Denver’s e-bike subsidy program produced more new riders, fewer car trips
ridereport.com
ridereport.com
As a personal anecdote, my household has gone from 3 cars pre-pandemic (2 commuters + 1 back up beater car) down to 1 commuter, 1 e-bike, 1 bicycle. The change has been startling in improved quality of life.
- Average Insurance ~ $1,771 per year
- Average Car Monthly Loan ~ $700 per month
- Average repair costs ~ $1,425
- Depreciation of initial investment. (google search returns an average new car - cost to be ~$50,000 USD in 2022)
- Gas
- Registration
> - Average Car Monthly Loan ~ $700 per month
Both of these are crazy high. Maybe not for everyone, but 1771 per year for insurance you should be shopping around or using a broker. And a car payment of 700, that is up to the buyer, but IMHO that is absurdly high.
I recently considered switching from a sedan to a cross-over... the sticker shock was upsetting. I make 2x as much as most of my friends and I absolutely refused to buy a cross-over, they all have cross-overs or trucks.
Ended up with a Hundai hatchback for 15k less, and bought a roof rack for 1k. When the 4 of us go snowboarding we use my small car instead of their huge expensive cars because I can fit 4 people + 4 snowboards on the roof, while they have to put a seat down for snowboards.
I don't know whats going on with everyone, a all wheel drive hatchback with a roof box is probably cheaper than the average crossover, fits FAR more luggage considering you can actually reach into the box, and if you buy a lift kit its just as good at off-roading as some random crossover is (IE: better than you think, worse than you expect)
1) Women
2) The elderly
3) The overweight
Women have a say in over 70% of vehicle purchases in the US. So even if the vehicle is for dad, mom (who is 5’4” on average) preferring the higher ride height of the SUV will influence the purchase if she has to drive it occasionally.
The elderly and the fat have a harder time getting in and out of lower-riding cars/hatches. The country is getting both older and fatter at the same time.
These are the driving forces in crossover dominance.
Interestingly just looked and old frumpy minivans are right up there in price too!!
Then at the start of the pandemic, the car manufacturers slashed their orders for microprocessors in anticipation of a depression. The fabs sold their capacity to other customers which meant that when car demand didn’t crater as expected there was a massive shortage, and the car companies prioritized what chips they could get to the highest profit models.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g39628015/best-selling-car...
https://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/2022-You...
Not sure if that annual costs includes parking and other things that cost, but aren’t obvious for many people (many of us park for “free”, but we’ve paid for those space through higher rents, mortgages, etc).
For the rest of the money, the average new car costs around $50k today. And the average ownership length is about 8 years. Average loan length is approaching 6 years. So, $8333/year to service principal, plus interest, etc. Then only 2-3 years of only fuel/maintenance before starting over again. Plus the majority of depreciation is during those fist few years. On a $50k car, that’s probably $20k of lost value, if not more.
Yes, not everybody buys new cars. But, lots of people do, and they spend an ungodly amount of money on them.
Regardless, I agree that these expenses add up fast. If I replaced my regular commutes with a $3000 e-bike that lasts 2 years, and I spent $2k per year on Ubers and rentals for various things that require a vehicle, I would come out ahead.
Also, average new car cost is the wrong metric. One ether has to use average car cost, including used cars, or track ownership costs of a new car excluding any secondary market transactions. E.g. until it is not road worthy anymore.
If that's the case, it just speaks volume of the inflation and the devaluation of the money that the cost of $10K for car being normalized.
With inflation, the money the consumer will get back when selling the car will be higher. That's not factored into the ownership cost.
1) You forgot about insurance
2) Your car's value was in 1999 dollars, not 2022 -- $1 in 1999 was worth $1.71 in 2022, so you need to adjust your yearly cost upwards into 2022 dollars
3) You haven't mentioned loan interest, which is additional cost if you financed it, which the average person needs to do
4) If $22K was below average for a new car in 1999, then your yearly cost will be below average as well
So just multiplying by 1.5 for inflation (an estimation) and adding $1,771 insurance brings us to $7,010. With some cost of financing and if it's a little below average to begin with, it seems to be roughly accurate.
