(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 430: E-Bikes to Freedom!

This week we’re joined by Mike Salisbury of Denver’s Office of Climate Action, Sustainability & Resiliency to talk about the city’s E-bike rebate program. We talk about funding, E-bikes vs electric cars, and how the rebates are distributed.

To listen to the episode, check it out at Streetsblog USA or on our archive site.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript from the show:

Jeff Wood (1m 50s):
Well, Mike Salisbury, welcome to the Talking Headways podcast.

Mike Salisbury (1m 53s):
Thank you very much.

Jeff Wood (1m 54s):
Thanks for joining us. Before we get started, can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Mike Salisbury (1m 58s):
Sure. I’m Mike Salisbury. I work in the city of Denver’s Office of Climate Action Sustainability and Resiliency. I’ve worked there for about five years and my work really focuses on reducing greenhouse gases from the transportation sector. And I talk about my work often being like how do we, how do we electrify everything with wheels? So whether that’s a electric vehicle for individual ownership or you know, electrified car share vehicles, micro transit to serve Denver residents. Then E-bikes. E-bikes has been a big focus over work for the last couple years and really trying to find, you know, this seems like this great balance between this like electrification of mobility and just kind of pure mobility space and just a lot of potential.

Mike Salisbury (2m 41s):
So trying to figure out ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also give people more options to get around Denver. I think that’s a huge challenge and do so equitably. So we’re supporting people who, you know, don’t have lots of transportation choices.

Jeff Wood (2m 57s):
Have you always been interested in transportation policy or is it something that you have recently come upon?

Mike Salisbury (3m 2s):
No, I’ve been in this space for a while. Before the city I worked at a, a nonprofit called the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project for about nine years and I worked there all on transportation efficiency. So it was kind of a balance of reducing B M T but also talking about electrification. So it’s, I’ve been trying to figure out how to do this type of work for, you know, about 15 years now. So it’s been definitely, definitely been a passion of mine for a long time.

Jeff Wood (3m 28s):
That’s awesome. So tell us about the Office of Climate Action Sustainability and Resilience. What’s the acronym? C A sr? I read it as but is there like a catchy way to say it?

Mike Salisbury (3m 36s):
Sadly, no, no, it, it’s Kaar is how we, we pronounce it out loud. We’re lucky that it is not climate action resiliency and sustainability cause that would be cars, which would be funny but like would also not exactly be where I want to focus all of my time and energy.

Jeff Wood (3m 55s):
Yeah. So what does Casser do?

Mike Salisbury (3m 57s):
Sure. It’s a relatively new office. We just got formed about two and a half years ago and as you know, you might imagine really our, our goal as an office is to figure out how we reduce greenhouse gas emissions across all the sectors of the city. So there’s different programs within csr. I work in transportation, I, we have a buildings program, we have renewables, we have resiliency, we have workforce equity, zero waste. So there’s a lot of different programs all kind of with that lens of like how do we, how can we bring the levers of city programs and projects to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from those sectors, but really with an eye towards doing it as equitably as possible and supporting Denver’s disadvantaged communities and supporting them as much as possible to help them make that transition to cleaner sources of energy.

Jeff Wood (4m 51s):
Denver and Colorado more generally have had some really big wins lately. It’s been impressive to watch what’s going on, especially in the transportation sector at the state level and things like that. I’m curious what your thoughts are on kind of the general movement of climate change action and emissions reductions across the state.

Mike Salisbury (5m 6s):
Yeah, generally across the state. I think Colorado, we’re very lucky to be in a state where there’s a lot of great supports happening at the state level. I think there are, you know, lots of different programs often working in parallel to the stuff we’re doing in the city. So you know, different incentive programs for some transportation sector like electric vehicles, EV charging stations, but also the state’s coming out with own e-bike incentive later on this year there’s obviously a lot of really interesting work on renewables and kind of pushing that conversation forward at the state level so that all of our energy that’s powering our buildings as we are really focused on how do we electrify everything for us that’s kind of our, our, our North stars.

Mike Salisbury (5m 48s):
Like we see that as the fuel source that can be a hundred percent renewable in the future that will allow us to meet our different sector wide goals. So as the city of Denver we can’t do the loan. It really helps to have the state being a really strong champion and working with us and others to say push, you know, we have a, our investor own utility here, Excel energy, so like they’re much bigger than city of Denver. They’re across the state of Colorado. So really working with them and the state and all those other stakeholders to kind of push that, you know, how do we make that electricity mixed greener over time and really be strategic about, you know, our investments in the clean energy space.

