Making e-bikes more affordable

Screenshot of the California E-Bike Incentive Project website

Think about it this way: an e-bike is an affordable, climate-friendly, and fun Toyota sedan. (Or whatever brand of smaller affordable subcompact automobile you picture in your mind.) It's not so much a fancier bicycle as it is a way of getting around easily with some bags of groceries, a kid or two, or just yourself.

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My kids, groceries, and I roll around Alameda (and nearby parts of Oakland) on a Tern GSD Gen 1. It cost $3,800 from Alameda Bicycle, thanks to a discount they offer to members of Bike Walk Alameda and Bike East Bay. My e-bike predates Alameda Municipal Power's rebate — it was, more or less, the inspiration for that rebate program.

Starting on Wednesday, December 18 at 6 p.m., the California E-Bike Incentive Program will start taking applications to make this clean mode of transportation more accessible to a wider range of Californians.

Applicants can receive up to $2,000 to cover the cost of an e-bike from an approved retailer. There are two approved retailers in Alameda: Alameda Bicycle and Westside Joe's.

Currently eligibility is limited to individuals or households that with annual income of up to 300% of the Federal Poverty Level. the program's website has a quick overview of the eligibility criteria.

CalBike's blog has more context about the program, including these useful details:

All the e-bike models in the program have safety-certified batteries. People who are awarded vouchers will have 45 days to choose an e-bike and make a purchase. The incentive is point-of-sale and will act as a discount applied to your purchase from an approved retailer. If you need additional time, you can get a one-time, 45-day extension to use your voucher.

If e-bike incentive programs in other states are any indication, demand for the vouchers will be very high. CalBike has an e-bike interest list of more than 20,000 people. As many as 10 million Californians are income-qualified for this program. There are only 1,500 vouchers available in this round. The math means that many people are likely to be disappointed.

At 6:00 p.m. on December 18, the application portal will open. At that time, people will be placed in a waiting room to be let in to apply, to prevent the site from crashing. You will be let in in the order you get onto the site. The program will only accept 1,500 applicants. You can’t pre-register to get in more quickly.

Unfortunately, we can’t offer any tips to improve your chances of being one of the lucky ones to make it through the traffic jam and complete an application. But remember that this is just the first of several application windows. CARB plans to give out around 15,000 incentives in total with the money already budgeted for this program. You’ll have another chance in 2025.

If you want to be ready to "speed run" the application at exactly 6:01 p.m., here's a video of the process:

Alameda Municipal Power's rebate

Don't qualify for the state-wide CARB incentive? Alameda residents who are AMP customers can still make use of a smaller credit offered by our city-owned electrical utility when purchasing an e-bike.

More info on the AMP rebate is on their website.

For what it's worth, my own experience getting an e-cargo-bike and beginning to use it to ferry my kids to and from preschool on the other side of Alameda Island helped to plant the seed of AMP's rebate.

I searched through my local Twitter archive and found this from 2021:

If I recall, I got a kind but non-committal response:

No action, so it was time to try again the next year:

In March 2022, I wrote an email to the City Council, the City Manager, the general manager of AMP, and the members of the Public Utilities Board. (The email was long :)

Bike Walk Alameda also shared the email with their members via their newsletter to encourage others to write in. Then the Alameda Sun noticed it in the BWA newsletter and published it as a "letter to the editor" in a print issue.

The chair of the PUB invited us all to give public comments at the PUB's upcoming annual strategic planning workshop. Bike Walk Alameda brought out a wide range of Alameda residents and East Bay advocates speak to the benefits of e-bikes and the potential for promoting their adoption in Alameda. (Thanks especially to Cyndy Johnson for organizing this!)

Over the coming months, AMP took action:

And eventually announced a pilot program:

(Note that the current program is not as generous as the pilot program was. I haven't followed it closely enough to understand what's changed. If you think this should be changed, you can lobby the Alameda PUB. That said, it's probably worth seeing how the state-wide CARB program works before advocating for further local efforts.)

At one time the thought of promoting the transition to carbon-free transport modes via subsidies was novel. Now it's normal — both here in Alameda and across the state of California.