After two full weeks of disturbing news (in terms of both daily life and externality research), I am attempting (at least) to bring our readers with some good news.

Since the beginning of this COVID 19 pandemic, even when it is still a regional pandemic in China, academics have been studying some novel externalities resulting from this crisis, both good and bad. Now as China has been enjoying stable, "normal" life routine for a considerable amount of time, finally some good externalities have popped up in relation to road, rail, and airborne transportation.

First of all, pollution. More than one study has pointed out visible decline of pollution since the national lockdown of China, including the work of Okyere et al. (2021). In fact, not just has fossil-fuel burning long-range transportation declined, causing reduction in traffic pollution; the national lockdown in China has made grocery and meal delivery ever more popular. Since most delivery within urban regions are carried out by electric bicycles that run on simple, rechargeable lithium batteries, intra-urban fuel burning and pollution has also reduced. With smaller per-product production externality from factories, such lithium-battery powered e-bikes is a great cut-back from families driving to restaurants. On the other hand, the electricity supply of China is still heavily reliant on fossil fuel burning, especially coal burning (Yuan et al., 2018). Dominance of high green house gas intensity power sources within Chinese electricity supply structure inevitably means reducing marginal positive externality revenue for more electric bikes on the road. Yet we are rather far from reaching the balance point.

Criticism may rise against my point above, but given that residents in China have greatly reduced the frequency of going out for meals, e-bikes do pose much less negative externalities than both fossil fuel cars and electric cars (because the batteries for e-cars are much more complicated than the ones used for e-bikes). They require much less power, are (much) more flexible in urban setting, and have been in service for way longer than most electric vehicles. Maybe e-bikes should be seriously introduced to other countries aiming at reducing urban transportation externalities.

References

Okyere, M. A., Forson, R., & Essel-Gaisey, F. (2020). Positive externalities of an epidemic: The case of the coronavirus (COVID-19) in China. Journal of Medical Virology, 92(9), 1376–1379. https://doi.org/10.1002/jmv.25830

Yuan, J., Na, C., Lei, Q., Xiong, M., Guo, J., & Hu, Z. (2018). Coal use for power generation in China. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 129, 443–453. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2016.03.021