increasing dramatically due to the legendary Beijing traffic. The concept of weaving through traffic on an electric motorcycle is a much more appealing than being crammed into a bus or subway like a sardine.

New transport infrastructure is incredibly expensive and slow to complete.

The sheer cost of building a new road, railway line or subway is horrendous. Just to build 1 mile of a US freeway costs around $11 million. Governments will try to find any other method to reduce congestion on a road before investing in new transport infrastructure projects. It just makes sense that they would do this because of course if you could avoid building something that has a high initial cost and will need expensive maintenance.





The efforts to not build new roads/rail or subway does nothing but increase the time it takes for your average driver just trying to go about their daily grid unless they decide to use that hefty government plug in incentive to buy a 2 wheeled EV instead of an electric car.

Environmental benefits

Modern Lithium-Ion batteries used in the automotive industry are designed to last the lifetime of the vehicle they are fitted to. There is a common misconception that once the batteries have lost some of their charging capacity, they are useless and need to be disposed of but in reality they are still usable for home energy storage. For example, the battery pack in an Evoke Urban S electric motorcycle can handle 1000 charge cycles before they lose 20% charging capacity. This works out to be 200,000km and when is the last time you saw a bike that managed that sort of mileage? The batteries in these bikes greatly outlast the usable lifetime of the rest of the bike so you have a high-grade battery pack with more than 80% charge capacity when the bike is taken off the road. That battery can still be used for many years as an energy storage solution in a home or business with solar panels, small wind turbines or even a user looking to buy electricity during off peak hours.

When you also take into consideration that there is one moving part in an electric motor, there are a lot of replacement parts and fluids that will be saved over the lifetime of the bike let alone the components saved during manufacture.

These are just some of the reasons why we need to move to another form of transport in this overpopulated world. An Evoke Urban S is the first affordable electric motorcycle that can skip through the traffic and pollution without contributing to it. This doesn’t even touch on the enjoyment of riding a motorcycle over crawling along in a car or being crammed into a bus.

With so many governments pushing for electric vehicles with various incentives and tax cuts, why pay for 4 wheels when 2 gives you so much more.