james s. wood / arizona daily star

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Paul Durham went on a 5.5-mile errand and filled up for one cent.

His electric bicycles — he has two of them — have a range of at least 25 miles, depending on terrain, speed and how much muscle he contributes.

An electric bike is just the thing when he has to show up in slacks, dress shirt and a tie, and not soaked in sweat, says Durham, an attorney and former aide to City Councilwoman Nina Trasoff.

"It allowed me still to go places on a bicycle but not be uncomfortable or unattractive. That's why I originally did it," Durham said.

He bought the first bike in 2006 and got another one last year. His Giant Lite uses a motor connected to the pedals. His eZee Torq has a front-wheel-hub motor and is controlled by a motorcycle-type throttle grip, but on the left handlebar. The Giant Lite has a pedal-activated motor that turns a conventional bike chain attached to a four-speed rear hub.

Durham also has a bike trailer that can hold a substantial load of groceries. He sometimes makes shopping trips to the Costco several miles east of his home, near Grant and Country Club roads.

His diesel Volkswagen mostly sits in the driveway these days.

And that brings up another major attribute of the electric bike, says Durham — one that Downtown and University of Arizona commuters would appreciate. Besides passing gas stations along the way, he says a bike can be parked almost anywhere for free — maybe even inside, safely leaning up against a desk.

He's been riding electric bikes for more than a year, but even he was shocked to find out just exactly how cheap they are to operate. After keeping track of the mileage on an errand run, he plugged the bike's charger into a Kill A Watt power monitor that measured how much juice it took to top off the bike's battery. A year ago that would have been a nice conversational tidbit. Today, with gas approaching four bucks a gallon, it's hard not to gloat.

And so it is that Matt Zoll, another veteran-bicyclist-turned-electric-bike-user, has an even more rewarding way of calculating his new electric bike's savings. He figures his Schwinn Campus electric bike gets about 1,250 miles per gallon, based on what it costs him to recharge the battery when the alternative is $4 a gallon gas.

He says he can cruise along at about 19 miles per hour for 25 miles before needing to recharge. And while replacing the bike's lithium ion battery in 15,000 miles probably will cost him $500 he figures his cost per mile is still a mere 3 cents per mile, not counting the original purchase price. He bought his Schwinn from Ajo Bikes, 1301 E. Ajo Way, for $1,500 in May.

The price of most electric bikes ranges from $1,000 to more than $2,000.

Zoll figures the payback on an electric bike can take as little as three months, if you were to replace a car with one.

"If just on gas savings, I figured two years," Zoll says. "But it depends on how many miles you're driving."

And, he says, there are other benefits that are tough to quantify, such as easy parking and time saved. He says nearly any trip less than five miles can be done as quickly, or even quicker, on the electric bike — especially when parking Downtown is involved.

Like Durham, Zoll is a longtime, serious bicyclist, but he enjoys the electric for work because it means not showing up drenched in sweat, but still having the economic and most of the environmental benefits of not driving a car.

"I can cruise at about 19 mph, and all I need to do is keep the pedals turning around. I don't need to actually apply any physical pressure on them," said Zoll, director of bicycle and pedestrian programs for Pima County.

Durham got his bikes via mail order over a year ago, when they were an oddity. But several different models are now sold in town by bicycle shops.

Tanya Rose of Ajo Bicycles says there are plenty of models and types of electric bikes from which to choose. She said sales are picking up since gas prices spiked, and that the shop is sold out of one popular kit.

Ajo carries two Schwinn electrics priced at $1,500 and $1,700, and some kits that can be used to convert many regular pedal bikes to electric power, or electric assist. The kits, which vary greatly in price, use a hub motor that replaces a regular bike's traditional front hub.

Batteries for most electric bikes, whether factory equipment or retrofitted kits, usually are mounted either on the seat tube (the post that goes from the pedal crank bracket to the seat) or on a rack above the rear tire.

Ajo's Wilderness Energy electric bike kit, currently sold out, works with specific bikes and costs $700, plus $100 for installing its hub motor in the customer bike's front wheel.

The BionX electric bicycle kit ($1,700) is a bit different from most kits, in that it uses a rear hub motor.

Ajo also sells an electric-assist adult trike with a large basket for $1,000.

And there are other electric-assist bikes available from local dealers, as well as the Web outlets of big electric bike shops such as Seattle's Electric Bikes Northwest and New York's Nycewheels.

Durham says it sometimes turns heads when he effortlessly whizzes away from other bicyclists at stop signs — in slacks and tie, not breaking a sweat — on what appears to be a "fat" cruiser bike.

He may have even gotten the evil eye from the Spandex crowd a time or two.

"I had an interesting experience once pedaling across the the 'U' ", he said. "A fitness guy, with all the gear. I flew past him. At the stoplight at Third and Campbell he's looking at my bike. The light changes and he takes off. I'm staying behind him and he starts to tire, and I was . . . dressed in slacks and shirt."