France offers e-bikes for clunkers
Heavily polluting old cars out, e-bikes in under new French proposalThe French government is pushing to swap old clunker cars off the road and swap them for electrically-assisted bicycles, or e-bikes.
The move passed the National Assembly this week, and would give owners a €2500 ($A3870) grant for an electric bicycle in return for scrapping their high-emissions older cars.
The move would serve to clean up both French air quality and free up French roads of traffic as well.
With Paris already insisting it will ban combustion-powered cars by 2040, the e-bike move came as part of a draft climate bill to slash 40 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2030.
It would make France the first country to offer people clean e-bikes (or folding bicycles) in exchange for older cars, which has the full backing of the French Federation of Bicycle Users (FUB).
“For the first time it is recognised that the solution is not to make cars greener, but simply to reduce their number,” the FUB’s Olivier Schneider said.
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