This article was published by The Energy Mix on May 29, 2024.
A purchase incentive for electric bicycles was enough motivation for nearly 400 people in Saanich, British Columbia, to reduce their average driving distance by 49 kilometres per week.
“You don’t [normally] see large shifts in travel behaviour, so to see that amount was quite remarkable,” lead author Alex Bigazzi, associate professor of civil engineering at the University of British Columbia, told Electric Autonomy Canada. But “incentive programs can be really effective in enabling mode shift.”
UBC’s Research on Active Transportation (REACT) lab conducted its research in the Victoria suburb in 2021 and 2022, Electric Autonomy says. Participants received subsidies of C$350, $800, or $1,600, depending on their income. The study compared bike use by 164 of the participants with people who’d received no incentive to purchase a conventional or electric bike.
It concluded that “the incentive program attracted many new or marginal e-bike purchasers and purchasers have high satisfaction with their new e-bikes,” the news story states. Participants used their bikes three or four days out of seven and travelled 30 to 70 kilometres, for a total emission reduction of 16 kilograms per person per week.
That made the e-bike incentive “cost effective in terms of CO2 reduction per dollar invested, [and] by our estimates, more cost effective than the provincial car incentives,” Bigazzi said. “We recommend more places consider shifting a portion of their climate mitigation dollars from electric car incentives to electric bike incentives.”
But Bigazzi said the results might not be the same in every community. “We can’t say exactly what is the minimum threshold for cycling infrastructure we need for people to feasibly use e-bikes.”
Saanich “has solid bike infrastructure: rail trails, touring routes, and relatively quiet neighbourhood streets,” Electric Autonomy writes. “However, there is no data that suggests how much cycling infrastructure will encourage people to ride more.”
While he said communities should introduce e-bike incentives for low-income households, Bigazzi said the rebates are likely to land most powerfully with people who are already interested in cycling. “It’s not like if you give random people e-bikes you are going to see that kind of mode shift.”
Based on the successful pilot, Saanich offered additional incentives in 2023, and the provincial government introduced an e-bike rebate of its own.
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