The e-bike market will continue to grow. This was a good program to make it more accessible to people who might not consider getting one.

But limiting it to specific shops and models made it too restrictive and made little sense. A $1000 voucher would be given to someone at the low end of the income qualifier. But then the e-bikes available at the local bike shop were $1500-$5000. The $1000 and under e-bikes are mostly online or at large retailers that aren’t on the dealer list.

That meant any lottery winner would still need to come up with a non-trivial chunk of cash. An alternative might be to bulk purchase some bikes and dole them out to lottery winners. But it’s likely many of those would end up on eBay.