After many years of municipalities and states reversing their bicycle registration requirements, we have seen a renewed interest in these programs with regards to electric bicycles. Honolulu, Hawaii is a unique situation, as they have required, and successfully implemented a bicycle registration program for a while now. Since they are an island, and shipping is prohibitive, there is limited mass market ecommerce from the contiguous US. This special circumstance provides an opportunity to see a different view on consumer inventories and acquisitions of bicycles and ebikes.
Honolulu residents can register their bike by submitting a paper form to the local government. This process creates a hurdle in our investigation, as it means someone within the department must sort through the forms and manually count the volume of bicycles registered in each period. Thankfully, Travis Counsell of the Hawai’i Bicycle League helped get some data from the local agency as these bicycle registration fees help to fund the local “Bikeway Fund”
Above we can see the total count of registrations. There are some important take aways from this chart:
- Bicycle registrations declined over 2021-2023, along with bicycle industry trends, but rebounded in 2024.
- The share of electric bike registrations has climbed quickly over the past few years to above 30%. This is on par with Europe’s ebike unit sales share. Admittedly, it’s unclear if electric bikes are more likely to be registered than non-electric. Nonetheless, accounting for that, Hawaii may still have skipped ahead of the broader US in electric bike unit share.
- Registrations are a significant portion of the population of the county of Honolulu at ~2.7% in 2024. Total US estimated bicycle sales is somewhere approaching 4% of the US’s population. This suggests that a significant portion of bicycles are being registered in Honolulu.
So what is the lesson here? There are some silver linings to bicycle registration requirements. Firstly, registration fees can provide additional infrastructure support and community grants. Secondly, transparent registration reporting can provide unique data views into the bicycle market that we otherwise wouldn’t have. Hopefully with more time and data collected we will have one of the most unique views of consumer bicycle inventories.