Bike Sense
Bike Sense: the podcast of The BC Cycling Coalition.
Join Host Peter Ladner as he interviews guests to talk about all things related to cycling advocacy, education, and road safety in BC. Listen to stories that can influence changes that make active transportation and mobility safer, more equitable, and more accessible, so we can meet our climate, health, social justice, tourism and economic development goals.
Please visit our website at bccycling.ca to find out more about what the BC Cycling Coalition is doing and how you can join and support us.
Bike Sense
Accessibility, Equity, Joy, and Fun: E-bike subsidies can take us there
UBC Prof and Transportation Engineer Dr. Alex Bigazzi explains how e-bike rebate programs are transforming the transportation landscape in BC. Bigazzi has all the data on who gets the subsidies, how the bikes are being used, whether anyone is taking a 'free ride' on the program, and whether e-bikes are actually replacing cars ... or bikes.
Dr. Bigazzi also shares how a pioneering subsidy initiative in Saanich paved the way for broader provincial adoption, and which strategies are successfully encouraging people to swap their cars for e-bikes thereby reducing carbon emissions and improving public health. Spoiler alert: it turns out that fun and joy are the key motivators for getting people onto bikes, and keeping them there.
SOME HANDY LINKS
Saanich results and report: https://reactlab.civil.ubc.ca/saanich-ebike-incentives/
The study on micromobility mode shares and speeds in cycling facilities: https://reactlab.civil.ubc.ca/human-electric-hybrid-vehicles/
An earlier report on e-bike incentives for Victoria in 2019 that actually led to the Saanich collaboration: https://civil-reactlab.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2021/01/Ebike-Incentive-Program-Development-Victoria_FinalReport_March-2019.pdf
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The Bike Sense podcast with Peter Ladner is produced by the BC Cycling Coalition – your voice for safer and more accessible cycling and active transportation in British Columbia.
Membership in the BCCC is now FREE! To find out about BCCC's projects and add your voice to the chorus please visit BCCycling.ca
Welcome to Bike Sense, the BC Cycling Coalition's podcast, where we talk about all things related to active transportation advocacy in BC. I'm your host, peter Ladner, chair of the Board of the BC Cycling Coalition. I hope you enjoy the show. In the summer of 2021, the municipality of Saanich introduced BC's first e-bike rebate program, where people were subsidized to buy e-bikes. The success of that program led to a province-wide rebate program for e-bikes introduced in May 2023, where the province would give people between $350 and $1,400, depending on their income, to buy an e-bike, and they allocated $6 million for this. They thought it would reach 9,000 people and the day they opened up the applications, their website crashed. There were so many people applying. We have a guest today who probably knows more about all this than anybody in the world. His name is Dr Alex Bagazzi. He is a transportation engineer associate professor at UBC and his special area of focus and research is non-motorized and lightly motorized transportation and the intersection of physics, physiology and behavior for active travelers. Welcome, dr Alex Bagazzi.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, peter, it's great to be here.
Speaker 1:Before we start, I noticed in your bio that you have a background as a jazz musician. How did you go from being a jazz musician to a transportation engineer?
Speaker 2:as a musician to a transportation engineer. Yeah, that is true. My first university degree was in music and I played music and had a bit of a vagabond lifestyle for a while.
Speaker 1:Did you ride around on an e-bike during that vagabond lifestyle?
Speaker 2:No, no, this was the early 2000s, so not a lot of e-bikes around then.
Speaker 1:A van, maybe with Grateful Dead.
Speaker 2:Yeah, more like that. And yeah, a little bit later on, I was looking for a big change and some way to have a little bit of a different type of impact on the world. And so and I looked around and transportation systems seemed like something that needed some work and really had a big impact on people's lives, and so that's why I ended up in transportation.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you for doing that. So you looked at the Saanich program, you evaluated it, with some help from the Saanich municipality and the provincial government, but mainly it was your initiative and you got the money together to do that. What did you find out? Did it work?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. Uh, short answer is yes, it worked. The the, the incentives were um, remarkably successful in both attracting new e-bike riders and in having those e-bike riders use their bike regularly, even a year after purchase, and in the long-term follow-up that we did. And a fairly large portion of that e-bike travel was displacing automobile use, which is kind of the ideal thing when we're looking at having positive impacts on climate change and affordability and public health and things like that. So, yeah, quite a large success.
