Time For Kirkwood To Embrace Electric Vehicles

Happy (belated) Earth Day, Kirkwood! To mark the day, I wanted to write a little something focusing, as we always do, on the politics of the possible. Before we start, I want to offer my usual annoying caveat that the single best thing Kirkwood can do for the environment is to allow the construction of more homes in our walkable, highly desirable community. I’ve written a lot about the best thing we can do, though, so here’s a little something on maybe the second or third best thing we could do: embrace electric vehicles.

Micro Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles run the gambit from sorta boring things like electric cars —where the city seems to be rapidly building out charging stations on city-owned parking lots with a big assist from Kirkwood Electric— to more fun options like golf carts, electric scooters, and e-bikes. And while electric cars will more or less leave the built environment unchanged (electric cars still take up a ton of space and run over pedestrians at similar rates, they just do so with a smaller carbon footprint), micro-mobility options have the potential to make things better on the environmental and walkability fronts.

Things like e-bikes, e-scooters, and golf carts travel more slowly than cars meaning pedestrians are safer. They also weigh less, putting less wear and tear on city roads and decreasing maintenance costs. These types of vehicles are also smaller, meaning you need less room to park and store them. Despite those differences, though, these small vehicles can increasingly replicate the capabilities of bigger, more traditional vehicles: Cargo e-bikes and golf carts can haul groceries, carry young kids, and navigate steep hills that you wouldn’t even think about biking up. This unique combination of public benefits and personal utility means Kirkwood should be doing everything it can to encourage and maybe even explicitly subsidize the adoption of these transit options.

Why Now?

I want to offer two suggestions for how Kirkwood could do that, but before we get there, I think it’s important to consider how critical of a juncture we currently find ourselves at. Kirkwood is only a few years removed from a revision to our local ordinance that allowed golf carts on streets on all streets with speed limits of 25 mph or less and to cross streets with speed limits of 35 mph or less making them a much more useful (and legal) mode of transit. We’re a couple of years away from the first stretches of the Grant’s Trail extension opening up, a project that could prove to be an e-bike super highway. And given the flood of money coming to infrastructure projects thanks to the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure law, a lot more ambitious projects (like my idea for the Frisco Trail) might become a real possibility in the near future. Okay, let’s take a look at what Kirkwood could do.

Legalize Lime Scooters

First, I think we should contract with one or both of the dockless electric scooter companies currently operating in St. Louis City, Bird and Lime, to expand their operations into Kirkwood. I’m certainly expecting this to get some blowback given how these scooters have been scapegoated in Downtown St. Louis. You can geofence them or limit their speed to whatever people are comfortable with, but the advantages these things provide outweigh the costs by far too much to forgo them altogether.

To start, e-scooters greatly compliment public transit currently serving Kirkwood, like busses and Amtrak trains. Busses and trains are much better suited for taking people long distances, but they also make a limited number of stops leaving riders to solve the infamous last mile problem: How do you get from the bus stop to your destination or how do you get from your home to the train station. Taking your car and then paying to park it at the station for a few days is not ideal (it costs money, and no one else can use the car while it’s sitting there), but a scooter that you can rent for two bucks and then leave at your destination for someone else to use solves those problems remarkably efficiently.

Looking a little further into the future, e-scooters could also become a compelling option as a primary mode of transportation. With the coming extension of Grant’s Trail, taking a Lime scooter from Affton to Downtown Kirkwood suddenly becomes a viable way to get to PJs or Kaldi’s for a work shift or to Billy G’s for lunch in a way that a hot (read: sweaty) bike ride is not.

Finally, allowing Bird or Lime or both to drop their scooters in Kirkwood could provide Kirkwood with a short-term infusion of cash that we could then reinvest to unlock one of those virtuous cycles I’m always talking about. For example, the City of St. Louis charges both Bird and Lime a $2,500 annual permit fee and an additional $30 annually per e-scooter deployed. Assuming we get maybe 300 scooters across town, you’re looking at somewhere between $11,500 and $15,000 in revenue to the city. That’s obviously not a ton of money, but it might be enough to pilot something interesting like an EV rebate program.

E-Bike & Golf Cart Rebates

EV rebates are well-established policy tools, but there’s a gap in the funding of non-car modes of electric transportation. For example, the federal 2022 Inflation Reduction Act legislation provided rebates of up to $7,500 for electric cars but failed to include micro electric vehicles like bikes or golf carts. That hasn’t stopped some communities like Denver, and perhaps soon states like Colorado and Minnesota, from rolling out micro EV rebates of their own. The Denver program offers $300 instant rebates for regular e-bikes and $500 for cargo e-bikes, with additional help for those making below a certain amount of income. I think the first half of that model, the universal $300-$500 refund, would be the sweet spot for Kirkwood. It’s administratively simple enough that even a community with an administrative capacity as small as ours could pull it off.

If you have $15k to play with from the scooter permits, as I estimated above, that gives you 30-50 e-bikes you’d be able to provide rebates for. That’s, again, not a ton, but I think it could be enough to really set off some feedback loops in terms of adoption, demand for infrastructure, and support for expanding the program in the future.

And in a more mature and well-funded version of the policy, I think it also might be worth considering extending rebate eligibility to golf carts (an increasingly popular mode of transportation for families in Kirkwood), perhaps by allowing families to bundle individual family members’ rebates together.

Then, you could perhaps even further leverage this program by entering into a partnership with Pedago, the biggest e-bike retailer in the country whose St. Louis outpost happens to be currently located just outside of Kirkwood in Oakland, right along the Grant’s Trail. Part of the reasoning behind that location is that the trail provides the ideal opportunity to test-ride the bikes. I’m hopeful that when the trail reaches Downtown Kirkwood in a few years’ time, the company will consider following suit and moving there as well. In the meantime, if they wanted to be an official sponsor of the rebate program, helping to market it, or providing an additional discount for customers using Kirkwood rebates or both, I think that would make for an excellent synergy.

Thinking Outside the Box

Part of the reason I love writing about Kirkwood is that no one is really sure of exactly how much we’re capable of, me included. We’re not tiny, but we’re not huge either. We have a decent-sized tax base, but we also haven’t historically strayed too far outside of our basic-suburban-services-lane. That makes writing Kirkwood Gadfly incredibly fun because I get to look at things that other places are doing and poke at them and try and determine whether or not little old Kirkwood could actually pull off something similar or if I’m just daydreaming. My drafts folder is full of the latter. But in this case, I really think we could do something big if we had the courage to go for it. The policy ideas in this piece aren’t going to make or break Kirkwood, but they could make it a little better at very little cost. I think we should give them a shot.