Jeff Wood (6m 25s):
And the Office Kasser was funded by a sales tax, is that correct? So how did that kind of evolution come about where the office was formed, the sales tax was passed? I’m curious about that cause I think there’s a lot of places that might be interested in similar formation of a department.

Mike Salisbury (6m 39s):
Yeah, absolutely. So the kind of origin story of Kaiser is back in 2020 there was a push essentially for the city to do more on climate. So you know, Denver residents, community-based organizations were pushing the city, you know, you need to be newborn, you need to make bigger investments for this just absolutely critical issue that we are facing in the city and in the world today. And so there was a formed in 2020 and they formed a whole climate action task force to bring in a lot of stakeholders from you know, the environmental justice community, business groups, small business owners, just regular Denver residents.

Mike Salisbury (7m 20s):
You know, just a broad spectrum of people from across the community to a kind of lay out a vision for if the city were to create what is now the climate protection fund, you know, what are the types of investments we should be making as a city. There’s not an interest like hey let’s just give the city a blank check to do whatever they wanna do. Like let’s tell them what the community thinks is important to do. And then addition to that whole work product, there was the recommendation to put a sales tax measure on the ballot in the November of 2020 election, which then did pass and officially created the Climate Protection Fund, which provides our office around 40 million a year to focus on different climate work that we do.

Jeff Wood (8m 7s):
That’s awesome. So let’s talk about e-bikes. Obviously Kasser does a lot of different things and has a lot of different roles to play in the emissions reduction game, but e-bikes have been getting a lot of attention. And so, you know, the city of Denver and Kasser started this e-bike rebate program and it’s become super wildly popular. But where did the initial idea come from? Like how did that get put into the bin of things that you all wanted to do?

Mike Salisbury (8m 29s):
So the initial idea from E-Bikes did come out of this climate action taskforce that was formed in 2020. So they made a large list of different things we should be doing across all sectors, not just transportation. So e-bike vouchers programs, e-bikes was definitely one of the bigger items that they had highlighted in that report. And so I think what happened is that ballot measure passed in 2020 and myself started trying to figure, okay, now it’s passed, what do we do? You know, how do we, how do we start implementing things? And that for me, the e-bike voucher, E-bike incentive just made a lot of sense because A, it was really a great marriage of both the mobility and electrification space.

Mike Salisbury (9m 14s):
Before this all passed, my work was a little more focused on the electric vehicle side of things, but essentially the ballot language that passed this was very much focused on mobility and also electrification. So I knew I really wanted to have my initial work really focusing on things that reduced G H G were also really promoting mobility. And so that just seemed like a really good thing for myself and office to focus on early on. And it was also something that was very much within our purview as an office. So we work really closely, the city has a department of transportation and infrastructure, so they are the ones who do like all of our bike lane projects and kind of those streets and all that mobility piece.

Mike Salisbury (9m 59s):
We have to be very careful we’re not, we’re not supposed to be doing their work for them. And so this was a new program that was very much in the purview that our office could do, offering incentives, offering rebates to people. So it’s something that we could do ourselves and you know, get started relatively quickly.

Jeff Wood (10m 15s):
Was it something that they were excited about? I mean obviously they’re doing the bike lanes and other things like that but you know, something new, a different idea. Is that something they were excited about or is that something that folks in the city were excited about? Is it something that people pushed back on?

Mike Salisbury (10m 27s):
I don’t think anyone very little pushback if at all. I think city, you know, people in our department of transportation infrastructure, they’re working on how do we improve mobility for Denver residents. So they were really excited because they, you know, didn’t have this new budget source to go out and do things like incentives for e-bikes. So they’re very excited like to see the our office step up and do something in that space to again give people more options. They’re really, you know, their focus is a lot around how do we reduce these, you know, single occupancy vehicle trips in the city. Those are kind of the big challenge, you know, just people commuting by themselves in their car back and forth.

Mike Salisbury (11m 8s):
And so they see bikes, e-bikes as being a really critical piece of the puzzle of how we get people out of their cars for these, you know, shorter trips. I think that, you know, the city of Denver, I forget, it’s like, I think something like 65% trips are less than 10 miles or something. So it’s just like it’s this huge potential of all these trips are being made in the city and cars that something like e-bike has just a huge amount of potential to replace those shorter trips for a lot of people. And especially those single occupancy vehicle trips where you know, you’re just, you’re just going to the doctor’s office, you’re going to work and you’re doing it by yourself and you’re doing it on a 70 pound bike instead of a, you know, 4,000 pound car.