--
Source quotes:
"The average cost of full coverage car insurance in 2022 is $1,771 per year"
"Monthly loan payments for new cars jumped to an average of $700 in the third quarter of 2022, while used vehicle loans averaged $525 per month, according to Experian."
"Registration fees vary from state to state. While some states charge a flat fee for all vehicles, others base the registration cost on age, horsepower or weight of the vehicle. Registration fees in Oregon are the highest in the country, ranging from $268.50 to $636.50 for first time registration. Arizona has the cheapest registration fee of just $8..."
"A car’s depreciation varies widely. In 2021, the average annual cost of depreciation is $3,900, according to AAA."
[1] https://www.bankrate.com/insurance/car/cost-of-car-ownership...
Can you elucidate? I assume by 'full coverage' you mean comprehensive (you get paid if your car gets damaged), vs liability-only (other person gets paid if you damage their dar).
Doing some very approximative math, my 7 year old car is worth $12k, and adding comprehensive insurance costs an additional $500/year. Why is it so obvious I wouldn't want that?
Your chance of a total loss on the car from a collision that’s your fault or a non-collision loss is well under 4%/year (the economic break even if your additional coverage is $500 on $12K). If you can’t write a check for $12K, you might need to keep the coverage. If you can, you make money (statistically) by dropping it.
Having a $5K car would probably be more financially appropriate, but that’s a side topic when considering only “buy this insurance or not”.
I don’t buy collision for a few reasons:
1. I can afford to self-insure.
2. If I pay for collision, I’m more likely to make a claim, which will make my insurance even more expensive in the future. Also, using insurance makes the repairs more expensive, and otherwise incurs more costs to society (various people will be involved in the claims process). These costs are incorporated into the price of the insurance.
I can understand paying for it if losing your car would ruin you, or if you think you are much more likely than average to crash (in a way the insurance rate for your demographic doesn’t capture), but otherwise it seems like a bad deal.
You might come out ahead, you might come out behind, but the risk of losing the car is still, on average, costing you something.
Or another one: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7356145,-104.9873758,3a,75y,...
...or another one: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7383571,-104.9929042,3a,75y,...
You can click around to pretty much any street in the city, and 100% of the space is dedicated to cars. A complete bike network that enables mass cycling is a dense grid that makes basically every street safe to cycle on: http://www.aviewfromthecyclepath.com/2015/05/the-grid-most-i...
This is what trying looks like (Jersey City's Quick Build Bike Network ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mC1l8L5aBA
Or this (Inside the New Plan to Make Paris ‘100% Cyclable): https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-22/how-paris...
Denver is not even really trying.
It has such an uphill battle against its historical context as a Western U.S. mining town. Before that, the area was sparsely populated by Native American hunter-gatherers. You're not even pretending to consider the starting point.
Why not compare it to places like Salt Lake City, or Boise? Cities that actually have some similarity to it terms of population and historical development.
I encourage everyone to disregard the comment I'm replying to. It's totally ridiculous. Peak HN big-brain BS.
I live in Phoenix, which is even more sprawled than Denver. I have a grocery store less than a mile from my house, and a bike path almost all the way there. Unfortunately, that path leads through an unlit and flooded underpass, through a flooded drainage canal, then ends with a stretch of grass and a guardrail to a 6-lane 55 mph road. They're so close, but there has to be an intention to complete the job. So far the powers that be intend only to serve cars. I hope that continues to improve in Denver (and elsewhere!) but sprawl and age aren't great excuses for clear choices.
You're gonna have to educate me on the projects you're talking about. It's taken them 7 years to put a bike lane down Broadway and it isn't even gonna be that fantastic.
The safe streets program created some wonderful spaces and routes, so of course they dismantled them for no reason.
Cap Hill, the most densely populated area of the city has no north-south bike route that I would ever dream of taking my children on. The East-west route on 11th is a death trap that cuts in and out in order to maintain a few car storage spaces.
The crown jewel, the I-25 for bikes in Denver, the Cherry Creek Trail requires users to play frogger across Speer, a 4 lane highway, in order to access much of it.
We can go on and on with these.
DOTI is an organization that is 100% dedicated to moving cars, every bike and pedestrian project is implemented with the first goal being to not inconvenience drivers.
