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All Bikes Are Cheating

By Erik Noonan

Somewhere on a Minnesota trail this weekend, a very serious rider in full kit on a carbon road bike got passed by someone on an e-bike and muttered the familiar line: e-bikes are cheating.

I agree. All bikes are cheating. Literally every single one.

The bicycle is one of the most efficient machines people have ever built. A person on a bike covers more ground on less energy than a person walking, and more than nearly any animal moving under its own power. Gears multiply the force of your legs. Ball bearings make friction nearly disappear. Air-filled tires smooth out the road. Every derailleur, freewheel, clipless pedal and aero helmet is a mechanical advantage someone engineered so you could go farther with less work. Nobody on a 17-pound bike with 22 gears gets to be a purist about assistance.

An electric motor is one more augment in that long line. What matters is what it lets people do.

E-bike riders are exercising

A 2018 systematic review in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity found that e-biking delivers at least moderate-intensity physical activity, less than a conventional bike but more than walking, and that it can improve cardiorespiratory fitness in people who had been inactive. A 2022 meta-analysis in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports reached the same conclusion across heart rate, oxygen uptake and energy burned. Moderate intensity is exactly what federal and World Health Organization guidelines ask adults to get for 150 minutes a week.

Minute for minute, a conventional bike works you harder. But your body counts what you do across a week, not on a single ride. The PASTA study surveyed more than 10,000 people in seven European cities and found that e-bike riders got about as much weekly physical activity as conventional cyclists (4,463 MET-minutes a week versus 4,085), because their trips were nearly twice as long: 5.8 miles versus 3.

The honest comparison is the car

E-bikes mostly don’t replace road bikes. They replace car trips.

Time spent driving is time spent sitting. A 2004 study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that each additional daily hour in a car was associated with 6% higher odds of obesity.

A 2017 BMJ study of more than 263,000 working adults in the UK found that people who commuted by bike had about half the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, and a 41% lower risk of dying from any cause, compared with people who drove or took transit. That research looked at conventional bikes; we don’t have decades of e-bike data yet. But the mechanism is the same: regular, moderate activity built into trips you already make. A six-mile e-bike commute takes about half an hour each way. Do it three days a week and you’ve cleared the weekly guideline before setting foot in a gym.

For many riders, the motor is access

My work has allowed me to meet countless people who are benefiting from the accessibility that e-bikes deliver. But in truth, I had already met many before I ever started here at BikeMN. You almost certainly have people in your life who could extoll the benefits to you as well.

Dr. Mary Jones, a retired Mayo Clinic pulmonary physician, was first told she “probably” had multiple sclerosis while she was in medical school. A severe flare-up in 1994 took away her full balance and strength, and today she walks only short distances with forearm crutches. She assumed her days of biking outdoors were over. Then her husband, retired physician Dr. Paul Claus, fitted a donated adult tricycle with pedal assist and an electric motor through his volunteer work with We Bike Rochester. Mary calls it life-changing. The couple rode 1,000 miles together in both 2021 and 2022, and they still ride three seasons a year, out for hours at a time, with Mary’s service dog, Misty, riding in a wooden box between the rear wheels.

My friend Ed Denbow, a retired prosthetics expert in Rochester, has probably forgotten more bicycle adventures than most of us will ever get to have. After a stroke left him with less strength on one side of his body, he’s kept riding, on an e-bike.

I ride every day, mostly on an acoustic bike. In my early twenties, I injured my knees in military training, and some days they flare up. On those days, my e-bike is the difference between riding and not riding.

None of us is unusual. In Portland State University’s national survey of e-bike owners, nearly a third reported a physical condition that makes riding a standard bike difficult, most often knee problems, arthritis, asthma or back pain.

Anna Zivarts, a low-vision parent, nondriver, author of When Driving Is Not an Option and keynote speaker at BikeMN’s 2025 E-Bike Policy Summit, wrote for Streets.mn about low-vision riders who depend on e-bikes because they can’t drive. She argues that the insistence that pedaling is what legitimizes an e-bike reflects the ableism and fitness culture that persist in the bike world. She also warns that proposals to require licenses or insurance for e-bikes would shut out the people who rely on them most, because someone who can’t pass the vision test can’t get a license.

We have built a state where getting almost anywhere requires a car, and where not having the option to use one, because of disability, age, cost or choice, means being shut out. That burden falls hardest on disabled Minnesotans, older adults, low-income families and communities of color. E-bikes are one of the few tools that chip away at that injustice now, without waiting decades for a bus line. Calling them cheating misses who is being cheated.

Longer trips, more trips, different trips

Distance is the wall most people hit. Researchers at Portland State have long observed that trips over about five miles are a barrier on a conventional bike; e-bike trips in their surveys averaged around nine. In their first national survey, roughly two-thirds of owners said they bought an e-bike to replace car trips.

That wall is highest outside the urban core. In the suburbs, home, school, work and the grocery store are often miles apart and separated by wide arterials. In rural Minnesota and small towns, the nearest store or the next town over can be well beyond an easy ride. Hills stack on top of distance: in Duluth, a rider can face a 500-feet of climbing between home and the grocery store. Electric assist is increasingly closing those gaps, turning trips that only made sense by car into trips people can make by bike.

Families are doing exactly that: hauling kids to school and daycare on cargo e-bikes, making the big-box store run with a week of groceries in the bags, getting to work without needing a shower on arrival. Rochester City Council Member Nick Miller and his family have brought their Christmas tree home by e-cargo bike for years. Those trips were never going to happen on a road bike. They were going to happen in a car.

More riders make every rider stronger

More people, and more kinds of people, riding more kinds of trips changes what our streets have to do. A retired physician on an e-trike, a parent with two kids in a cargo box and a commuter crossing a suburban arterial should not have to mix with 45 mph traffic behind a stripe of paint. As e-bikes grow the number and diversity of riders, demand for quality protected bike infrastructure grows with them, and so does the pressure on decision-makers to build it. BikeMN is all in on protected infrastructure, because it gives everyone who now has the means to ride a safe place to do it.

Everyone who loves riding wants more trails, safer streets and more room on the road. Every new e-bike rider is another voice asking for protected bike lanes, another constituent showing up for the next trail, another reason for a city council to fund the next connection. The rider who passes you on the trail is on your side.

So yes, e-bikes are cheating. So is your bike. Welcome them to the people-powered, human-scale revolution.


Minnesota is a national leader in forward-thinking transportation policy — and that didn’t happen by chance. For over 17 years, BikeMN has been at the table, fight after fight, shaping a future where biking, walking, and rolling is safe, accessible, and valued. That work is funded by members like you. Join as a sustaining supporter today at bikemn.org/join — $5 or $10 a month helps ensure Minnesota stays ahead. We all move forward together

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