Speaker 1:And that success led to the province being emboldened to do their program. And you have looked somewhat at the province's program. Are you seeing the same successes and did it have the same goals of displacing car travel?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we are right now finishing the 12-month follow-up of the people that we recruited into our study from the provincial program and so far, from what we've seen in the interim analysis that we've done, it looks like the results are quite similar to what we saw in Saanich. There's a few differences because there's a few different aspects to the way the program was structured. They're similar but not equivalent, and so we're seeing a little bit of a difference, and also people in the BC program are in a wider range of contexts than Saanich and so there are some differences and we'll soon be able to dig into that full data set and hope to have all the results out sometime in the spring, in a few months.
Speaker 1:On the impacts of the provincial-wide program, which was much larger, as you said, Well, speaking of a wider range of context, I know that e-bike program rebates are being done all over the world and many, many cities in North America are doing them, and so this is not a new thing and it must be working because they're all doing it and continuing to do it. But, looking at different contexts, how effective are e-bikes in a rural part of the province where maybe it gets more snow and the distances people have to go are longer and the protected routes are fewer?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question and one of the main things that we'll be able to look at once we have the BCY data all analyzed because that Santa's context is more constrained and and most um of the e-bike incentives that have been um, uh, done so far well, actually they're.
Speaker 2:They're at all levels of government. So there's some cities doing them, like Saanich, like Denver, um, there are some provinces and States doing it, like now BC has done it, um, california is working on some, and there's even been some countries that have done it in Europe, like the Netherlands, and so there are a range of these incentives and they do have different effects. However, we haven't had enough kind of analyses of different programs in different contexts to be able to say how much their effectiveness varies In general. We do know that people use e-bikes differently in different contexts, but in terms of the effects of the incentives, it's still pretty early to say. There hasn't been a lot of rigorous analysis, which was one of the big motivations of us developing an evaluation program to accompany the rebate programs in Saanich and BC, and we've been super appreciative of the District of Saanich and the province well, both for their leadership in launching these programs but also for their eagerness to engage with researchers to do an independent evaluation of the effects.
Speaker 1:People looking at these, just taking a quick sudden look at it, might say well, yeah, but so I get $1,400 for an e-bike. Why don't I just go and sell it and keep the $1,400 and not worry about riding my e-bike around? Has that happened? Did you research that?
Speaker 2:It's hard to know the extent to which that is happening. It probably is happening, some. It's possible. It's definitely a risk with this and all types of incentive programs, but it doesn't appear to be a large issue, just based on the few times that administrative agencies have been able to go in and go back and follow up with people who've received the e-bike rebates. All these programs have agreements that people who receive the rebates have to agree to before they can get the rebate, which includes things like not selling it and keeping it for 12 months. So what you're describing would be a violation of the terms, which can definitely happen. But a kind of bigger concern, actually in terms of the effectiveness of these programs, is what we call free riding, which is just people getting the rebates who would have bought an e-bike anyway, and that's, you know, within the allowances of the program, because the program doesn't say what you would have had to have done anyway, because there's no way to really know for certain what would have happened in that, in that other world.
Speaker 2:So, um, when we're evaluating the effects of the programs, one of the most important things to quantifying how impactful it was is trying to tease out and separate the people who would have bought an e-bike anyway without the rebate from those who would not.
Speaker 2:And that's a big part of it, and it is also a big piece of trying to design a program that's more effective.
Speaker 2:I'll say one of the things that made Saanich's design so unique and really on the vanguard of these types of incentive programs is their approach to tiering the amount of the incentive to the household's income.
Speaker 2:And they did that specifically to achieve two things. First of all is to enhance the equity of the program, so to make sure that people who were in greater need of assistance got more assistance, so to achieve both kind of climate and equity goals simultaneously. But also some pre-program modeling analysis that we had done before the Sanus program launched suggested that lower income households are actually also more price sensitive. So they are more likely to be these marginal purchasers who wouldn't have bought without the rebate, as opposed to higher income households which are more likely to be free riders. They were more likely to buy an e-bike anyway because they have more capacity to do that. So there's a way that we can target both equity and effectiveness by income conditioning the incentives, which is one of the novel and, I think, really successful aspects of both the sandwich and the provincial program and the richer people get a much smaller amount of money, like in the provincial one, they only get 350 bucks.
Speaker 1:So that's really, you know, not a painful free ride. So what did you find out about how people use these e-bikes? Who? Who benefited the most, and did people actually get out and ride them, and did people actually get out and ride them.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they used them quite a bit, on average three to four times a week. We recruited a control group of people who purchased non-incentivized e-bikes and people who purchased conventional bicycles as well, so we can do a robust comparison, and what we found is that the people who purchased the e-bike were substituting auto trips much more than people who used conventional bicycles, at actually twice the rate. So around 20% of conventional bicycle trips, or trips made by a purchased conventional bicycle, were substituting for auto trips, whereas around 40% to 45% of e-bike trips were replacing automobile trips, either as a driver or a passenger, and so we really are seeing quite a lot of mode shift. These are people who were not e-biking before, and most were not conventional bicycling before either.
