E-bike rebates to benefit Atlanta residents
Electric bikes just got less expensive in Atlanta.
Generous rebates for e-bike purchases to city residents won’t begin until spring, but this week the plan just took two pedal strokes forward.
First, City Council approved $1 million to fund the program, which was the brainchild of Council Member Matt Westmoreland. Then, the Atlanta Regional Commission announced it’s partnering with the city and the nonprofit group PropelATL to administer the rebates.
Under Westmoreland’s plan, any Atlanta adult will get an instant rebate of $500 to $2,000 when buying an e-bike at a partnering bike shop.
The program is geared toward equity. Seventy-five percent of the money is reserved for individuals earning less than about $54,000. In addition, the rebates are more generous for those who fall below that income level. They’ll receive rebates of $1,500 for a standard e-bike and $2,000 for a cargo e-bike, while the rebates for those who earn more than $54,000 will be $500 and $1,000.
“The program will help reduce the number of vehicles on our roads, clean our air, and provide a cost-effective way for people to get around town,” Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, who also serves as ARC chair, said in a press release.
PropelATL Executive Director Rebecca Serna noted that e-bikes can provide “a meaningful solution … for people who are burdened by the high cost of owning a car.”
The rebates may also lower the threshold for Atlanta residents with limited personal mobility. Dozens of e-bikes and e-trikes designed to serve wheelchair-bound riders are now on the market and would, presumably, qualify for the rebates.
Broadly speaking, the rebates help the city lean into “light-individual transportation” – planner-speak for the growing number of people who travel by bike, scooter, foot or other individual modes of transportation. LIT also promises a healthier, greener, more flexible and less expensive way to get people around than spending hundreds of millions of dollars on extravagant infrastructure projects.
As cycling advocates know, the success of this kind of program also depends on safe routes that protect cyclists from automobiles. Westmoreland told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that the city is in the process of clearing up a backlog of unbuilt bike lanes.
At the same time, one of the city’s most popular e-bike commuting routes is under threat. While the planned Atlanta Streetcar extension won’t remove the existing and often-overcrowded multi-use path from the Beltline, it will make it impossible to improve the flow by widening the path or creating a separate path for pedestrians.
For now, the rebate program should help 800-1000 people buy e-bikes, according to the ARC. But Westmoreland told the AJC: “Once this first wave of dollars goes and I think we see how many folks are interested. ... I’m looking forward to refilling this bucket with more money to make this opportunity available to more residents.”
That a $1 million program could move the needle toward green, healthy, active transportation for 1,000 people expresses the disruption that e-bikes and other 21st-century technologies are bringing to transit. To put things in perspective, for $2.5 billion (the amount that rail boosters propose to spend on the Beltline streetcar) the city could buy more than five e-bikes for every man, woman, and child in the city!
