A future e-vehicle-filled Anchorage as envisioned by AGOGS Electric Bikes

Do electric motors truly make everything better?

The first great pandemic of the 21st Century is now winding down with nearly 1.2 million Americans reported dead, the vast majority of them having been medically compromised by chronic diseases, now more often called comorbidities, linked in large part to a lack of physical activity.

And the response to this from the political leaders of Alaska’s largest city is to motorize local “multi-use” trails designed for pedestrians and cyclists to make it easier for people to get around without engaging in physical activity.

Anchorage’s sociopolitical leadership is not alone in this behavior. Any number of U.S. cities are embracing so-called e-mobility as if electric motors were somehow different from those fueled by hydrocarbons.

They are in that they are quieter and produce slightly less pollution overall. They are not in that they contribute equally to the “sedentary lifestyle” that has become a plague on the Western World.

“Sedentary lives, the other global epidemic,” a publication of the World Bank headlined warned years before the pandemic arrived to kill the physically unfit. Below the headline was written this:

“A man leaves home to go to work. When he reaches the bus stop, he discovers that it has been relocated two blocks further away. In his office building, he learns that the elevators only stop on every fourth floor. Later, when he goes shopping, he finds that the store has turned off all the escalators.

“This individual will probably be annoyed that he has to do with his two feet what technology previously did. Additionally, these new arrangements mean that he has to spend more time to reach his work or to go shopping. But these changes could be saving his life.

“Sedentary lifestyles kill some 5.3 million people every year, according to the WHO, and with the increase and aging of the population, these lifestyles will become increasingly common….”

A lot of the people in this country’s aging population are now dead. Up until death, most of them managed to live free of those healthful annoyances the World Bank suggested might head off these deaths.

The Centers for Disease Control’s latest report puts almost 94 percent of the dead over the age of 50 with nearly all of them suffering from some medical issues prior to being infected by the newly evolved SARS-CoV-2 virus.

“For over 5 percent of these deaths, Covid-19 was the only cause mentioned on the death certificate. For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to Covid-19, on average, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death,” the agency has reported.

These multimorbidities as they are now being called tend to accumulate in people who ignore exercise as they age.

Enough was known about the connection between chronic diseases, lack of physical activity and death that researchers writing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine a dozen years ago declared that “although more research will increase our understanding of the effect of exercise on the pathophysiology of chronic disease…enough is now known about its benefits that it is irresponsible and unethical to not advocate for its widespread adoption.”

Irresponsible and unethical

Some of the same might be said about political decisions that have the effect of removing incentives to exercise. They might not be unethical, but they are certainly irresponsible, especially when they are pitched as somehow “helping” the citizenry.

This was the pitch made for motorizing Anchorage trails, the argument being that some people can’t use and enjoy them because of their limited fitness. This is true, but it is an argument for providing exemptions for the use of motorized equipment for the disabled – old or young.

It is not, as the Anchorage Assembly decided in all its wisdom, a justification for throwing the trails open to the use of all sorts of motorized vehicles – e-bikes, e-scooters, Onewheels, e-trikes and more – for young and old alike.

Onewheel riders outfitted in full-face helmets plus body armor and looking like human projectiles about to be shot out of a cannon are now as welcome on the trails as elder walkers.

Though the assembly was told there have already been collisions involving fast-moving motorized vehicles on these trails, the health consequences of this move to motorization have gone largely undiscussed.

One can only wonder what the late Gov. Wally Hickel, a regular walker on the Coastal Trail almost up until the time of his death at age 90, might have said. Or the late Lanie Fleisher, who some consider the “Mother of the Trail System.”

Both were big advocates of maintaining physical activity throughout life.

“I am convinced that if you don’t use your body and care for it, it gets rusty,” the conservative former governor wrote in a column for the Anchorage Daily News not long before his death. “You literally ‘use it or lose it.’ No matter what your age, you’ve got to keep your body moving.”

Anchorage’s current political leaders appear to disagree.

Although happy to order the citizenry to wear masks to “save lies” only a couple of years ago, assembly members just couldn’t bring themselves to encourage people to use their muscles to “save lives” no matter what the science says.

Meanwhile, the “listen to the scientists” crowd that ranted about the need for lockdowns, masks and vaccines only a few years ago was nowhere to be found even though the science supporting the idea that something needs to be done to get Americans moving is much stronger than what little science there is to support lockdowns and community masking.