Jeff Wood (11m 53s):
And that’s really interesting, I mean that movement for e-bikes has really taken off in the last few years and folks chatting about them and and exploring using them and and you know, writing about it all over the internet and how excited they are about them. But they do serve a specific and, and I think part of that is the trip reduction from automobiles and I think you all found some interesting facts about how people were using them after the rebate program existed for a little while.

Mike Salisbury (12m 17s):
Yeah, it’s been really exciting. In the fall we were sent out a survey to about the first 3000 people who had used a voucher to buy an e-bike from our program to try to better understand exactly how they were using their e-bikes, what kind of trips were they making, what kind of trips were they replacing being a really important thing for us to understand. And for us it was really exciting to kind of get this data and we saw like overall people were riding their e-bikes 26 miles a week. We also saw that they were replacing 21 of those 26 miles we’re replacing vehicle trips. So that was a really exciting finding for us. Cause I think that was a really, you know, fundamental question is are we just replacing a lot of walking and biking trips and actually kind of moving in the wrong direction from a greenhouse gas perspective.

Mike Salisbury (13m 5s):
And so it was really heartening to see no people are really using these in the way we hope they would be. People are taking, they’re going out and riding around for fun and recreation because they’re awesome and fun to ride but they’re also like, no these are becoming real mobility options for people. And we also, another really interesting finding from the survey was the found that the income qualified residents, these are residents, you know 60% of area median income can qualify for a much higher incentive amount. We see them riding their bikes about 50% more miles than the general population. And so I think it’s a really great indication that it is really becoming even much more robust mobility option for again those lower income residents who again maybe lack that individually owned vehicle or don’t want to or you know, were maybe very transit reliant beforehand and now a much more reliable and timely way to make the trips they need to make every day.

Jeff Wood (14m 2s):
That brings me into another question about like how the rebate is targeted specifically. So who does the rebate go to or who is allowed to get the rebate when they go and and buy an e-bike?

Mike Salisbury (14m 12s):
Sure. So it’s set up right now again we have two tiers of incentive. Everyone in the city of Denver can apply to get, today it’s a $300 rebate. Last year was $400. And so everyone can get one of those. You just have to be able to prove you’re a Denver resident. And then again if you are what we call income qualified resident, if you are enrolled in existing programs that indicate, you know, maybe you’re through the utility or someone else you like already have been identified as being having a lower income, then you kind of automatically will qualify for this rebate of up to $1,200 off the e-bike. And so every time we do a release of the vouchers, we set aside a certain number of vouchers for the general population and then also for the income qualified residents.

Mike Salisbury (14m 59s):
And so last year it was about a 50 50 split between two groups of people for the total of redeemed vouchers.

Jeff Wood (15m 6s):
That’s pretty impressive to target and then also, you know, basically get to that goal that you’re setting for yourselves.

Mike Salisbury (15m 12s):
Yeah, well I think it was, it’s been way more successful than we envisioned it would be. I, I think we did not know how successful it would be and how much demand there would be in that income qualified space. Cause it’s still, it’s a, it’s a new technology, they still can be expensive. You know $1,200 can cover a lot of the cost but you still might have a lot of the e-bikes out there, they’re not gonna be free. You might still have to put a couple hundred dollars for the lower end or less expensive e-bikes. So I didn’t have a sense of like is this really gonna be successful and is there gonna be a lot of demand in that space? And so that was really exciting to see. So we started out, you know, lots more demand I think for the the standard vouchers.

Mike Salisbury (15m 55s):
But then as the program I think became more widespread and people learn more about it, guess how more and more equal amount of demand happening in the income qualified space. Our goal is get a lot of egs out there but I guess I would’ve been disappointed if this had confirmed the oh e-bikes are just kind of like things for rich people to have. So you definitely hear that, oh they’re just for rich people. But I think we’re like, we’ve demonstrated the, the success of the interest in this program that everyone wants this really cool mobility option. It can be a real resource for everybody.

Jeff Wood (16m 26s):
I do wanna know what the budget initial budget was for the program because you ran outta money because so many people took advantage of it, which is a good thing, you know, it’s to run outta money cuz it’s so popular. But what was the initial budget for the program?