That being said, you are right that it's light years ahead of Phoenix.
I do not know why the parent commenter chose those streets, nor what knowledge they have of the city, but if they posted 1000 more links it'd be more of the same.
Denver is not even trying. The landscape is completely dominated by cars, and utterly hostile to humans. The Mayor and City Council pay only lip service to making Denver more bike and pedestrian friendly, but little meaningful work has been done. Money has been spent, and things have been done, but none of it impactful.
In the 10 years I have lived in my house in central Denver, I cannot think of a single project, within a mile radius, that the city has planned and completed[1] that has made me feel safer as a cyclist, or pedestrian[2]. And I live in the densest part of the city, where these projects should be happening.
We even have a Vision Zero program, which is a joke. With the exception of the pandemic, traffic deaths continue to rise.
> Since Vision Zero was implemented in 2017, traffic fatalities have increased every year, except 2020, which saw a significant decrease due to stay-at-home orders and people working remotely. In 2021, traffic fatalities reached an all-time high with 84 deaths, surpassing Denver’s 2019 record high of 71 people.
This includes pedestrian deaths.
Source: https://denverite.com/2023/02/17/denvers-getting-money-to-st...
And road safety aside, bike theft is out of control in Denver. I only take my bike to do errands if I know I lock it up where lots of eyes will be on it, during daylight hours.
That all said, I am happy if the incentive program is paying off. Let's see. Maybe the city got it right. I remain skeptical, for now, given how hostile these streets are.
[1] - During the pandemic they closed 80% of the roads in Cheesman Park and have not reopened them. I am glad the city has stuck with it since it has completely transformed the feel of the place. I truly love it, more than I did before. But they did not plan this. It was a fortunate accident.
[2] - For context, my wife and I share one car, and otherwise we walk or I bike. My wife does not bike. She is afraid to, and I do not blame her.
Why would you ever lock your bike outside anywhere in the U.S.? NYC is no better. It's actually worse out East in my experience. That's a separate issue. One exacerbated by the naive views of liberal voters.
You live in the remnants of the Wild West. Millions of poor Central Americans are pouring across the border and setting up shop in your backyard. What do you expect? You are never going to get European city living unless you move to Europe.
Mindlessly repeating this fact does damage to the psychology of every single person that earnestly wishes that they didn't have to drive.
A huge fraction of people dislike driving.
Of course, lots of people have to get around, and most of them don't want to die accidentally, so the systemic pressure creating drivers is immense.
American road networks have been managed in a way that should be labeled criminal.
Urban renewal in the '50s and '60s was used to destroy ethnic neighborhoods for the emotional well-being of politically powerful white people.
The reason everyone drives today is because of the ethnic cleansing (via road networks) being conducted by white people in the '50s.
The roads are already devastatingly congested.
To act like American mobility networks are fair, or reasonable, or functional is something like gaslighting at a population level than anything else.
What those busy streets don't show is that there is almost always a calm street one block over and parallel that is frequently a designated bike route (not that the designation means much, but they are better streets for bike riding).
I used to commute by bike in Denver, and it isn't the worst major city in America, but it certainly could be improved, especially in the downtown core where bike lanes exist, but drivers constantly cut across them/parked in them. I normally felt safer using a traffic lane than the bike lane downtown for that reason
I would love to give up my car, we went down to one because wfh but there is no chance in hell we could go zero. We don’t even have a bus route down my street and I live in an area that is entirely dense apartments. The closest one is a mile walk to the nearest main road with no sidewalk.
I decided to check my friends who live across down and it’s 20m by car, impossible by bus (Google just gives up), 6 hrs walking, and 1hr30 biking.
I swear it’s “we tried bike lanes, what else do you want?”
Cities oriented around the car (even relatively dense ones like LA) are very difficult to adapt to transit because there are no logical nodes at which to place the transit.
The same is true for the road infrastructure, but the bike lanes are set up to ensure that there's a continuous stream of dangerous and complex interactions where bicyclists would be effortlessly killed by a driver.
I ride a scooter around the city full time, like a small motorcycle, and it's so fast and easy and convenient.
