Transportation
How Paris Hopes to Build an E-Bike Boom
The French capital region just launched a bikeshare program for electric bicycles, and now it wants to help people buy e-bikes of their own.
If you live in or around Paris, there’s never been a better time to try out an e-bike.
The Greater Paris region, known in French as Île-de-France, launched an unprecedented 10,000-vehicle e-bikeshare program earlier this month. Then, just a few weeks later, Île-de-France came back with another offer: Anyone in the region who buys an electric bike can get €500 toward its cost, paid by the regional government. Consider this alongside the City of Paris’s existing e-bike subsidy (with a cap of €400), and it’s clear that e-bike boosterism is alive and well in Greater Paris.