Over the last several years, Streetsblog has written too many articles about the long-awaited state e-bike incentive program. After a while they all sounded the same: "Where are the California e-bike incentives?" is a typical headline. California Air Resources Board (CARB) program staff, which has undergone turnover in that time, has consistently claimed that the program is "coming soon," "will launch early next quarter," or " will definitely launch by the end of next quarter." But it hasn't.
There has been a "soft launch," to test some of the issues that have come up around fairness and efficient distribution of the money, but information about that is not easy to find. According to CARB staff, the soft launch is taking place in Barrio Logan in San Diego; Bayview Hunter’s Point, Rodeo, and Hercules in the San Francisco Bay Area; downtown Fresno and greater Fresno along the 99 corridor; and among unspecified tribal governments statewide. So far, "most of" the 77 vouchers that the program has released have been redeemed in San Diego, where the program's administrator, Pedal Ahead, is located.
About 80 applications have been received in the soft launch and more are coming in. But CARB staff have not commented on what they're learning from this yet.
Finding any of this out has not been easy.
The program's FAQ page is better than it was two months ago, but still lacks basic information. There is no information online about where the soft launch is happening or how people are finding out about it or which organizations are handling outreach. CARB staff have been very slow to respond to questions, and their answers have been vague and incomplete.
To be fair, there is a lot to consider in launching the program, and a lot of pressure to get it right. But two years and counting, with no clear launch date set, is really a bad look for the $30 million program.
And now, two recent articles in the San Diego Union Tribune say that the program's administrator is "under investigation" by multiple agencies for various improprieties, and is being sued by one of its employees who says he wasn't paid for work he did, and that the nonprofit mixed public money and private business.
When CARB announced that they had chosen Pedal Ahead as administrator for the program in 2022, advocates were quietly but frantically worried that a big mistake had been made. Rumors swirled about Pedal Ahead's founder, Ed Clancy, and questions were raised about his personal connections to former CARB board member Nathan Fletcher, who helped Clancy launch his organization, Rider Safety Visibility (RSV), of which Pedal Ahead is a part.
But no one would go on record with their concerns, and CARB staff insisted that Fletcher had zero influence over the decision. They chose Pedal Ahead, they said, because of the organization's experience with e-bikes.
A Brief History
To recap:
In 2021, after years of advocacy from the California Bicycle Coalition asking the state to create a statewide e-bike incentive program, $10 million was allocated in the state budget for it. The allocation included a deadline to launch by July of the following year.
CARB issued a call for applications for a program administrator, and received three starkly different applications.
GRID Alternatives, which manages Access Clean California, CARB's "one-stop shop" clearance center for people seeking clean energy rebates and incentives, submitted an application in partnership with Ecology Action, a nonprofit that works on community sustainable transportation plans and trainings and has years of e-bike experience. That application showed a clear understanding of what the state was asking for, outlined how it would meet the program's requirements, including outreach, and contained a clear budget outlining how the money would be spent.
The Center for Sustainable Energy, which administers CARB's Clean Vehicle Rebate program, sent in a short application that only addressed a portion of the funding.
Rider Safety Visibility turned in an application that implied it would recreate the program it was running in San Diego. But that program was not at all like the state's plan. That is, the Pedal Ahead program run by RSV is a "loan-to-own" program wherein income-qualified people are given e-bikes, which they could keep after a certain period of time as long as they fulfilled certain requirements, like riding at least 35 miles a week and bringing them in regularly to be checked (and to have their mileage checked on Strava units included on the bike).
The statewide plan, in contrast, would give money to people to buy their own e-bikes.
Despite the vast difference between what CARB asked for and RSV/Pedal Ahead provided in its application materials, the CARB team chose Pedal Ahead to administer the $10 million contract. They announced the selected administrator in August of 2022, a full month after the required launch date of the program.
(At the time, team lead Aria Berliner told Streetsblog that the requirement was actually for the program to be "established" by July 2022, and that it had complied with it when it started work. She said this during an interview in which she was explaining that the team had "gone dark" after receiving applications, and why they had taken so long to make an announcement: "We typically announce once we've worked out the kinks" is how she put it. Berliner has since moved on to a different program.)
Stakeholders immediately asked whether Pedal Ahead had the experience to manage the program. In particular, its lack of expertise with public outreach was a worry, since making sure the e-bike incentives were handed out fairly was top of mind for most. Several people asked CARB if Pedal Ahead had an unfair advantage because of Clancy's personal relationship with Fletcher, who had channeled regional funds to Clancy's San Diego endeavor when he was a supervisor after he left CARB.
While Berliner, in the interview cited above, had told Streetsblog that the administrator's job was to manage outreach, it was clear that Pedal Ahead (as RSV has been referred to by CARB ever since) had not much outreach experience, and was planning to rely on a not-yet-created "network" of community-based organizations - which included GRID Alternatives, one of the other applicants for administrator.
