With gas prices going up, advocates want B.C. to bring back e-bike rebates
A local street safety group is renewing its call to the B.C. government to bring back its e-bike rebate amid the war in Iran causing gas prices to spike.
“Everyone was posting online about oil prices, and we’re like, ‘You know what would make this even more resilient? If we didn’t have to rely so much on on fossil fuels,'” said Mihai Cirstea, a volunteer with Vision Zero Vancouver.
He added that rising gas prices aren’t the “most important thing that’s happening” regarding the war.
“But one of the things that it shows is that our reliance on automobiles makes us reliant on these global political events that are totally outside our control,” he said. “A war starts in another part of the world and oil prices shoot up … which obviously will translate to gas prices here, and people are already struggling to make ends meet.”
In 2023, the B.C. government started its e-bike rebate program, offering rebates between $350 and $1,400 to e-bike purchasers, depending on their personal income.
Initially, the government planned to run the program for one year, with over $6 million invested and the funds for as many as 9,000 people.
But when the program launched, it received nearly 1,700 submissions in the first 13 minutes and 12,000 in the first 24 hours.
“Instead, applications were open for just a few days before thousands of British Columbians were sent to a waitlist,” reads a blog post from Vision Zero Vancouver.
In 2025, the B.C. government provided another $3 million to the program to take some of these people off the waitlist.
“But they basically barely got through the original waitlist from the first day of the program. And … since then, has received no more funding,” said Cirstea.
He called the money needed to bring back e-bike rebates “a rounding error on the budget,” and compared it to the hundreds of millions of dollars B.C. has spent on automobile rebates.
Vision Zero Vancouver
For example, through B.C.’s electric vehicle rebate program (which the government has since paused), people were eligible to receive up to $4,000 in rebates, with no limit on the number of grants.
Vision Zero Vancouver also pointed to ICBC issuing $410 million in insurance rebates in 2025, and almost $400 million the year before.
“It’s been $1.2 billion in automobile rebates, either through ICBC or electric vehicle [rebates] … and $9 million for e-bike rebates. So that’s pretty disproportionate,” said Cirstea.
What are the benefits of e-bikes?
Two University of British Columbia studies looked at behaviour changes due to e-bike rebates.
One surveyed people who participated in the District of Saanich’s e-bike incentive program, which started before the province-wide initiative.
They found that 93 per cent of users were using an e-bike for the first time, and 60 per cent were new to cycling.
After one year of e-bike use, people were still using it three to four days a week, reducing weekly car travel by 48 kilometres — a reduction of 30 to 40 per cent.
The follow-up study on the province-wide program found that 58 per cent of rebate recipients wouldn’t have gotten an e-bike without a rebate, especially among lower-income people. It also found that 38 per cent of new e-bike trips replaced automobile trips. People reduced their travel-related costs by 12 per cent, and emissions by 17 per cent.
Further, people’s physical activity went up by 13 per cent.