Finland actually does this in the form of a "company bike".
As an employee, you can get a bike leased through your employer, with a tax free benefit of up to 1200€/year leasing cost. After the leasing period is over, you can buy the bike for 1% of the original cost (to buy out the remainder value in the company ledger). The leasing can be for up to 5 years, so the max value for the bike is 6000€, with s final buyout value of 60€.
Due to Finnish tax laws, the calculations are a bit weird but in the end, you end up getting the bike at around 20-40% cheaper in the end. Additionally, you get to spread the cost over multiple years without having to pay high financing overhead.
It's crazy that they would subsidize electric cars above electric bikes to me. I get subsidizing both, but it seems like bikes should have been prioritized.
Wouldn't e-bikes be a relatively stopgap measure? They still require a relatively advanced and carbon-wasteful technological base, after all: maintenance and repair for the bikes themselves (including regular replacement batteries, which are definitely NOT environmentally friendly), plus paved roads in good repair (again, requiring a lot of fossil fuel expenditure).
There's also the likelihood that as the Earth's environment becomes increasingly hazardous we'll require protection from the elements more and more often - protection which would be difficult to add to a bike of any sort.
The US military has projected that basic infrastructure in the USA will be collapsing throughout much of the country in less than twenty years. It's hard to see how ebikes will be practical under those conditions. Gearing towards long-term lower-tech solutions would seem to be a wiser choice.
I don't think you understand how simple E-bikes are, they are essentially just bikes, and their maintenance and repair vs any car is miles away, even if we only consider the savings vs oil changes, not to mention things like car batteries or tires.
I ride an e-bike exclusively to get around, usually several hundred miles a month, for the past 3 years, and my battery is still at near the capacity when it was new. I don't think a new battery every 10 years (if that) counts as "regular replacements", again comparing to the amount of waste involved in automobiles.
Yes, comprehensive public transport would be better overall, but that requires large amounts of public coordination and money, and still takes away agency from the commuter. An e-bike is relatively cheap, and can be a switch made on a person-to-person basis, so you don't need to fund a billion dollar train to make progress, you just need to get as many people as you can on bikes.
And, crucially, if the batteries all die and we're in the apocalypse... It's still a bicycle. You can still pedal around like normal
I've never used an e-bike but I assume that it has similar limitations to normal bikes, correct? Where I live, the American midwest, the biggest issues I have with riding my bike are:
It is difficult in the winter because it is so cold and windy. Even harder when it snows. And
The people who designed our cities didn't want to deal with people on bikes. There are places I just cannot get to on a bike without serious risk of life.
Maybe you can share with us what were the difficulties you had where you live and what you did to mitigate the difficulties you had to deal with? I'd love to hear more of it!
Unfortunately, I think it's mainly just reason number 2.
As a Finn, I'm really proud of the way biking is handled and supported here, even in the winter. There's a nice documentary about it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU
Disclaimer: I'm too old, soft and lazy to bike in the winter myself even though I could..
Unfortunately the only path toward better QOL in American cities is to set an example (by using a bike, ebike or public transit in as many situations as physically possible) while loudly demanding change from local officials. No doubt the country has a long, long way to go before we start reaching the living standards of some other developed countries with very walkable / bikable cities.
I was highly skeptical before reading the article, but the author made great points and I’m actually fully on board with that, now. I was even wondering if my state had plans to do something like this, then I read this at the end of the article:
Meanwhile, many states aren’t waiting for federal action. Hawaii, Connecticut, Colorado and Massachusetts either already offer subsidies or intend to.
Awesome! Thanks for sharing. This really changed my perspective.
E-bikes work as a car replacement for short-to-medium distances, and it would be a huge net benefit to facilitate that shift for as many people as possible, in as many situations as possible. So to make that happen, you obviously also want to roll out safe, protected cycling networks in tandem with these subsidies.
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