I used to bike around the city but will never go back to biking.
heres a cool litle project showing where ive ridden in denver (and the world)
They may be less dangerous than a bike because they can go quite fast, matching the speed of cars when riding on the road, which helps you avoid dangerous situations in which car drivers try to pass you without enough space to do so. Good bicycle infrastructure can minimize this, though it doesn't seem like Denver has it.
- the usual pedal-assisted ebike which is classified as a bicycle, pedal assistance up to 25 kmh
- bikes with pedal assistance up to 45 kmh, these need to be registered and need a special licence plate, and you need a driving licence to ride them. Bonus is (compared to a scooter) that if you turn the motor off then they are treated as normal bicycles, so you are allowed on all the bike paths where regular bikes are.
These latter ones are actually fast enough to keep up with city traffic easily, even though in Zurich there is a lot of bike infrastructure, so you wouldn't necessarily need them. I think they are the best of both worlds, bicycles and mopeds.
The 50cc/45 kmh or 4kw/45 kmh for electric ones defines a class of vehicles (mopeds L1, L1e-b if two wheels) that have a simpler registration and need a simpler driving license.
Electric powered bikes exist (Powered cycles, L1e-a) with 1 kW/25 kmh, while electric assisted bycicles and scooters[1] are "out of scope".
It's complicated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_category
[1] the kind of electric sccoters with tiny wheels and no seat, "scooter", at least here in Italy, is commonly used to call anything with smaller wheels than a motorbike, it is used also for (powerful) motorbikes of class L3.
There was a lot of outcry and fixes of some of the worst ones after various accidents.
Still a lot to do, but during COVID a lot of roads were experimentally closed, with pedestrian space increased and more cycle lanes it's been a big jump in some parts of London at least.
Bike lanes have always felt kind of silly in my view. You're always being set up to collide with an opening car door or get T-boned by someone making a right on red. Worse yet, drivers will often try to overtake cyclists to make that right turn. Many are terrible at judging relative speeds.
Easy solution is to just skip the bicycle lanes. Move with traffic on the main thoroughfares. When possible operate on the residential side streets.
Bicycle lanes are part of the problem in that they create the wrong expectations for both cyclists and drivers. Cyclists still need to maintain just as much if not more situational awareness. Drivers expect cyclists to stick to the lane. As you approach any intersection you are going to want to move towards the center. Sure, get over to the side when it makes sense. No need to make a nuisance of yourself, but bike lanes create more problems than they solve.
Denver itself is a relatively rural area. Many drivers are unaccustomed to urban driving. On the plus side, you have extremely wide streets. I never attributed my experiences to a "lack of bike infrastructure". From my perspective the less planning, the better. Like the bike lanes, when they do build something, I doubt it would solve more problems than it creates.
Like, the "urban traffic problem" really can be reduced in almost every respect to either "humans are unsafe drivers" or "cars take up too much space". Shrink the fleet down to robotaxis and ebikes and you've solved everything last-mile related with no streetscape changes, leaving just the longer journeys for shared modes. As a bonus, kids become much more self-mobile again.
"The average vehicle costs $40k, is owned for 11 years, gets driven 13k miles per year, burns 25 mpg, gas costs $3/gal, insurance is $1500 per year, and the vehicle needs $900 per year in maintenance and repairs."
The Bankrate estimate seems high, but not by much. My own cost is 38.4 c/mile.
I'd ditch 90% of my car use for a bike if I felt safe doing it... but most places in the US you really aren't. A quick google search shows bikers are 2-10x more likely to die per mile, though I didn't delve too deeply into it.
For sure there are some cities where biking is terrible, but I am not sure it’s a “majority”. It also takes some awareness to ride your bike safely in a city, but actually, doing anything in a city takes a bit more awareness and caution.
Is it possible that you could avoid death while cycling by improving your cycling skills a bit? You could join a group of (still alive) cyclists to learn the ropes.
That's like two dozen+ people without a single exception to the contrary. Yes, it's anecdata, but it's quite a lot of anecdata with a strong signal to noise ratio.
Bike infrastructure cannot share with cars given the magnitude of the consequences when the two vehicles interact unintentionally.
And then you read stuff like: "The average monthly car payment is $716 for new cars and $526 for used.", which is more than what I pay for my flat in a EU capital
https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/average-...
