Do municipal e-bike incentives match their policy objectives? Comparative insights on policy design

Source abstract

Electric bicycle (e-bike) purchase incentives have become a common policy tool for promoting the uptake of active transportation across cities globally. Yet the policy framings that underpin them and the extent to which their calibrations operationalize broader policy objectives remain underexplored. This study presents a comparative qualitative evaluation of four municipal e-bike subsidy programs, two in North America (Denver and Saanich) and two in Europe (Oslo and Vienna), to analyze how these instruments are locally articulated and implemented within broader political contexts and higher-level mobility and climate strategies. Applying the policy taxonomy framework by Cashore and Howlett together with a multi-scalar governance lens, we examine the alignment between specific program designs (policy means) and high-level objectives (policy ends) concerning climate mitigation, mode shift, and equity. We compare variation and policy shifts across cases. Our study shows that policy framings converge on climate mitigation, providing programmatic justification and funding for municipal incentives. Operationally, all cities follow iterative implementation, incorporating pilots, monitoring, and program evaluations to varying degrees, but diverge in spending budgets, program duration, and total numbers of subsidized e-bike purchases. Situating our findings, we synthesize existing impact evaluations. While prior studies generally report that e-bike incentives can advance transport decarbonization by reducing car use and transport-related CO2 emissions, our comparison shows that cross-city benchmarking of program effectiveness remains constrained by a lack of standardized evaluation metrics.