The E-Bike Political Paradox
When City Planners and Politicians look at future planning and budgets they have lots of hard decisions to make. The first being supporting existing infrastructure or working on new ones. This is what I call the "E-Bike Political Paradox". People need the existing car oriented infrastructure to continue to work and grow so they can also work and grow. At the same time, officials are faced with the needs of the future. They need to see ahead for their constituents and beyond.
There have been many inflection points in American Society. The choice to embrace the automobile allowed for expansive growth across the entirety of our Country. For Good and Bad, it has allowed us to become what we are today. Even that deeply incumbent set of businesses is going through their own rebuilding today. Competing with the future, in Tesla and other new manufacturers here and overseas. With the future being Electrification of mobility, Planners and Officials need to consider a more holistic view of the city, its future and direction of Growth.
Many Governments, local and federal, have offered and considered rebates to allow many more to access the future as early as possible. These rebates have centered around the auto industry, but more recently citizens and officials alike have come to recognize the E-Bike and E-Motorcycle as highly efficient and fun ways to provide mobility to their lives. In our customer and citizen interactions we've found that pricing is somewhat a concern. With the number one concern being road safety. Especially in the E-bike potential and current commuter base.
With so many different concerns of current and future mobility infrastructure, Planners and Officials are placed in the most difficult situations of decision making. How do they allocate their funds appropriately to make the greatest impacts for today while keeping them moving towards the future.
Rebates are Great, but for Who?
Ok, so little bit of political mass population operations theory here. The Carrot, the Stick, the Sermon and now The Nudge. These are all things used by governments to encourage large populations to embrace change. Rebates are generally viewed as "Carrots". In today's environment you could call filling your gas tank "the Stick", ouch! We've all heard "The Sermon", "It's the War, you have to pay more." And before you go any farther with that, please, take it to Twitter, not about the politics here. Then there's the Nudge. I prefer this method, it's like Mom hitting you with the guilty reminder of what you should be doing. Eventually, you hear the voice in your head and take the appropriate action. How much any one or mixture of those works depends on individual psychologies. Applied across the whole, you can create the greatest amount of behavioral change.
Rebates are generally viewed as temporary. This is because they only encourage on part of the overall required behavioral changes. The idea being if you got one, you'll use it. At the same time, the rebate creates a psychology of decreased value. Since someone was able to get something for so much less than what it would normal be in an open market environment it creates a false view of lower value. This is a large reason why I'm not the biggest fan of rebates provided by governments. If the rebate is a direct financial provision of the manufacturer, that makes more sense to me. This creates a direct understanding that the manufacturer is doing this to gain market share and the pricing will be higher. Think crowd sourcing campaigns. You get a discounted price for buying something early, that's basically a manufacturers rebate at point of sale.
"Why should the manufacturer offer a rebate, John? Makes no sense to me."
I feel the same way about government rebates. It's basically paying yourself back for buying something you might not of in the first place. It tells me you might have had somewhere better for that money to go. Of course E-bike manufacturers and retailers support it, it means you'll artificially come buy more product from them. Then they can go to more investors and say, "See, people want there, we need more money." Again, it's artificial. And you might think as a PEV Marketplace we'd want this. Besides, our E-motorcycles fall right inline with most the requirements of the rebates being offered or considered. Makes some of them only a few hundred dollars some places.
But we want a real market. One that isn't spending government subsidies to over charging brands disguised as "rebates".
We Took a Totally Different Approach
There's lots of companies out there that aren't going to like what I'm saying here. And they're really not going to like it if Government Officials read and understand this too. But here it is:
Government Rebates for Ebikes only Help Ebike Companies
There, it's out there, I said it and I'm sure many agree and disagree. It may have helped you buy an ebike from a company that really could've sold it to you for less and still made a profit. That's been our approach from the beginning. We're not looking for hand outs from the Government and essentially the People of the USA, but rather their Honest Purchase from us and into the Electric Future. We reduce prices to bring you comparable units while still making a reasonable profit. We could charge more. After all, the goal of a company is to make profits. But for us, before profit, comes happy customers, who got great deals and love the way these things can change their lives.
We can do this without adding excessive overhead. Those are the top 2 goals of a business, happy customers and efficient operations. Profit will cascade from there.
Our Request for Officials
We are all for rebates and if already offered in your area it doesn't make any sense to pull them back. What we would ask is that there be more focus on the infrastructure and spending. As a business owner that offers many of the same models for less, I know that part can be done from our end. Regardless of our own friendly competition, making them more accessible to everyone should be our collective goal as businesses. From your end as an Official, People Centric planning for safer roadways that encourage bicycle, E-bike and E-motorcycle traffic. There are many multi-decade and multi-generational examples in European cities that can be easily adopted and added here.
Las Vegas, being a newer city and mostly a grid layout lends itself well to this type of future planning. It's 215 loop provides outside quadrant access to the interior of the city. While the cross of the 15 and 95 can allow for more direct access, for cars. Interior areas get slowed down for safer travel. The decreasing of reaction time/speed ratios by drivers will lead to decreased accidents and deaths. An interesting side effect of slowed traffic and traffic on bike/e-bikes, local businesses and neighborhood thrive and become deeper communities. Again, there are many examples of this in Europe going back to the 70's showing impact and yield over decades. With the city layout Las Vegas has, the addition of more tunnels under the Strip, we think Las Vegas could lead the way in this planning and design.
Our Request of Riders and Citizens
No one is going to argue that our roads could be safer in general. After the recent pandemic traffic fatalities have skyrocketed. If you agree, and you would like to feel safe riding a bicycle/ebike/emotorcycle, please contact your local City, County, State politicians. Let them know what you've told me. I ride almost daily and multiple times each ride I avoid a collision. Once in a while it's even my mistake. No one's perfect, but overwhelmingly, I'm dodging someone in a car not looking or not caring. Tell, them about your experience too. Tell them you want safer streets to ride on. Tell them that if they were safer you'd save money and have a better quality of life. That your mobility shouldn't be oppressed by the high cost of fuel, but lifted up by the abundance of Electricity!
