[bscphil]

> And obviously, caveat lector: there are huge assumptions going on here, because the "real" cost of stuff like food and batteries aren't trivial to calculate at all. It's not like you can feed em both the same resources anyhow, so at best this is an analysis that the efficiency is sort of comparable. In 2004.

This is what I was thinking as well. My naive guess is that the extra energy expended to build an electric bike blows the efficiency improvement completely out of the water. It would take a truly enormous amount of usage to make up the difference in the expected lifetime of the battery (which then has to be efficiently recycled, else it's yet another environmental hazard).

Of course the real issue is the fact that I can't travel even 1km toward my workplace on a bike without seriously fearing for my life. Cities in the United States are extremely unfriendly to bikes.