Switching gears to tackle Sheffield's hills on an e-bike

“That sounds a lot for ‘a bicycle’, but we need now to be thinking of e-bikes in the same transportation costing bracket as cars, buses, and taxis rather than relative to ‘normal’ bikes,” he says.

“If your ‘car’ is an e-bike, it’s economical to buy, and very economical to run,” agrees Sheffield Council senior transport planner Paul Sullivan.

“You shouldn’t see an e-bike as a new bike, or a replacement for a bike. You should look at it as a replacement for a car.”

Staff at JE James Cycles and Russell’s Bicycle Shed in Sheffield say many more people are looking at the cost and time taken for city travel by car or bus, and choosing an e-bike instead.

Russell Cutts of Russell’s Bicycle Shed, says: “Two-car families are one of our target markets now.”

If you’re still not sure if an e-bike is the answer, ‘have a spin at a local trail centre to see how an e-bike feels’, suggests Richard, or borrow one from a local loan scheme.

Sheffield Council is preparing a new CycleBoost e-bike loan scheme with 185 e-bikes funded from the Department for Transport, which could be targeted at keyworkers, or people on lower incomes.

In the meantime, e-bikes can be hired at £15 a day for up to 10 days from Russell’s Bicycle Shed, with the cost of hire coming off any future purchase.

And the S-Cargo scheme run by A Different Gear will loan bigger e-cargo bikes for £20 a day or £100 a week.

If you do decide to buy, there are options to help, says Richard Attwood.

Many shops offer hire purchase schemes, often at 0 per cent. And some people buy a communal e-bike to share with friends or business colleagues.

There is also the government Cycle to Work scheme, offering a discount of 30 per cent or more to employees earning over the minimum wage. The purchase limit has now been extended to £2,000 or more, but not all schemes have caught up, so, Richard says, it is worth checking with your employer.

Although the self employed are technically excluded, some access the discounts by being employed by their own limited company. And JE James offers its own version of the scheme so most customers can take part. But Russell says Cycle to Work does not work for people on low incomes.

“If you’re on the minimum wage you can’t use it, and people who earn more get a higher discount," he says. “The benefits of the Cycle to Work scheme are skewed towards higher earners.”

Dame Sarah Storey, Sheffield City Region active travel commissioner, says that as more people take to cycling, there needs to be new options to enable more people to afford or loan cycles, such as removing VAT from bikes and e-bikes, for example.

She says: “Given the subsidy for people switching to electric vehicles it would make sense to ensure there is a financial incentive for people switching to push bikes and electric bikes. “Building activity back in to people's lives shouldn't be exclusively for those who can afford to buy a bike, and with about a third of households in South Yorkshire having no access to a car, and relying solely on public transport which currently has hugely reduced capacity, the affordability of transport is a real issue.

“It is important we don't exclude a huge portion of the population due to the costs involved in having a bike in the first place."But for many, the figures are beginning to add up, says Paul, who notes that modern transport modelling shows that a decent cycle network could mean 20 per cent of trips in Sheffield being made by bike, or 30 per cent if many of those bikes were e-bikes.

“A city like that will feel better to live and work in,” he says. “It will be cleaner and quieter. It will be a more sociable city.”

After the initial outlay, the mile for mile cost of e-biking is favourable compared with other means of getting about. E-bikes can carry you and any amount of shopping or stuff up to 50 miles or more, for just a few pence.

To find out more about e-bikes, the different models available and for all the latest information, see sheffieldcycleroutes.org/e-bikes