Speaker 1:So you have solved the cheater conundrum. When people who have regular bikes find friends with e-bikes, they call them cheaters. But those of us with e-bikes say, well, yeah, but compare taking an e-bike with taking a car ride, and you're not cheating at all. You're getting more exercise. And I gather that people with e-bikes end up getting more exercise because they take them out more often. Is that what you found too?
Speaker 2:So you're exactly right, peter, and I'll be honest. So I actually don't ride an e-bike but I do ride a conventional bicycle quite a lot and the nature of the devices we see in bike lanes and paths has changed. And there's a whole separate research project we did now looking at four-year trends in mode shares on off-street paths and speeds, and what we found is that there has been an enormous growth in e-bikes and other electric devices in these paths and that has led to an increase in speed, which does lead to kind of less comfort and more conflict. So it is a shift in the transportation system. So there's an understandable kind of response to people who were using it before in the more conventional just conventional bicycle and pedestrian modes. But one of the things I do like to remind people is that most of the e-bikers would not have been cycling anyway. Most of this is car or a much larger share is car mode shift than conventional bike shift. And so you know, would you rather be interacting with an electric bike or with a car?
Speaker 1:One of the premises of this program is that finances are a barrier maybe the biggest barrier to e-biking. But I noticed that there was also, in the provincial program, a promotion of education so people who didn't know how to ride or weren't sure of the rules of the road could be educated. And we all know that the biggest barrier for people riding more is protection and safety.
Speaker 2:And so, between finances and education and protected lanes, which would you say are the most important factors for getting a mode shift going, that's a great question and so, just to be clear, I'm now speaking we didn't actually analyze that question within this research, but speaking more broadly, because we have done a lot of research on this type of question, infrastructure is absolutely essential, absolutely essential, and that needs to be the foundation of any cycling policy, any cycling policy. I have heard some governments kind of hinted this. So we need to make sure that, although e-bike incentives are very effective, they are not kind of the answer for people who are looking to promote active transportation. They are one complementary strategy within a suite of strategies to promote active transportation that needs to center on infrastructure. And then e-bikes can be an important tool for helping especially lower income households, enabling them to access lightly motorized, non-automobile transportation options for some of their trips. But it really does need to center on infrastructure first.
Speaker 1:Can you talk about the type of trips that people use their e-bikes for? Because the classic argument about bikes is well, yeah, that's great, but how am I going to get my kid to a soccer game or pick up the groceries or get that load of lumber from Kimber?
Speaker 2:Mart or something.
Speaker 1:Are they being used for more utilitarian purposes?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I can pull up the data now while we're talking. But, um, they are you being used for a variety of purchases, just like automobiles and just like conventional bicycles. Um, so in our, in our data here, uh, around 35 40% were being used for a commute trip of some kind going to work or school, whereas that was about 30, 35% for conventional bicycles. So actually a little bit higher utilitarian rate than conventional bicycles, and that's a large share.
Speaker 2:They're also being used for other types of utilitarian trips, like shopping and errands. It's about 10, 15%. They're being used as escort trips. So this is something that e-bikes really open up within the cycling world is pick up and drop off for children, and you'll see a much larger share of parents taking kids to school on an e-bike than you do on conventional bicycles, because it's just so much harder on a conventional bicycle. So electric bicycles enable actually more utilitarian trips than like exercise or leisure trips. Now, there are some exercise or leisure trips, but we actually see a smaller portion than for conventional bicycles. I do like to say, though, I feel like, especially transportation engineers like myself, we tend to focus too much on utilitarian travel and, you know, maybe that's just our kind of economic, kind of capitalist orientation. But you know, recreational exercise type trips are also a really important and perfectly valid use of the transportation system.
Speaker 2:So you know, we also want to get people out there on those types of trips. But yeah, e-bike trips e-bikes are being used quite a lot for utilitarian travel.
Speaker 1:We're not afraid to use the words joy and fun on this podcast. When you're justifying a political program, you say well, it brings joy and fun into people's lives. Sounds a bit flaky, I will say, but for those of us who do the rides, that's a really big deal. But let's get back to the numbers actually, if I could follow up on that speaking of the numbers.
