Orange County has an e-bike problem. Or maybe it has an electric motorcycle problem. Or perhaps it has a rider education problem. Depending on which machine, crash, law, or angry neighborhood Facebook post we're talking about, those can be very different things. Yet Orange County's latest attempt to make its streets safer has come up with an impressively simple solution: pay people to hand over their electric two-wheelers, then shred them.
The Orange County District Attorney's Office held what it believes was America's first e-bike buyback program on September 13, borrowing a concept normally associated with firearms. Participants could surrender unwanted electric two-wheelers in exchange for gift cards worth $200 to $1,000. Officials budgeted more than $100,000 for the program and apparently underestimated just how many people had an old e-bike and an appetite for free Target money.
