A nation of Electric Moped-owners would not just change their own behavior; they’d become a constituency for changing all of our transportation options and our built environment itself. Most people don’t need massive vehicles for the majority of their travel. Throughout the rest of the world, most people manage to get by with lighter and smaller vehicles than the ones Americans use. Many Americans are purchasing larger and larger SUVs and trucks because they feel safer, but the main thing they feel safer from is other people in larger and larger SUVs and trucks. Low-speed, light-weight scooters will pose much less of a threat to children and pedestrians, and if their use is widespread, their users should come to realize the benefits of further restricting the use of heavy automobiles in urban and even suburban settings.
Rich people don’t need subsidies to buy nice things.
Ideally, once millions of adult Americans are tooling around on their Biden Scooters, it may even help bring about much needed changes in development patterns and land use as people seek out new places to live and work, where using scooters feels safer and more convenient, or make the places where they currently live and work more conducive to small vehicles.
Now, it turns out that the federal government, recognizing the wisdom of my plan, already subsidizes the purchase of “electric motorcycles,” offering a federal tax credit up to $2,500 in value for their purchase. That’s nearly enough to cover that nice European scooter I linked earlier, right? Wrong: The tax credit is only for 10 percent of the cost of the bike up to that amount, meaning, much like California’s electric vehicle subsidies, it is just a coupon for rich people to buy nice things. (The subsidy is also set to expire at the end of this year.)