Speaker 2:So we asked people about their experiences three months and 12 months after as compared to what they expected, about things like comfort, charging, parking, how often they use it, etc. And what's super interesting. I did not expect this, but in both the three month and 12 month follow-up in sanich and in the three month follow up in for the BC program, every one of those the number one thing that people cited as much better than they expected isikes are fun is actually has been a huge component of people's experience and their habit forming behavior, of their tendency to still be using it 12 months in. People really like riding e-bikes and that again is something we probably especially transportation engineers like myself we don't focus nearly as much on as we probably should.
Speaker 1:Were there any other surprises in your findings?
Speaker 2:I did not expect to see the level of retained mode shift at 12 months that we saw. I thought we'd see more of a novelty effect where they use it quite a bit for three months but then by 12 months in it was like a Peloton bike gathering dust or, you know, like a clothes hanger, clothes drying rack. That was not the case. It dropped off a little bit after 12 months, but really not much, and so this appears to have been a pretty sticky intervention in terms of long-term travel behavior shifts. I'll also add one more thing, which is that this isn't a whole lot of people abandoning automobile travel, a whole lot of people abandoning automobile travel. Pretty much everyone still had access to a car, who had it before and still used a car regularly. We're really just talking about shifting a portion of their trips, and that's really why the incentive program is nice, because it provides an option for people to shift their feasible trips which, aggregated over a lot of people, can really have an impact.
Speaker 1:And I would guess that what people consider feasible changes over time too, because I talked to somebody yesterday who said they used to just ride their bike on sunny days and they only ride home from work not to work because they get sweaty. And then they figured it all out and now they do it much more often for many more reasons.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. You learn the network too. What are the good routes? Where are the problem spots? How to avoid schools during pickup and drop-off period, and these little tricks that make a big difference in your overall experience, little tricks that make that make a big difference in your overall experience.
Speaker 1:but let's get back to the numbers. Did you or does that? Has anybody calculated the return on investment for these types of rebates? Because when you think about the savings on, let's just say, road maintenance, uh, the road repair evs, which are much more heavily subsidized and we could get into that, but I'll fight the urge to do that are typically much heavier than conventional vehicles and wear out the roads, and that is a direct cost. There's a mental health cost that are alleviated, one might assume, because of all the fun and joy costs that are alleviated, one might assume, because of all the fun and joy and also physical costs. People are getting outdoors and getting some movement, not to mention injuries and ICBC costs and everything. So have you done that calculation?
Speaker 2:So we did an economic evaluation just on the greenhouse gas dimension. So we calculated the cost per ton of CO2 reduced, assuming a 10-year lifespan of the e-bike and so on that regard, what we found is that it is cost competitive with other types of transportation interventions, but it is not cost competitive per ton CO2 reduced with kind of the international carbon market. So you know, compared to kind of forest type initiatives in other parts of the world, initiatives in other parts of the world. But the reason it's important to contextualize that is because part of climate justice is about not just finding the cheapest place in the world to reduce emissions or to offset your emissions, but to actually reduce your emissions that you're generating locally. And so when you look at that it is quite cost competitive. And we actually compared it with a fairly recent study of the electric car purchase incentive in BC and we found that it was cheaper in terms of CO2 reductions. It was better per dollar spent than the electric car incentives. And that is just looking at CO2. And so you're absolutely right If you start expanding that out to look at all the other potential benefits, right, most of the other things for e-bikes are on the plus side, whereas for electric cars, they're more on the minus side in terms of infrastructure, in terms of health, in terms of external safety risks and things like that.
Speaker 2:And so when people do a more comprehensive economic valuation of things like, especially including health effects, what typically happens is because physical activity is so important for health and because there's such systemically insufficient physical activity in Canada and North America right now that those physical activity benefits getting people out on a bike, even an e-bike are huge and tend to kind of dwarf all the other costs. So if we incorporated those they would be extremely cost-effective. That was a little bit outside of the scope of our work, but we did do some calculations and we found that overall there was a net increase in the transportation related physical activity that these people were getting. So, even though there was a little bit of a reduction in conventional bicycle use and walking, that increase in e-bike use more than offset it.
Speaker 1:Can you talk a little bit about equity? To what extent affordability is more and more an issue these days, and to what extent does the affordability of these bikes change people's lives and make them more accessible? We're getting a little bit more of that data on the provincial program.
