🏡 Trikes Sweep the Suburbs
Plus, Giant says eBike sales are strong, UK slashes active transport budget, and New Mexico proposes subsidy.
Hi - a bit of housekeeping before we get going:
🇳🇱 The Micromobility Europe floor plan is 65% sold out. If you’re looking to grow your company’s media footprint and drive high-quality leads among manufacturers, cities/government, fleet operators, retailers, and more, now is the time to reserve your booth.
❄️ We still have a batch of €595 Winter Special tickets available. Want one? Better be quick. The price goes up this Friday, March 17th.
🍹Will you be in Paris next week for Autonomy? Come hang with us, Askoll EVA, and a bunch of other industry friends. We’re throwing a networking get-together on March 22nd near the venue. In the tradition of Hemingway in Paris, we’re doing a tropical tiki bar :) RSVP now, space is limited.
What You Need to Know Today
On the latest episode of Ride On!, Julia and James do a deep dive on Aventon’s first e-cargo bike, talk global subsidies, look at NYC’s impending eBike crackdown, and more.
The issue of fires caused by faulty electric bike and scooter batteries is not trivial. But like a long line of “risky” technologies that later went on to become ubiquitous, micromobility will keep getting safer through a mix of product innovation and consumer protections.
Trike spike meets silver tsunami: Baby Boomers in American suburbs are falling in love with easy-to-ride electric tricycles as a means to stay active and independent later in life.
New Mexico is the latest U.S. state cooking up ways to make it less expensive for people to buy electric bikes, with a new bill worth up to $1,200 in discounts for low-income residents. We’re crowdsourcing data on all the known micromobility subsidies in the world here.
… You may have noticed our database has far more incentives in Europe than in the U.S. Cleantech analyst Alex Mitchell points out that this disparity may have something to do with the relatively low number of jobs the sector creates in America.
Nearly one in four bikes sold in Denmark are now electric.
Giant says demand for electric bikes remains high, even as the market for traditional bikes has cooled down somewhat post-pandemic.
Kenya-based electric motorcycle maker Roam is opening a new factory that will be capable of producing 50,000 units per year.
App downloads continue to increase for most European scooter operators. But as the industry pivots from growth to profitability, is number of downloads still the right metric to gauge success?
On that note, Bird’s Q4 earnings beat Wall Street expectations but fell short of profitability.
From zero to hero? Indian vehicle maker Hero MotoCorp is joining forces with California startup Zero Motorcycles on premium electric motorbikes.
One year after Seattle repealed its bike helmet law, the amount of helmet use in the city remains almost exactly the same.
Brompton’s pre-tax profit fell 24% last year, even though its revenue grew 40%. The British bike maker blames numerous headwinds for this predicament, including competition from knockoffs, the fallout from Brexit, supply chain issues, energy bills, and more.
A former F1 exec is trying to get a new electric bike racing championship off the ground.
A new partnership in Spain will see Cooltra’s EV mopeds integrated into Cabify’s multimodal ecosystem.
Disappointing news: The U.K. is slashing its active transportation budget by £200M, a move that will make it all but impossible for the country to reach the government’s target of 50% of all trips in English town and cities being by bike or foot by 2030.
Investing in micromobility should be a fiscal no-brainer for the U.K. A recent Oxford study found that, if one-fifth of car trips in Britain were taken by shared electric bikes or scooters, the result would be a £1.1B boost to the economy.
On the latest episode of The Micromobility Podcast, we talk to YIMBY, pioneering blogger, and self-professed “ebike dad” Matt Yglesias about the politics of micromobility and urban development in America.
If a driver kills a cyclist on a street with a history of fatal crashes, should the city be liable for negligence? A $100M lawsuit in NYC argues so.
The Netherlands’s transformation from a traffic-ridden nightmare to a bike-lover’s paradise began with a protest movement’s emotional rallying cry: “Stop murdering the children.”
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo responds to criticism that the city’s population is shrinking because of her administration’s restrictive car policies: “The opposition say people are leaving because they can’t drive their car through the centre of the city. That’s stupid. What people say is that they need cheaper housing to stay in Paris . . . A city’s creativity doesn’t depend on cars. That’s the 20th century. We’re in the 21st.”
People hate walkable cities… until they actually live in one.
Browse the best jobs in micromobility—and post your own—on our Jobs to Be Done board. Featured jobs:
The issues of fires and pedestrian injuries and deaths are making big news in NYC -- you should probably cover and opine.