Property crime in Denver has skyrocketed, and even the local light-rail (RTD) has become far more dangerous, discouraging vulnerable people from riding. A whole lot of the weapons to reduce car trips in cities get completely undermined when order collapses.
most full on pedestrian trails are genuinely great, especially when helped by higher traffic. i do, however, avoid my most direct route into work at night. on the south platte trail from cuernavaca park to 29th is legitimately a scary stretch. mind you i'm a 6'1 225lbs guy..
denver really is trying, and they've come a long way! i'd love to see some improvements on vehicle calming and better cycling right of way on the neighborhood bikeways, but the highest priority issue has to be biking trail connectivity.
that was a very long winded way to give you a single half mile stretch answer..
Totally. A year or so ago they installed a protected bike lane on 23rd st crossing 25 onto water st (to connect to the south platte river trail/REI), but then it snowed and people ran over all the rubber protectors because they couldn't see them. They've since added higher reflectors, so at least they learned from their mistakes! I have a bunch of the same style on 17th by Sloan's lake, so I feel decently protected from that area to the stadium and onto the south platte river trail.
> After nine months, the City had spent $4.7 million to provide vouchers to 4,734 Denver residents [for ebikes and equipment to ride in the winter]
I'm a bit skeptical of some of this data:
> 65% of Ride Report's Ride App users were riding at least once daily, and 90% were riding weekly.
In the report, it mentions the Ride App was iPhone only and "Our sample size consisted of 70 riders across 12 of the 19 participating local bike shops". Is that 70 iPhone users out of the 4,734 voucher recipients? It seems like it would wildly skew any survey data to expect them to be representative.
Sadly they do not report any other survey data, like how many of the recipients even completed the online survey. I suspect there's some huge self selection going on. It's hard to take these numbers at face value.
Denver city government has a tremendous amount of waste and city officials and non-profit partners desperately trying to get more funding by presenting programs as rosy as possible. Colorado politics has a long, long history of corruption, but Denver is especially egregious.
There should have been more aggressive terms - completely free bikes if you don't have a car or get rid of one. There is no incentive to actually use them with the current strategy.
● The Denver Ride App pilot launched on June 1st and ran for 3 months ● Our sample size consisted of 70 riders across 12 of the 19 participating local bike shops ● Collectively, these riders logged over 3,500 ebike rides and over 15,000 miles during the pilot period
The rest of their data is extrapolated from this "sample." Which is probably, given all the other hitches and processes involved in a potential rider even getting to this point is really a "self-selection funnel."
Oh.. and the app was iOS only.
I have considered just walking slowly in random lanes of traffic while in downtown areas recently. On what grounds do you need thousands of acres of space? Speed limits should often be 4-5mph and space usage should be shared.
>> I don't want to be brutally killed by a car on unsafe infrastructure
>> Oh yeah? Well how are you going to have a refrigerator delivered or get your sick grandmother to the hospital?
I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just hyper-logical thinking that it has to be all-or-nothing and implemented solely by force. But man, grandmothers and refrigerators are going to be just fine if we stop giving cars priority over people. Maybe better.
Now suppose we take all or majority of Manhattan's roads, let pedestrians in, and only allow buses, trucks, and utility vehicles. Suddenly buses are much slower than they are now, because the pedestrians have the right of the way.
My general theory has become "the harder it is to drive, the better." Turns out we give cars way more leeway than is even legal, like here people will wait to let them finish a right turn they no longer are legally allowed to do (no right turn on red here). Or in a tiny alley, everyone will scooch out of the way if a car shows up. Why? If a tremendously huge person showed up and was is no emergency or particular rush, but just blasted airhorns in people's faces so he could get by a little faster, why would we all do so? Screw that guy lmao you came to a walking area you can go at walking speed like the rest of us. Take the mrt next time.
We just had lantern festival where there were lines of cars snaking out of the city for the few parking lots we have, all of which filled up in the first hour of course. So now just a bunch of cars idling around with nowhere to go. Thought about getting a sign and carrying it around that says "you'd already be here if you took the MRT."
After a while of doing it you realize that the risks aren't the ones you initially thought they were. I've stopped thinking "my life is in your hands stranger" every time someone passes me too closely. But I'm still hyper vigilant about the ones that pull out in front of me, presumably they tuned me out as noise because I present a relatively small image at that angle.