Mike Salisbury (16m 38s):
So our initial budget in 2022, honestly we had set aside about $300,000 for e-bike vouchers in 2022. We didn’t have obviously much of a sense of what the demand for the program would be. We thought, you know, we’ll put this out there, we’ll learn some good lessons about what the market looks like. Are we setting the rebate levels of appropriate amounts? So we started out with that in mind and we blew past that in the first weekend that the voucher program was opened. I think it launched on a Thursday and then we remember coming back into the office like on that Monday morning after the weekend of applications had come in and being like, oh we’ve gone way past 300,000 already with just the people who had applied to date.

Mike Salisbury (17m 21s):
So we were just, you know, blown away in a really great way by the interest and demand for the program. But that just required a lot of, a lot of adjustment and fine tuning. And again, we’re very, I think fortunate as a city and that we do have this dedicated source for the climate programs. So we were able to go back and say, okay, this program is really successful, there’s a lot of interest in it, let’s find ways to kind of keep on shoveling money into it in 2022. Because people were really excited about the program and so we were able to like, okay, let’s, you know, think about well we’re gonna do this in 2025, this program, so let’s just kind of like borrow some money from that year and kind of shift it over into here and have that kind of leadership in our office being really receptive to being like, yeah, let’s figure out a way to keep this going.

Jeff Wood (18m 7s):
I imagine the results of the study also help too because you can actually prove that you’re actually reducing emissions. I know here in California we have cap and trade and you know, the funding goes to a lot of different programs and I think people question whether some of the programs actually reduce emissions. In theory they do, but then do they actually, when you give people money to do it? And so I think that was really interesting too that the, the research actually showed that people were replacing their car trips with bikes with e-bikes and the emissions reductions were are huge. Even over taking an ev it’s actually a big emissions reduction as well. So it’s not just, you know, internal combustion engines that you’re replacing but other, you could also replace regular EV cars because they’re so huge and they take up so many, you know, missions to build and all that stuff.

Jeff Wood (18m 48s):
It’s a big win And so I, I think that’s impressive too that you can actually prove that your money is being well spent for the goals that you set.

Mike Salisbury (18m 55s):
Yeah, absolutely. I think that was again, seeing the results that people are really replacing vehicle trips, you know, as you said, whether it’s a gasoline vehicle or an electric vehicle, at the end of the day an e-bike, the emissions are minuscule compared to almost anything else. I mean there’s such an efficient mode of transportation that the, the emissions footprint for an e-bike is just gonna, you’re just gonna get a huge emissions benefit, whatever kind of car you’re replacing. And so seeing that, yeah we’re replacing car trips and that’s I think helping also, you know, we talk about all the other reasons that cars are not great. So you know, I’m all about reducing emissions.

Mike Salisbury (19m 37s):
I think electric vehicles are really critical to meeting our emissions reduction goals. But it’s also really great to have modes that don’t take up so much space that don’t have safety implications for pedestrians and other bicycle riders. I think that, you know, focusing on the mode that can get you where you want to go with the least amount of like square footage being taken up is just really important. Bright sizing the modes we use for the trips we’re making. You don’t need to be driving around in a, you know, 6,000 pound car all the time by yourself.

Jeff Wood (20m 9s):
Another thing is that there’s an important piece to this which is, you know, the bike shops and the point of sales rebate part of it is important. How did you get to that place where you decided that that was where the rebate should take place rather than people maybe like sending in those old rebates used to get in in the mail where you’d have to mail in your, your, your voucher and you weren’t sure if whether you were gonna get the money back from that company or not?

Mike Salisbury (20m 30s):
Yeah, so it became very, I think clear to us that the point of sale aspect was gonna be really critical to the program. We did a lot of, you know, outreach and engagement in 2021 when we were designing the program and found that especially again we’re talking about if we wanted to have that higher level amount for income qualified people, that those are exactly the residents who don’t have a thousand dollars just sitting around and can wait for the city to pay them back in three or four weeks. If we really wanted to make sure that they’re gonna be real kind of equity benefits to this program that we needed to make that voucher off the upfront purchase price or it was just gonna be a, you know, people weren’t gonna take advantage of it, people were not gonna have the flexibility in their budget to like wait around for us to get back to them.

Mike Salisbury (21m 20s):
So that was, I think we, we kind of understood that. So we looked at lot lots of different models, lots of programs do kind of do that backend reimbursement, some do upfront. And so we were kind of debating that internally and just realized like that just makes a lot of sense. We wanna like really reach people who can’t afford me by today. We need to make sure that that money comes off upfront. And that led to some really great important conversation with the bike shops and you talked about the local retailers puts a little bit of the onus on them cuz they are then the ones who are burying the cost of that incentive until the city pays them back. So we had to really work closely with the local bike shops to make sure that a, they were really comfortable with the program, really understood exactly how it worked and were happy with how it was gonna work, but that they were also going to get paid back in a very prompt manner.

