176: The power and potential of E-bike subsidies with Grace Rink - Chief Climate Officer of Denver City

This week Oliver interviews Grace Rink, Chief Climate Officer for the City and County of Denver. Grace leads the Office of Climate Action, Sustainability, and Resiliency. She’s more well known in micromobility as the head of the Denver e-bike subsidy programme, which has captured the imagination of regulators all over the world with the latest program iterations selling out in mere minutes. Today we talk about how she ended up in Denver, why the programme was formed and it’s objectives and the implications of what they’re finding.

This felt like an important interview. We think that subsidies and government support are something that micromobility has traditionally eschewed in favour of just doing it, but there are more and more cities, states, and countries around the world realising that the bang for the buck on these vehicles are substantially higher than they’d be for the other transport climate policies. They talk through the newly launched subsidy tracker that Micromobility Industries has just launched which tracks all subsidies for E-bikes, scooters and more globally. We’re very excited about it - and think that it’ll be an important tool going forward.

Oliver and Grace also run through other schemes of government support for end consumers looking to use micromobility and how to make micromobility support non-partisan.

If you’re a policymaker who is looking into this, welcome - We hope that you enjoy this, and that this conversation inspires you to push for a similar policy in your jurisdiction. If you have the desire to develop better materials for you on how to best do this and that we can host, please reach out to our team - we’d love to hear from you.

Specifically they tackle:

- How is the subsidy funded?

- Why pick this? What are the motivation/outcome objectives?

- “The city reported that the e-bikes purchased as part of the program were ridden 26 miles (42 km) per week on average, and replaced 3.4 car trips each week.”

Does the city calculate trips?

- How do you balance action and resiliency?

- Which companies benefit the most from this?

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