San Francisco E-bike Incentive Program

The San Francisco E-bike Incentive program was a campaign to get a universal e-bike incentive for San Francisco

Problem

San Francisco has multiple goals around pedestrian safety, sustainalbe mode-share, and climate change resiliance and it's failing or not making progress on all of them. Transportation represents 44% of San Francisco's climate footprint and each year as many as 20 people are killed by vehicles in the City.

Solution

E-bikes are an healthy, equitable, and sustainable way for the City to meet it's goals and e-bike incentives are an extremely cost-effective way of getting more people on bikes. E-bike incentive programs in other cities like Denver and Atlanta have been wildly successful and led to results like 17% reductions in trips taken by car.

Challenges & Learnings

• It's very valuable to understand the incentives of stakeholders and policymakers when it comes to moving legislation forward. We mapped out who would be against the program and crafted the legislation and
• It's very valuable to do a lot of work up-front, before presenting an idea to policy-makers. We were able to give the Supervisors an nearly fully-formed program with buy-in from stakeholders nearly at the outset. They had to do very little "heavy lifting."
• The real challenge is often money. Identifying potential funding sources is critically important to getting programs implemented.

Results & Impact

Legislation creating the program was passed on November 5th, 2024. The legislation assigned the San Francisco Department of the Environment as administering agency, established parameters for the program, and created a fund in the Administrative code to accept money for it both from the City and outside of it.