Mike Salisbury (22m 12s):
So while they might have a little bit of a capacity, they, they also can’t sit around for four to six weeks for the city to pay them back. Especially with lots of like really local, you know, one or two employee bike shops. They’re not just all large, you know, we have rei, we also have like, you know, really small independent bike shops and they’re like yeah we can’t sit on 10 to $20,000 of vouchers and wait around for the city. So we worked really closely and we have a, a contractor Optum who does processes our applications and processes rebates and while we were selecting them that was one of our kind of critical questions like can you turn around this voucher reimbursement to the bike shops in like two to three weeks?

Mike Salisbury (22m 53s):
Cause we just knew that was fundamentally really critical to making sure the bike shops were gonna be made whole as quickly as possible.

Jeff Wood (22m 59s):
What was the reaction of the bike shops? Like were they excited to hear about the program or, or was it something they kind of had some consternation about at the beginning?

Mike Salisbury (23m 7s):
They’re all very excited. I mean I think at the end of the day we’re, we’re hopefully helping them sell a lot more bikes.

Jeff Wood (23m 12s):
Yeah, I can imagine. But

Mike Salisbury (23m 13s):
I think, you know, there was the devil’s always in the details like they wanted to know, really understand how the program was gonna work and they’re really instrumental in helping us, you know, think about and design the program. We had lots of conversations with some, we call ’em kind our champion bike shop. There’s some bike shops who are like already really excited and engaged in the e-bike space in Denver. So we’re able to like talk to them and understand, you know, how everything works, how we should define things. There’s lots of different, you know, programs, different classes, what’s allowed, how we define cargo bike. So they’re really instrumental in helping us lay out what the program would look like. And so it was very just helpful to have them engaged and I think they’re just, they’re all generally really excited.

Mike Salisbury (23m 53s):
I said we, we started with I think nine shops when we launched a year ago and we’re now up to about 35 participating bike shops in, in, in Denver. So I think we’ve brought on new bike shops that didn’t exist beforehand. We’ve gotten bike shops who now who used to only carry regular bikes now also carry e-bikes. We have bike shops that have brought in a lot, have kind of been able to shift their inventory to meet the demand. There’s been lots of, you know, people demand, like people wanting to come in and get those lower cost models. So bike shops then will shift there like what they have on the floor of the bike shop to help respond to what general residents are really excited about buying.

Jeff Wood (24m 32s):
That’s really interesting. I’m wondering if, you know, just the general increase of inventory and things like that has actually increased sales of e-bikes even without the rebate. Do you think that that’s been the case as well?

Mike Salisbury (24m 43s):
I’m not sure anecdotally I would say so. I think, you know, unfortunately unlike vehicles there’s no like e-bike sales dashboard that you can consult and know how many e-bikes were sold in Denver in 2021 and 2022 and 2023. We just don’t have good data on that. I think just talking to the bike shops, you know, they will talk, you know, they definitely have seen a pretty significant increase in their sales volumes. You know, 2022 versus 2021. They definitely say, you know, everyone, it’s not everyone who’s using the voucher, they’re still selling a good number of e-bikes from people who aren’t making use of the voucher. But this certainly has increased their sales significantly over year to year.

Jeff Wood (25m 22s):
It feels like it would also just bring kind of attention to the existence of e-bikes. I mean all the the, all the articles in the in westward or Denver Post or whoever kind of free advertising almost not for the individual bike shops but for the mode as a whole.

Mike Salisbury (25m 34s):
Yeah, I think it’s, you know, you were talking earlier about just the e-bikes becoming more and more popular and more and more a part of people being aware of them over the last couple years. That’s one I think really big plus of this is that it’s made people aware of e-bikes who maybe didn’t, you know, hadn’t heard of them and maybe they don’t need the voucher to buy an e-bike but they’re like, oh this is a really cool thing. I didn’t know this existed or this is a thing and now I can both, you know, read news stories about it but also see other people are in my neighborhood using them. And so you hear a lot of those kind of anecdotal stories about my neighbor got one and I tested it out. I’m like well this is really cool. I gotta get me one of these. Yeah. And so that spreading the word among your own networks about how, how awesome e-bikes are,

Jeff Wood (26m 20s):
There’s been a lot of interest nationally as well and depending on the treasury rules that’ll be coming out soon. Yeah. On EV rebates there’s discussion about the e-bike law that Earl Blumenauer and others have have put together. I’m wondering what do you think would happen if we were able to put even a fraction of the money that we put towards EVs towards e-bikes because $7,500 for you know, a $60,000 car or you know, a thousand dollars for you know, maybe a, a two, a 1500 to $3,000 e-bike. That’s a big difference in how many bikes versus cars you could actually create people riding.