Delays, and More Questions
By now quite delayed by the slow decision on an administrator, CARB announced that "the worst case scenario" would be a launch the following January. Then they began a series of working group meetings to discuss program parameters. There were a lot of them.
- Who would be eligible: should income eligibility be consistent with other state assistance programs? Should it apply to all the incentives? Should lower-income people be eligible for larger incentives?
- How much should each incentive be? Would they be big enough to encourage people to buy quality, safe e-bikes?
- Should incentives be geographically balanced, or given out first-come, first-served?
- What kinds of e-bikes should be eligible? Should the faster Class 3 e-bikes be eligible? Should cargo bikes be eligible for a higher incentive, as they seem more likely to replace car trips?
- Should e-bike batteries be UL certified? Believe it or not, there is controversy over this. At least one retailer was quite angry when it became clear their inventory would not be eligible.
- Should online retailers be allowed to participate? Many areas lack a local e-bike shop, so this would solve a problem for some, but it raises the question of how participants would access service and repairs. Some retailers said they have too much work already, and won't service e-bikes they don't sell themselves.
- What level of education or training should be included or supported by the program?
Every question CARB put to stakeholders received widely diverging responses. And it seems like every question threw the CARB team for a loop, sending them back to rethink and make new proposals.
An entire year passed between these workgroups and updates. Meanwhile, staff kept promising to launch a program "soon" or "definitely by the end of the year/quarter." In May of 2024, staff lead Sam Gregor told participants that a launch date within the next several months was "pretty firm."
It hasn't happened, despite the eagerness expressed at every meeting of the working group. "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good - we need this now," said one participant.
And now there's the Big Question of the program administrator. The San Diego Union Tribune articles were vague on details, but they wrote that Pedal Ahead is being investigated by the Department of Justice and by CARB. SANDAG, which had hired Pedal Ahead to administer its own e-bike incentive program, concluded a "routine" internal review by asking Pedal Ahead to finish out its contract "in a limited capacity." That contract concludes on July 31, and SANDAG has taken over administration of that program.
CARB staffer Lys Mendez said merely that the agency is conducting a "regular program review" of all of its grantees, among them Pedal Ahead, and would not comment on the UT articles.
Failure to Launch
Which entity is contributing more to this failure to launch? It's hard to say. Both CARB and Pedal Ahead have been far from transparent. CARB runs the workgroup meetings, but doesn't provide a list of attendees. They say that Pedal Ahead representatives - even Ed Clancy himself - have attended, but he has never spoken up nor been introduced.
CARB has posted a map of pre-approved e-bike retailers on its website as well as a list of eligible e-bikes. Both are subject to change.
CARB staff said there would be a pre-application form available, but if so it's not obvious where it is - there is a list of steps to take to get ready to fill out an application, but that's all.
At the most recent workgroup meeting in May - billed as "the last workgroup meeting" by CARB - program lead Sam Gregor said that the program has a total of about $30 million available: $13 million in the initial program, plus another $18 million approved in last year's budget. It's not clear if Pedal Ahead is contracted to administer all of that, or only the initial bit, nor is it clear whether CARB would renew its contract once the first $10 million in incentives are distributed.
The UT reports that Pedal Ahead has been paid about $1 million for administrative costs so far.
Of the total $30 million, about $5 million is set aside for priority applicants - that is, income-qualified applicants. The maximum amount per individual would be $2,000, although most of the incentives would come to less (lower-income households qualify for higher incentives, as do cargo bikes).
CARB expects to give out on the order of 15,000 incentives from the initial allocation and, as far as anyone knows, still plans to do this via multiple application windows, into 2025. Note that CalBike has at least 20,000 people on its list of interested parties. While it's likely not all of them are eligible, it gives an indication that the incentives are likely to be snatched up quickly, as has happened in other places.
Approximately fifty community-based organizations will receive microgrants for outreach.
The best place to find the latest information about the program, and the most thorough FAQs page, is not on either the CARB or the Pedal Ahead website, but on the website of the California Bicycle Coalition. CalBike has been doing unpaid outreach, but Mendez names CalBike as the main statewide organization that CARB will rely on to get program information out to the general public.
Note that CalBike has nothing to do with running the program; it's just doing a good job keeping people informed.
The biggest problem with this failure to launch is that even the total amount of money available is but a drop in the bucket. It will not structurally improve the affordability of e-bikes or create a huge mode shift, even if CARB were more dedicated to seeing it happen quickly.
But to reduce transportation emissions, to offer more transportation choices, and to provide better ways of moving through our cities and towns, e-bikes need to be provided to people on a massive scale. And it must be accompanied by the infrastructure to use them safely - that includes safe streets, support and maintenance, and education.
