E-bikes rise in popularity
Art by Sara Polster
From April 2024 to June 2025, the City of Santa Monica completed the first E-Bike Voucher Program, providing 122 low-income Santa Monicans with funds to purchase an e-bike. The project, carried out by the City’s Office of Sustainability and the Environment, was started to “encourage active transportation and reduce emissions by increasing access to bikes and e-bikes for income-qualified residents while piloting an innovative method for providing resources to residents,” according to the closing report by the Santa Monica E-Bike Voucher Program.
E-bikes have experienced massive growth in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic. With sales exceeding $ 1 million in 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, this increase has been supported by government initiatives.
The State of California also had a program called the California E-Bike Incentive Project, which provided funding to lower-income applicants in California to purchase their own e-bike, much like Santa Monica’s, but on a larger scale. It granted more than 2,100 vouchers to applicants before being closed by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) in late October 2025, according to KCRA News. According to the California E-Bike Incentive Project’s website, the project's goal was to help people replace car trips with e-bike trips, increase access to e-bikes, and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
E-bikes have also found use at Samo, with some students using them to commute to school and places around Santa Monica. Samo student Joseph Bowers-Disney (’27), who commutes to school on an e-bike, explained why he enjoys riding it.
“I love the freedom. I have my license, and I get to drive my dad's truck, but I have to ask him and do all these steps to be able to drive it. But with my e-bike, I can just head out and have fun. If I’m bored and I don't want to waste gas in my dad's truck and want to go down to the beach or just drive around, I can just go down to the beach and chill out for the day. And that's the best part of it, the freedom that you get from it,” Bowers-Disney said.
However, with this demand and usage have come increased safety concerns about e-Bikes. In California, injury collisions involving e-Bikes rose from 184 in 2018 to 3429 in 2023, according to the California Highway Patrol’s Statewide Integrated Traffic Record System (SWITRS). And it’s not just adults that make up the majority of injuries in e-bikes, according to an article by the Miller Children and Women’s Hospital, people under the age of 18 make up 40 percent of e-bike-related injuries, and 60 percent of those were head-related injuries from not wearing helmets.
To ensure safety, the State legislature has approved numerous bills in recent years to tighten restrictions on e-Bikes. Among the bills passed was the E-Bike Modification Bill (AB 1774), which prohibits the sale of devices that can modify e-bikes to go beyond the top speed regulations. Another bill passed by the state was the E-Bike Battery Safety Standards Bill (SB 1271), which clarifies what can and can’t be classified as an e-bike, and increases safety standards for e-bike batteries. The California State Legislature also passed bills testing laws targeted towards younger e-bike riders. Bill AB 1778 will restrict the minimum age to ride certain types of e-bikes to 16 in Marin County, and Bill AB 2234 will limit the minimum age of any e-biker, regardless of bike type, in San Diego County.
Bowers-Disney expressed his views on e-bike safety.
“I think, especially for kids our age, we think we're gonna be able to live forever and be able to heal from anything. And so we have the sense of, ‘Oh, it's not gonna happen to us, ’ but then it does happen to us, and then that's when it actually does affect us,” Bowers-Disney said. “I have to be cautious, and I'll steer clear of the streets, and I'll go on the sidewalk if I have to because, at the end of the day, a driver could make a mistake that might not risk their lives, but risk mine.”