Mike Salisbury (26m 55s):
Yeah, I think it would have a huge impact if we had a federal support for e-bike purchases. I think again, the amount of money can be stretched a lot further with a a thousand dollars, $1,500 e-bike incentive compared to the, you know, much larger EV incentive because you’re talking about the purchase price of e-bike is so much less and you can actually have a much larger percentage of the cost of that mobility option. So I think there’s a real great benefit to doing something like that and I think it’d just be really great to have that available everywhere. I can’t tell you how many cities in Colorado and across the country have reached out to me be like, Hey, we wanna do this here.

Mike Salisbury (27m 37s):
And so everyone seems really excited about it. Again, we’re very lucky in Denver we do have dedicated climate funding to help support programs like this. And so not every city has those resources. And so I think making sure that this is like an option for people across the country would just be, you know, potentially even more game changing because Denver great we have like 700,000 people. We’re, we’re a small slice of the pie, but if we can like get programs like this in cities states across the country, then I think you just kind of obviously snook increased the potential mobility and greenhouse gas benefits of this technology.

Jeff Wood (28m 14s):
There was an article in the Hill I think yesterday talking about the average cost of a car and it was like $49,000 or something like that. And three years ago it was only like $38,000. And so the prices of these vehicles is becoming a luxury good. And so I feel like that opens the door for something like the e-bike where it is much cheaper and it’s, you know, it’s a mobility accelerator. It feels like it connects people with those destinations you’re talking about those short trips and so, you know, it’s, it’s interesting to think about it from that perspective too. If, if cars get way too expensive it might be that you need a rebate for these these modes that actually people can afford to, to get around and in addition to transit and walking and and and regular biking.

Mike Salisbury (28m 53s):
Yeah, well it just makes so much sense to support something that again, I think with a, certainly especially with the e-bike incentive, it’s an affordable transportation alternative. You know, on some level it’d be great if for a client perspective, everyone just bought an EV tomorrow be other challenges but like great climate benefit. We still have all the cars but with the e-bikes it’s a, it’s a, as you men said with cars, new cars are expensive, used cars are expensive just because there’s a, there’s great incentives for them doesn’t mean everyone can afford to buy one or afford those monthly payments. Whereas you know, you can buy an e-bike for $2,000 maybe that’s like what, three or four months of car payment.

Mike Salisbury (29m 37s):
Yeah. And you have yourself a brand new e-bike with or without any incentive. It’s something that can be accessed by everybody. I think we’ve had a lot of struggles in the electric vehicle space trying to figure out how we provide disadvantaged residents, disadvantaged people access to electric vehicles. Cuz even people talk about well we have to use Nissan leaves that are coming off leases. Those are a little more expensive and that’s still like a chunk of change for people. You still need financing to get that. Whereas with, you know, the e-bike combined with the incentive like this can be something that people can walk in and buy today and not have to like save up months and months and years for like down payments or worry about those ongoing cost And then you know, the cost that you like you’re or you’re saving money by riding it.

Mike Salisbury (30m 27s):
I mean your cost per mile is insignificant. Your cost per mile is just so much less than a gasoline vehicle or electric vehicle. And then you also can save on things like insurance and if you can do that stuff, we see lots of people, you know anecdotally it’s like yeah I was able to go down to a one car household because you know, I got, I still have my car but I was able to get rid of my second car because now I can make all these, a lot of these short trips on e-bike. And so if you’re talking about the insurance cost of a car and on top of car payments there’s a lot of cost savings from shifting to an e-bike that hopefully you know, you’re actually saving people money over the course of the year as opposed to having them do expensive car payments for five to six years.