I take longer routes to avoid the risky spots, which is an option I'm lucky to have, and I feel relatively safe.
I'm not trying to encourage you to take my path, just giving some anecdata of what it's like.
I can't be sure of the exact mechanisms or whether I'm observing behavior correctly, but a strategy that seemed to be shaking out in SF is cyclists aggressively standing up for our rights, by for example one person blocking cars from making illegal rights while the rest of the bicyclists rode along, or by repeatedly asking people parked in the bike lane to move along.
Again I can't be sure about mechanism of action all I know is that over the course of five years, bicycling in the sf area transformed from a battleground to a relatively easy ride full of demure cars sometimes going out of their way to give right of way to bicyclists (like expecting bicyclists to run stop signs, something I personally disagree with but hey, the slower cars are going the better).
My personal strategy was to decorate myself with so many strobes I was like a rolling disco ball. You can get some pretty crazy bright bicycle lights these days. That plus the GoPro, the rearview mirror, all the shit hanging off my bike... I looked dumb as hell but also the last bicyclist on earth you'd wanna cut off.
I've just started going up on the sidewalk and dropping a foot to make it clear I'm just not going to cross...or turn if it makes sense
I guess its not as bad the mission post pandemic. seems like people are really blowing through stop signs now
I guess if the weight is way out of proportion that can start to be a problem.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2021/11/29/nypd-seizes-illegal-m...
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/01/when-seconds-count-nypd...
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/the-nypds-new-efforts-to-pol...
Is it possible that you just don’t like what is defined as legal?
The major issue I had was the fear of theft as e-bikes are stolen regularly and cost a lot to replace.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cycli...
Yea but so can a large number of other activities that let you keep your car.
For me switching to a bike meant more exercise without having to commit any extra time. Just swap on type of commute for another, duration didn’t even change due to congestion which is easy to cycle past.
Given the US rather extreme obesity problem, I would suggest that it needs all the help it can get when it comes to improving fitness.
$4.77M for 2,040 MT CO2e reduced/avoided yearly
My company was able to install a abatement unit that reduced >4,000 MT CO2e yearly for ~$150K. We are doing many more of these, but the cost is way better on a per lb level than this waste of money.
If we are going to get serious about emissions reduction, stop the feel good measures and focus on where it will make the most impact.
They also reduce congestion by removing car journeys, they reduce amount of road infrastructure that needs to be built, they reduce the cost of maintaining road infrastructure (e-bike cause effectively zero damage to roads), they reduce healthcare costs by improving rider fitness.
In short, for a government getting people on e-bikes can result in huge savings for relatively small investments. I believe for most developed nations you would expect every $1 spent on improving active travel to produce at least $2 of savings over a ten year period.
I don’t really understand why anyone would struggle to believe the a fitter, healthier population would be a good thing.
In Manhattan, I have zero consistent options.
Scratch that, it did not cross my mind at all.
What are the stats on injury rates on these things?
But I can't take humans serious as this stage where 40,000 of us are dying each year and so little is done to prevent it despite it being something we can dramatically improve. But people shake their fist at a scooter laying on it's side on the sidewalk while 7 Eleven says a car drives into one of their stores (through the building) on average once a day.
These e bikes and scooters are going quite fast in urban environments with more or less zero protection for the cyclist/scooterist, and who are closer to pedestrians.
Tell that to 40,000 dead pedestrians every year.
> These e bikes and scooters are going quite fast in urban environments with more or less zero protection for the cyclist/scooterist, and who are closer to pedestrians.
And e-bike or scooter with a human weighs at most 200kg total. That 20% of the weight of small car (1000kg), which means 20% of the energy in a collision. The e-bikes and scooters would need to travelling well in excess of 30mph before their deadliness to pedestrians in a collision would get even close to a car.
Something backed up by the stats, if you can even find them. So few pedestrians deaths are caused by bikes and scooters that most countries and municipalities don’t even bother tracking the data. In the UK an upper-bound on bike caused pedestrian deaths is about 2 per year, and more likely number is 0.5 per year.
Safety starts with car drivers.