In our last column, we talked about sustainable movement and the fact that bicycling is the most energy-efficient, human-powered means of transportation. But what if you want to go a longer distance with a little help?

You might find an electric bicycle or e-bike even more fun. Small motors and batteries can easily be added to bicycles. This makes them much more powerful and convenient than purely pedal-powered vehicles while remaining almost as sustainable.

Before buying an electric vehicle (EV) that weighs a ton or more and costs more than the average annual earnings of a full-time worker, there’s another way to electrify your ride that could save you tens of thousands of dollars and provide many years of enjoyment.

A whole new class of vehicles, “micro” EVs (e-bikes, e-mopeds, e-scooters, etc.) that weigh less than their riders and cost less than a week’s wage, are already having a major impact on cities across North America. Electric “micromobility” might not be quite as sustainable as pure pedal power, but it’s a close second.

In general, “e-micromobility” means an electric motorized wheeled vehicle with a pedal assist or hand throttle that you can ride by standing or sitting. These vehicles usually weigh less than a person and can carry a payload of hundreds of pounds. Prices range from about $500 to $5,000 or more if you’d like to buy a brand-new stand-up e-scooter, e-bike, e-trike, e-moped, or sit-down e-scooter. Next time you’re visiting a city with a shared micromobility system, why not take a trip on a rented e-bike or e-scooter to see how it goes?

E-micromobility vehicles are vastly more efficient and capable pound-per-pound than larger personal vehicles and a tow-behind cargo trailer turns an e-bike into a practical utility vehicle. Imagine doing all your errands with an e-bike and piling groceries and other items in a trailer behind your e-bike. This would improve your sustainability considerably (and increase your fun).

On average, we take four trips per day, with a “trip” defined as “a movement that includes a stay of longer than 10 minutes at a location away from home.” We use a car or larger personal vehicle for more than 80% of our trips, according to the 2017 National Household Travel Survey, even though more than half of our daily trips are less than 3 miles, according to a research study for the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

For about one in 10 trips, we walk; about one in 20, we ride public transit; and about one in 100, we ride a bike.

Powerful and efficient micro EVs make completing most of our trips possible using less time, energy, material, and money. With an electric motor assist, per minute of travel time, we can go six to ten times as far as we can walking and about twice as far as pedaling unassisted. We can also carry or pull heavier loads without breaking a sweat.

Riding our own vehicle is more convenient than public transit since we can go exactly where and when we need to go. Compared to large multi-passenger personal vehicles designed for high-speed travel on highways (and especially compared to electric personal vehicles), e-bikes and their ilk make much more efficient use of material and money. We could build more than 700 e-bikes with the batteries from a single large EV truck. Seven hundred people could use these 700 e-bikes to complete more than 1,400 daily trips.

An e-bike is more than a hundred times more affordable than the price of a new car, starting at around $400. For the price of one full-size EV, we could buy 138 e-bikes. Not only are they cheaper to buy, but unlike automobiles or motorcycles, most e-bikes don’t require paying registration fees.

E-micromobility helps us stretch every dollar while still getting to work, to school, to the store, and to visit friends and family. Every time we choose to use e-micromobility instead of a full-size vehicle, it lowers energy costs for everyone (by reducing the demand for transportation fuel and electricity) and improves traffic (by taking one more car off the road).

Fred Horch and Peggy Siegle are principals of Sustainable Practice. To receive expert action guides to help your household and organizations become superbly sustainable, visit SustainablePractice.Life and subscribe to “One Step This Week.”