Jeff Wood (31m 11s):
You mentioned earlier also that Colorado as a state is looking at rebates. How would that maybe kind of level on top and even if a federal one came out, like how would those all level on top of each other? Would they, would you be able to get like a free bike if you could, you know, put all these, all these like levels of, of rebates together or, or do you think it would work like that? I mean I guess the programs haven’t, aren’t quite finished yet so it might not even know

Mike Salisbury (31m 33s):
Yeah. How this all stacks is I think still to be determined. I think, you know, we talk, I talk closely with the state of Colorado to understand where they’re at in their process and kind of what system they’re gonna bring on. I think the intention is very much like how can we make these two programs work together to make bikes even more affordable. Cuz the state of Colorado’s program is really focused only on the low and moderate income residents. So we definitely wanna make sure we’re giving them the most benefits as possible. So I think there’s definitely, we’re gonna, we’re gonna try to make it at work to figure out like maybe they, you know, we split the incentives or one goes first or something like that. And I think that’ll really depend on, you know, exactly the details of the states program and like how we work with the bike shops.

Mike Salisbury (32m 15s):
Cause I think again the state programs intended to also be an upfront incentive how that works with the federal program, again that’s more of like a tax credit. So maybe it’s just like you only get the tax credit on the balance after you take the incentive off. I’m guessing they’re not gonna give you a tax credit for, you know, the, the $400 you got off the Denver rebate hopefully would not be something you’d get on the federal side as well. But I think because that’s coming after the fact, it would probably be easier to look at the actual purchase price of the e-bike as opposed to the the sticker price.

Jeff Wood (32m 46s):
Has the success of the program changed any opinions that you know of Maybe local officials, you know, state officials, anybody in kind of an elected place of decision making power?

Mike Salisbury (32m 57s):
I think globally our elected officials have been really excited about the program. I don’t think, you know, when we started it, no one was telling us why this is a really horrible idea, you shouldn’t be doing this. Yeah, people were excited about the program and I think people just got more excited about the program as it kind of became more popular and they kind of realized the demand that Denver residents were expressing for the program. So I think we’ve just gotten a lot more enthusiasm from a local elected officials and being like, yeah, more e-bikes. Yay everyone loves e-bikes, let’s get more e-bikes out there. But I think probably where, you know, I’ve seen the impact is getting other elected officials outside of Denver really excited about programs like this.

Mike Salisbury (33m 44s):
So I think it was something probably not on people’s radar but then they hear about the program like why can’t we do that here? So again, I’ve talked to you know, city staff but also elected officials in different cities across the country who are like, okay, what can we learn from Denver program? How can we implement something like that here? Like I want to do that in my city. So I think it’s like kind of again raise the profile of e-bikes but also what cities can do to help promote e-bikes and how that can be like done in a really successful and hopefully like really equitable way as well.

Jeff Wood (34m 20s):
You’ve been through a few cycles it feels like, of rebates and and releasing and you’re gonna have one, another one coming out in a few months, you know, after going through this a bit. Is there anything that surprised you about the, the process overall? I mean the process generally to either put the program together, the process of of having to answer all these emails and questions and go on podcasts, talk about the rebate program. I’m wondering if there’s anything that you’ve learned in the process.

Mike Salisbury (34m 45s):
I think one thing I’ve been really pleasantly surprised about is just how much interest people have for the program and for e-bikes in general. So we didn’t expect that. And just having thousands and thousands of people want these vouchers every month is kind of mind blowing. I think right now in our last release there was like 15,000 people trying to log on to our website for about 800 vouchers and they got snapped up in like three minutes. So like there’s this huge, we’ve given out you know, 6,000 e-bikes and the demand still has not even come close to being sated by Denver residents. So that’s really exciting. What also I think is exciting is that, you know, we talk a lot about the really the importance of the greenhouse gas reductions, which is absolutely super important, critical to what our job is on a day-to-day basis.

Mike Salisbury (35m 34s):
But what really is exciting for me to hear is kind of of the more like almost qualitative stories that people tell about how the e-bike has improved their lives, made their lives better, improved their mobility options. It’s like, it’s harder to measure that stuff, but it’s so important to think about like this is now someone’s like reliable form of transportation to get to work for example. Like they’re saving time because they don’t have to rely on taking two different buses and making a transfer between them to get to their jobs. Now they, they’re like I can go this like eight mile trip on this e-bike takes me half an hour. It would’ve taken me an hour and a half. Do this on a bus.

Mike Salisbury (36m 14s):
Or you hear about, you know, people talking about how much they enjoy riding their e-bike and how it’s like this like almost like physical and mental health thing for them that now they’re out of their car and they’re experiencing the city in a way they haven’t before. They’re exploring their neighborhood going further away from their house and just be outside and enjoying being, you know, in the city in a way that when you’re inside a car you’re just not really enjoying being in a city cuz you’re stuck in traffic half the time. So I think it’s just like seeing like yeah those like ways that it can really make a difference in someone’s life or kind of like can bring joy.

