The comments are, as usual, terrible. But to address some of them: many people have cars who can't afford them. Sometimes they're hand-me-downs, sometimes they're old junkers at the end of their life that they got a good deal on. But while those older cars were cheap up-front, the cost to continue maintaining them becomes a burden as parts fail. A $3,000 car has 100k+ miles on it and is a going to need parts replaced very soon. A $3,000 _new_ ebike is a high quality vehicle with warranty.

This is how taxes work. You are buying bombs to kill brown children. You are buying asphalt to pave roadways, and all the associated machinery and maintenance materials (like road salt) to keep them paved. But the thing is, people who bike are getting better health outcomes than people who drive or take transit (and if people don't make much money, you're paying for that health care one way or another). Bikes also cause hugely less road wear than cars and buses. So buying that bike costs less.

@Andres4NY I dream that one day we'll be collectively smart enough at economics to not collectively punch ourselves in the face with transportation policy. The public cost of driving is well over $1/mile just to maintain the network and pick up the broken pieces and casualties, hose off the blood... neglecting public health costs. And in my experience e-bike miles displaced 3x as many car miles, so about $3k/yr we're spending for people to drive when they could be using an e-bike.

@Andres4NY in fact there's a good argument for subsidizing e-bikes for wealthy people, who drive more, instead of trying to means-test and limit e-bike subsidies we could be cutting a lot more VMT and saving the road wear and other public costs if we made them as easy to access as car subsidies.