E-Bike Adoption & Infrastructure: Not a Chicken or Egg Scenario

February 23, 2023

In order to transform our communities to be more walkable, bike friendly places, it's a dual battle of incentivizing more people to ride (more frequently) and making people feel safe while doing so. The former is relatively easy to implement but can only go so far if the latter is not addressed.

With the influx of federal funding now available to city planners and engineers, every community in America should be submitting grant applications for funding more bike and pedestrian infrastructure projects, because in reality, the most amount of funding ever is now available, while bicycling and micromobility adoption and usage is increasing. Of course, the majority of these projects are not implemented overnight, and PeopleForBikes does an amazing job outlining funding opportunities and highlighting some current projects: https://lnkd.in/eYSkGapU

David Zipper's great piece on the flourishing of e-bike incentives, https://lnkd.in/eFJt65Rj, shows that e-bike incentives are working to get people to drive less and introduce more people to cycling and less reliance on the automobile. In the case of Denver, about 1,000 survey respondents who bought an e-bike with a $400+ rebate said they were "using their new e-bike in lieu of a car 3.4 times per week...nearly 30% claimed they had not previously biked at all."

Still the question remains in many communities, what should come first? I'd be a very wealthy man if I was paid for every time I was asked this question when working to introduce bike and scooter sharing programs to communities across North America. My answer was and is still always the same - it's not a chicken or egg scenario. Both should be worked on simultaneously. Because infrastructure takes longer to implement, and Zipper is right, "US city officials often insist on seeing plenty of people biking before throwing their support behind street adjustments that risk irking car owners," every city in America should be introducing an e-bike subsidy now!

P.S. If you're curious if your community has an e-bike incentive now or one in the works, here's a pretty handy catalog of all of the programs currently out there: https://lnkd.in/e5apDFwV

#cityplanning #bicycling #ebikes #bikelanes #federalfunding #community #people #infrastructure #projects