As of April 1, any Colorado resident can walk into a participating bike shop and get $450 off the price of an e-bike, courtesy of the state. It’s a sweet deal for Coloradoans and the planet. 

The commencement of the largest ever e-bike subsidy program in the U.S. is as good a time as ever to sing the praises of these kinds of policies. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act offers electric car subsidies as large as $7,500, but not a penny for e-bikes. It was a huge missed opportunity—hopefully one that will be corrected in the future. There are few policies that can do so much good for so little money as e-bike subsidies.

There are a million good reasons to get more e-bikes on the streets. E-bikes “provide a Swiss Army knife’s worth of societal benefits,” transportation analyst David Zipper has written. Zipper has been calling for federal e-bike subsidies for years, and various other pundits, like Jay Caspian Kang and Alex Pareene, have made similar arguments.

But it’s worth making the argument again as more and more evidence accumulates. E-bikes are already really popular, posting strong sales in 2023. And if they spread wide enough, they could offer a powerful solution to climate change and a whole host of interrelated problems.

Two- and three-wheeled vehicles—including e-bikes—account for the majority of global emissions reductions from all electric vehicles as of 2023. Or, as the New York Times put it, “tiny electric vehicles pack a bigger climate punch than cars.” 

In fact, e-bikes ameliorate just about all of the lingering climate and societal problems associated with EVs. They’re too small to require much lithium, too light to create much particulate matter from tires or brakes, too slow to pose much of a danger on city streets, too nimble to contribute to gridlock. Because they’re relatively simple and cheap to manufacture, e-bikes can be rolled out to a wide range of consumers very quickly—especially when subsidies grease the wheels.

So far, places like China, India, and Africa have dominated tiny electric vehicle adoption, but they make sense in the U.S., too. More than half of all trips taken by Americans are less than three miles. In cities, where things are closer together, short trips are even more common. E-bikes open up these kinds of trips to a greater diversity of cyclists. And cargo e-bikes are increasingly being used for hauling packages, groceries or little kids.

Preliminary results from Denver’s 2022 e-bike subsidy program, which helped inspire the statewide policy, show how e-bikes can begin to have an impact on emissions. A study from RMI and other groups found that Denver’s new e-bike owners replaced an average of 3.4 weekly car roundtrips per week with e-bike trips. Each dollar spent by Denver’s subsidy program avoided nearly a pound of CO2 emissions.

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.  

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.  

The number of e-bike subsidy initiatives in the U.S. is growing quickly. But mostly, these have been rinky dink affairs, facilitating the purchase of a couple dozen bikes here, a hundred there. One of the largest e-bike initiatives to date was a giveaway this year by Lectric Bikes and the Youtuber Mr. Beast that handed out 600 e-bikes to people in need. Giving 600 people a new way to get around cost just $600,000, according to the company. Those are the kinds of numbers that can scale.  

There were efforts to include income-restricted e-bike tax credits in an early version of the Build Back Better Act, but this kind of policy has yet to make it into federal law. A big reason, Zipper’s reporting shows, is that environmentalists didn’t appreciate the potential climate benefits of e-bikes. That could be starting to change. As infrastructure negotiations dragged on, more major environmental groups threw their weight behind e-bike subsidies. The next time opportunity strikes, they’ll likely be on board from the start

State-level e-bike subsidies like the one in Colorado show what a more successful policy design might look like. Colorado’s $450 e-bike subsidies, which will run through 2033, are universal, meaning any state resident can take advantage of them. The subsidies are applied at the point of sale, instead of as a tax credit, which makes them much more appealing for consumers, especially those with lower incomes. The subsidy can also be layered on top of existing local programs that many Colorado cities offer. With basic e-bike prices ranging from $1,000-$2,000, some Coloradoans will get their wheels fully paid for by the government.

One initial criticism of the program was that bike shops were hesitant to sign up, since they wouldn’t be reimbursed for the subsidy until filing their taxes. But it seems like retailers are gradually embracing the program. On March 28, there were 24 participating outlets statewide. By April 14, there were 74 and counting. Starting in 2025, Colorado bike shops will be reimbursed on a quarterly, rather than annual, basis.

Subsidy programs can also help combat the biggest political liability facing e-bikes. Making it cheaper for people to buy their e-bikes from reputable bike shops and brands is the most effective way to curb the e-bike battery fires that have recently plagued New York City. The bikes used by many deliveristas are Frankenstein creations, sourced from unregulated foreign suppliers, with batteries that can catch fire if improperly handled. If deliveristas could get high-quality bikes for cheap—or even free—the battery fire problem would quickly be extinguished.   

Colorado gets it. When will the rest of the country?