Mike Salisbury (36m 55s):
Like I love that several people have shared stories about how like they take, they got a cargo bike and so they take their kids to like preschool or daycare now every day and the kids get really excited to like get on the e-bike and the kids get all disappointed if they have to take the car because of X, Y, and z reason the kids will like run and grab their helmets and like, I mean that’s like really great cause you’re talking about this like, this like shift in how people are getting around and hopefully other children and the younger generations will even like experience, you know, biking as a mode of transportation. So hopefully raising new generations of people who are excited to cycle.

Jeff Wood (37m 29s):
I think that’s interesting part too is is the fun aspect or the, just the exploratory aspect even. I mean I think when, when ESCOs came out first people were just so excited to ride them because they felt like they were having fun and not just transporting themselves. That probably maybe was how people felt when cars were invented as well, I’m guessing, but a little bit of a different thing. But for me, yeah, like I don’t have an e-bike. I, I love riding my bike when I get a chance but you know, as a runner, as somebody who ran in high school and college, you know, one of the things that I really liked was being able to kind of know the city within a 10 mile radius of the University of Texas and you know, just understanding I could go for a 10 mile run and just, you know, go on a new street every day or something like that. And so I feel like if you could do that with an e-bike, cuz I’m not gonna be as fit as I was in college ever again.

Jeff Wood (38m 14s):
Right. It’s not gonna happen. Yeah. But if you could do that and be assisted by, you know, the electric option of a bike, it might actually open to people’s minds about what their city is, what their neighborhood is. Maybe it, you know, brings back some kind of civic responsibility as well. I don’t know, I, I don’t know the impacts long term of, of E-bikes, but I feel like that’s something that I would want to happen and have felt in the past that maybe could happen in the future.

Mike Salisbury (38m 36s):
I think you’re right. And then I think it likes, you know, they give you a, a chance to slow down a little bit. You know, they’re not, they may be a little slower than cars, but it’s like, you know, you’re slowing down and seeing what’s around you, what’s in your environment. I mean same thing as just regular cycling or walking, you’re actually seeing the environment around you and so you kind of like, you notice that small business that I didn’t realize that was in that shopping center or I didn’t realize that was in that area because I could drive by and I’m not paying attention to stuff like that. But also just exploring, I think you talked about exploring the city, like going out, okay now instead of like finding restaurants and stuff within a one mile area of my home, maybe I’m willing to go 2, 3, 4, 5 miles to go down to the new brewery down the street or the new, you know, store down the street or the new shopping area.

Mike Salisbury (39m 27s):
And so it just kind of gives people that extension of the world that’s easily accessible. Cause I think you want, yeah, you want to be easily accessible but you also want it to be fun to access.

Jeff Wood (39m 39s):
Yeah, for sure. Well where can folks find information about what your program is and you know, when the next rebate’s coming out, those types of things? The

Mike Salisbury (39m 48s):
Best place to get information about Denver’s bike voucher program is city website. So it’s denver gov one word.org/ebike. So that has all the information about the program when the next launch of the vouchers will be, there’s a email press or a, on that page is a lister you can sign up for to get all the updates. So you know, it’ll remind you, oh, vouchers are coming out tomorrow so you can sign up for that to get all the latest information.

Jeff Wood (40m 18s):
And I imagine you’re overwhelmed with people emailing you from cities and stuff, but I, if somebody does wanna start a program, could they get ahold of you somehow and get some information? Yeah,

Mike Salisbury (40m 27s):
Absolutely. At the end of the day I, I love, again talking with other cities, other states, people interested in doing this cuz you know, at the end of the day the climate problem is not stopping the borders of Denver. So whatever we can do to help other jurisdictions kind of down this path and you know, learn from some of the stuff we have experienced here in Denver, I’ve always delighted to talk to other people who are trying to do stuff in the e-bike space so I can, you know, share my email address, Mike Salisbury, s a ls b u denver gov org.

Mike Salisbury (41m 7s):
I’m always happy to talk to people about the program and share some of the information we’ve come up with date.

Jeff Wood (41m 12s):
Awesome. Well Mike, thanks so much for joining us. We really appreciate your time and efforts.

Mike Salisbury (41m 16s):
No, thank you so much. It’s been so much fun. I talk about Ebikes forever, so this is great