“Two decades of a sedentary lifestyle is associated with a two times risk of premature death compared to being physically active,” Norwegian researchers told the  World Congress of Cardiology in 2019 after completing a peer-reviewed study in that country.

“Is Your Sedentary Lifestyle Killing You? New Study Says Yes,” Medscape headlined just days ago. This time the data came from Australia where researchers found that “the risk for all-cause mortality was 47 percent higher in participants with lower engagement in physical activity and higher sitting time.”

A March study published in the peer-reviewed British Journal of Sports Medicine did optimistically report that among those who sit a lot, often because their jobs require them to do so, the potentially deadly consequences of the sedentary lifestyle can be minimized or possibly even eliminated by upping the use of one’s muscles at other times.

“Accruing 9,000 to 10,500 steps per day was associated with the lowest mortality risk independent of sedentary time,” those researchers concluded. The study made a strong argument for Anchorage residents walking or cycling to work on city trails rather than motoring there.

“Our findings,” the researchers wrote, “emphasize the importance of increasing daily steps particularly among adults who are highly sedentary….Among the high sedentary time group, being sufficiently active through daily step accumulation may ameliorate downstream effects of sedentary time, lowering the risk of developing comorbidities and subsequently leading to lower mortality risk.”

There are a variety of online charts now available, such as this one from MIT, that can be used to convert the minutes of everything from “aerobic dance class” to “Zumba” into steps. None of them offer conversion factors for e-bikes, e-scooters or any of the other e-devices designed to allow people to get around on trails and sidewalks without the use of many or any muscles.

E-exercise

Some studies of e-bikes have concluded that they can help increase physical activity levels, but those studies come with a huge caveat.

“Electric bicycles with battery-powered assist may overcome barriers to active transportation (i.e., time and perceived effort) (and) benefit cardiometabolic health,” researchers reported in the Translational Journal of the American College of Sports Medicine in 2021. 

The key words there were “battery-powered assist.”

Increasing numbers of e-bikes have abandoned the need for anyone to pedal them in favor of throttles similar to those on motorcycles. This allows people to go cycling without pedaling.

Onewheels, electric skateboards and longboards require no physical assistance, and many other electric-motor-powered devices often promoted as “mobility devices” – such as “quad bikes,” – may or may not have pedals to assist with propulsion and add exercise.

In the interest of public health, Anchorage could have banned all fully powered, motorized vehicles from the city’s multi-use trails with a simple ordinance basically saying that “if you’re not pedaling or walking, you’re not welcome,” but it didn’t.

Such an ordinance would have been easy to enforce since walking and pedaling, even if someone is just soft-pedaling to keep the motor on their e-bike engaged, are easily visible activities.

The Anchorage Assembly’s response was to opt for an ordinance hard to enforce in a city where law enforcement of any kind on municipal trails is already near non-existent.

The Anchorage Police Department tried to warn the assembly members against this, explaining that “it can be difficult to tell a high-speed e-bike for a low-speed e-bike…(and( if an e-bike has pedals, an officer would have to inspect the e-bike for motor size and the ability to power itself independent of the pedals.”

In a city where the police department is so busy for the past decade it has never had the time to ticket a motorist for close-passing a cyclist on an Anchorage street – something that happens on a daily basis – it has to be considered a given that no time is going to be devoted to trying to differentiate legal and illegal e-bikes on municipal trails.

But assembly members, in all their wisdom, decided that to ignore this and chose, as Estonia-based AGOGS Electric Bicycles put it, to align itself with “modern mobility trends.”

Yes, it is a small world.

The Anchorage Assembly had barely acted before AGOGS was online with a spiffy, artist’s rendition of Alaska’s largest city and a headline declaring “Advancing Electric Mobility: Anchorage’s New Frontier.”

“The vibrancy of Anchorage’s trails is shifting as electric assisted bicycles and scooters roll in, transforming the city’s landscape,” John Washington wrote for the AGOGS website. “Gone are vague boundaries: now, many types of e-scooters are cleared for trail usage, enveloping the city in a wave of electric propulsion…

“As Anchorage propels forward into a new era of urban mobility, the landscape of its trails is poised for transformation, driven by the hum of electric motors and the promise of a more connected, sustainable future.”

For AGOGS, obviously, this was mainly about business:

“Industry Overview: The electric micromobility industry in Anchorage is experiencing significant growth with the introduction of electric-assisted bicycles and scooters. These innovative modes of transport are reshaping the city’s landscape and providing residents with new options for navigating urban areas.