Speaker 2:But we do see a fair bit of new trips, basically people going places they would not have gone otherwise, which is kind of what we're talking about in terms of not just reducing travel costs but increasing access, and that is a really important part of transportation equity. The provincial program analysis that we're doing, the study we're doing, is supported by a large national grant funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada called Mobilizing Justice. That looks at these broader issues of the way transport poverty, or people's inability to reach destinations given the resources that they have, really has long-term negative impacts on their economic life, on their health life and on their social life.
Speaker 1:When people talk about e-bikes, they sometimes say well, that's great for people who are fit. Of course, you don't have to be as fit as a regular bike, but you still have to be able to balance and so on. But what about e-trikes? And what about scooters? Are those part of the subsidy program? They are not.
Speaker 2:Well, actually an electric tricycle, I believe would be. I could be wrong about that, but I believe that still fits the definition of a motor-assisted cycle under the Motor Vehicle Act. So part of the issue here is we're constrained by a quite outdated Motor Vehicle Act in terms of what counts as a legal micromobility device, mobility device, um, and so we have the motor assisted cycle regulation, which I believe a tricycle um falls under, because they don't designate um. It could be two or three wheels, I believe and cargo bikes as well and cargo bikes as well.
Speaker 2:Yep, those are okay, um, but you know, electric scooters are not fully legal under the Motor Vehicle Act. There's just that pilot program. So there's only, you know, maybe a dozen municipalities around the province where they're actually legal. So those aren't part of the program. And, as you say, we did some analysis. We found 27 different types of devices and I believe more than half of them were currently not legal under the Motor Vehicle Act. And I believe more than half of them were currently not legal under the Motor Vehicle Act. And there isn't really a reason that they're illegal, other than that they are new and we haven't had a chance to incorporate them into transportation policy and governance yet. But you know, BC takes a fairly cautious approach which has pros and cons Overall it, you know. I think it leads to some better decision making in terms of when we bring in things like ride hailing and electric scooters. We can learn from a lot of lessons and mistakes that other cities and places have made, but it does mean that things are a little bit slower to come to BC.
Speaker 1:So, speaking of being slow, given what we know about the success of this program, can you now I'm going to just ask you, as a sort of a citizen, to speculate. Can you speculate on what political resistance there might be to expanding or continuing this program? Because we're now more than a year since it started. The website exploded when it was brought in. I was told by somebody that there's such a waiting list that if they brought in a new program at the same scope, there would be no room for new people, because all the lineup of people already waiting would take up the available money. But I'm puzzled why we haven't got it. Do you think now, here we are, in an era where the government's trying to pay more attention to the non-urban constituents? Do you think that there's political resistance of some kind to this that's preventing the government from going ahead with it? Are they waiting for your data, or what's the holdup? Why wouldn't we just do more of this?
Speaker 2:Fair question and speaking as a BC citizen here certainly not a spokesperson for any government agency and I don't know in particular but these e-bike incentives are very effective and they address a lot of the stated priorities and goals and problems that BC has with the Clean BC program, with the Cycling BC policy and things like that. So they address equity, they address climate, they address affordability and public health. So they really do make a lot of sense and I think really the only argument against this is just in terms of the financial costs of the province and so Six million, that is not a lot of money.
Speaker 2:It is not a lot of money, but I do expect, especially given the outcome of the last election I would think that we'll see more coming. I don't know, but I would think we will see more coming, especially, as I said, because if you're looking at climate targets and things like that, and we're subsidizing electric cars, it's a no-brainer to subsidize electric bicycles.
Speaker 1:Well, alex, I'm pleased to be part of the ask, getting our little messages out into the millions of podcast listeners that we have and spreading the word, and I really look forward to hearing your final research. You've got your peer review paper coming out about the Sandwich results very shortly. We'll have the connection in the show notes and you'll have, I guess, more detail about the provincial program and maybe, hopefully, that will be the trigger for an expansion and continuation of that program and all these great results. So thank you so much for the work you've been doing and how it's helped policymakers get the courage to make these choices and I hope the rest of us can cheer them on appropriately.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my pleasure and thanks so much for having us on here. It's, you know, we do the work and then we put it out there and then we really rely on, you know, people like the BC cycling coalition to, um, you know, put it in, put it in front of people as much as possible. So, uh, thanks so much for that.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to bike sense, an original podcast from the BC cycling coalition. If you like the podcast, we'd be grateful if you could leave us a rating. On whatever platform you use, you can also subscribe, so you don't miss future episodes. If you have comments or suggestions for future episodes, email me at peterladner at bccyclingca. At peterladner at bccyclingca, you can help us amplify BC Cycling Coalition's voice by simply becoming a free member. You