“Colorado is offering $450 e-bike subsidies. Other states should too”

Benjamin Schneider, at FastCompany:

“Of course, the biggest barrier to bike or e-bike adoption is street safety. But the best way to build a constituency for bikeable streets is to flood the zone with bikes, creating a virtuous cycle where more cyclists vividly justify the need for better bike infrastructure. That’s what New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and San Francisco have done through their popular bikeshare programs. Scooter share services have had a similar, albeit somewhat lesser, effect in smaller cities across the country.”

Where we live, bike access on our main corridor is spotty at best, and there are a couple of intersections that are downright scary. That said, there are a lot more people on e-bikes these days, and I love the idea of “flooding the zone” to motivate our local governments to enhance infrastructure.

On top of road infrastructure, I think that supermarkets and other shopping destinations could differentiate themselves in a positive—and I’d bet financially meaningful—way by creating first-class, secure parking for e-bikes.

“Poor infrastructure notwithstanding, e-bikes are popular: Americans purchased more e-bikes than cars in 2022. And e-bike subsidy programs are a hit wherever they’ve been offered. Connecticut’s program was oversubscribed in three days. Tampa received five times more applications than it could afford. Denver’s program was so inundated by applications when it opened that it needed to be paused.”

2022 was under the extreme influence of the pandemic, including the very high price of cars at the time, but this is still a great stat.