“Market Forecasts: Market forecasts indicate a promising future for electric micromobility in Anchorage, as the city embraces e-scooters and electric bicycles. With the introduction of new regulations and the adoption of a three-class system to categorize electric-assisted bicycles, the market is expected to see an increase in shared micromobility programs and self-service rentals.”

The simple translation is that lazy Americans offer a perfect market for anything you can power with an electric motor given that somehow motorized vehicles powered by electricity are considered different from motorized vehicles powered by hydrocarbons even if they perform exactly the same.

Bye-bye pedestrians

Anchorage’s leaders embraced this sort of thinking with little consideration of history.

Americans have been here before. The country’s roads were owned by pedestrians and cyclists before they were pushed onto to sidewalks and road shoulders/bike lanes by motorized vehicles.

“When the first electric car emerged in Britain in the 19th century, the speed limit was set at four miles an hour so a man could run ahead with a flag, warning citizens of the oncoming menace,” Clive Thompson has written in Smithsonian Magazine.

But “things changed dramatically in 1908 when Henry Ford released the first Model T. Suddenly a car was affordable, and a fast one, too: The Model T could zoom up to 45 miles an hour. Middle-class families scooped them up, mostly in cities, and as they began to race through the streets, they ran headlong into pedestrians – with lethal results. By 1925, auto accidents accounted for two-thirds of the entire death toll in cities with populations over 25,000.”

The reaction was, at first, an outcry against what the New York Times labeled “the homicidal orgy of the motor car.”

But what Thompson described as “a clever and witty public-relations campaign” launched by the fledgling automobile industry eventually changed the tone.

“Their most brilliant stratagem: To popularize the term ‘jaywalker,'” Thompson wrote. “The term derived from ‘jay,’ a derisive term for a country bumpkin. In the early 1920s, ‘jaywalker’ wasn’t very well known.

“So pro-car forces actively promoted it, producing cards for Boy Scouts to hand out warning pedestrians to cross only at street corners. At a New York safety event, a man dressed like a hayseed was jokingly rear-ended over and over again by a Model T.

“In the 1922 Detroit safety week parade, the Packard Motor Car Company produced a huge tombstone float” that blamed jaywalkers, not drivers, for the carnage in the streets.

The campaign was so successful that by the 1930s, motor vehicles had almost fully taken over the roads, and by the time traffic engineers got around to computer modeling traffic flows in the 1960s, they didn’t bother to factor pedestrians into the models, which is a big reason why it is hard to walk around large parts of some American cities and suburbs these days.

The machines took over everyone’s thinking and made a mess of getting around in way other than with machines. And now Anchorage has decided to grant the machines free reign on the multi-use trails once reserved for people.

One can’t help but ask how long before the next PR campaign begins to get the pedestrians and pedal cyclists out of the way.

All that is needed, it would seem, is a label to hang on these slow-moving trail obstructions. Maybe someone could start by recruiting Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and other youth groups to hand out placards warning pedestrians to use only sidewalks.

Those are largely non-existent in all but the older parts of the city, but where they do exist, they are little used. Wouldn’t it be common sense to tell pedestrians to use those rather than clog up e-traffic on the multi-use trails?

How long can it be before the municipality goes all in to meet the demands of the e-crowd it is helping to create and relabels these trails as “e-routes” which others can use at their own risk like cyclists now do on roads everywhere in Alaska? 

And if the consequences of all this are that Americans can continue to grow ever unhealthier, well, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The healthcare industry is now the country’s largest employer, according to the U.S. Census, and it’s still growing.

“Overall employment in healthcare occupations is projected to grow much faster than the average for all occupations from 2022 to 2032,” according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. “About 1.8 million openings are projected each year, on average, in these occupations due to employment growth and the need to replace workers who leave the occupations permanently.”

Healthcare is today a big business in the U.S., and this remains very much a capitalist country, meaning business is “good” even if it is killing us. A skeptic might look at this and wonder about the wide variety of incentives now offered to Americans to keep them unhealthy and supporting the health-care industry.

But it’s nonsense to suspect conspiracies when simple ignorance so easily explains how we got here. Americans have become so addicted to what one might call “comfort” that they seem largely unable to recognize their lifestyle choices are killing them.

Editor’s note: The author of this story is a fan of e-bikes and part of a family with an e-bike. He believes they are great devices for getting around on roads and could do great things to reduce traffic congestion and hydrocarbon emissions in many communities. As with any new technology, however, it has to be recognized that they present questions of how, where and when they should be employed.