Can These Self-Charging E-Bike Libraries Bring Mobility to Low-Income Communities?
Can These Self-Charging E-Bike Libraries Bring Mobility to Low-Income Communities?
In Massachusetts, income-qualified residents can rent an e-bike for a dollar a day.
Non-income-qualified users pay $1 to start and $0.15 per minute for a maximum cost of $12 per day.
Ouch. I'm not non-income, but $12 a day to get around sounds crazy expensive compared to owning an e-scooter or getting a used bike.
On this program, just two short, 20-minute trips, and you're already at $7! Do that a few times per week, and you're at $100+ a month... wait at a couple of red lights per trip and you're bleeding money away.
To compare, you can get a Ninebot Max from Amazon USA with a zero-interest, 12-month payment plan of under $70 / month. It requires no maintenance, can be ridden in all weather (except deep snow, obviously), is super portable, and gets excellent range. And you get to ride it for hours a day without paying by the minute!
I wonder if the people who put together these programs actually do the math, because I can't see this being of tremendous value to low/no-income families.
I don't see rental bikes on a daily rate as a primary mode of transportation. Plenty of people only come into the city on certain days, or visit cities they don't live in, or otherwise just need to get around a single place they would've walked. They need the ability to start and stop in arbitrary places, and not bring something with them.
Keep in mind that this program is for people who likely have no other means to get around, so it would be their main form of transportation.
As a personal example, before my son could get a licence, he used an e-scooter to get to his school co-op placement on a daily basis. He would have used local rentals, but it was cheaper to own one.
But from what I hear about places that offer rental prpgrams on a monthly program, they do get used very often as a main form of transportation. And plenty of people, regardless of their income, use a bike as their main form of transportation, too.
This feels like a relevant situation to bring up one of my favorite Terry Pratchett quotes:
The Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
Something I think you may not be considering is availability of funds for lower-income folks - it's easy for us to say "why not just pay $70/month instead of paying $12/day", but... what if they literally don't have $70? What if they don't qualify for the payment plan because of bad/no credit? Let us not forget the story of Samuel Vimes and his 'Boots' Theory of Socio-economic Unfairness.
it’s easy for us to say “why not just pay $70/month instead of paying $12/day”, but… what if they literally don’t have $70?
How are they paying for the rentals? Some would be easily spending more than $70, so it kind of begs the question: how are any of these people able to afford the rentals? Buying would be cheaper!
The saying "it's expensive to be poor" certainly rings true here. I'm not really suggesting that those folks finance an e-scooter, since that would imply they have the financial means and credit rating to.
But it would be more cost-effective and provide a greater benefit for that state or local government to cover the cost of owning e-mobility devices, since these are really only going to a small percent of their total population.
And in my example, $70 was for a brand name, high-end of the <$1000 e-scooters. You can get a different model for half that amount, which would be like three days of renting one of those bikes, and you'd still end up saving money in the end. It's like spend a dollar and save 10!
But I do get what you're saying. I'm hoping these people can afford whatever allows them the mobility they need in their lives (plus, riding an e-bike will improve other aspects of their mental/physical health, too).
A band-aid-on-a-broken-leg solution that might help mobility where what would definitely help mobility is paying them more.