Within my first few months in New York City, I knew I wanted to use a bicycle for transportation. I’d grown up riding a bike, and through much of my first 17 years, it was my primary mode of transportation on the hot country roads just outside Birmingham, Alabama.
It was 1989, and Manhattan’s gridded streets, wide avenues and winding narrow paths downtown seemed custom-built to be conquered on a light-a-feather road bike, weaving through automobile congestion like quicksilver.
I was also in my early 20s and felt invincible on the city’s largest public space: its streets. That confidence took a scary body blow a few years later, when a car swerved, hit me and I crashed onto the street. There were no broken bones or head injuries, but I was instantly humbled by a hard truth: Bicyclists are little more than fragile human eggshells on wheels.
Fast-forward nearly four decades, and New York City is home to one of North America’s largest bike lane networks. Thanks to bike activism and transformative urban planning, bike lanes, many of them physically protected from cars, have become the norm in many of the city’s street designs.
Most weekdays for the past 12 years, I’ve taken advantage of a busy stretch of the network and ridden my pedal bike from Carroll Gardens over the Brooklyn Bridge to my job in lower Manhattan. In 2021, a lot of us rejoiced when the city repurposed a Manhattan-bound traffic lane into a protected two-way bike lane that soon became wildly popular.
Albeit a wonderful investment, the eight-foot-wide, walled-in bike path is far from perfect. Traditional pedal bicycles and commuter e-bikes share the narrow lane with food delivery workers on typically faster-moving e-bikes, mopeds, fat-tire e-moto devices, and stand-up scooters. Some models of the latter three can approach 40 mph in a city where the legal speed in bike lanes is 15 mph.
The danger is not just perception. In a headline-grabbing nightmare of a tragedy this past May, two men were killed, one on a traditional pedal bike and the other on an illegal stand-up scooter, when they collided on the 11-foot-wide, two-way Queensboro Bridge bike path. Streetsblog reported that the man on the scooter was riding a Blade GT II, which its manufacturer says is capable of reaching 50 mph. Photos from the crash scene showed the bicycle’s frame sheared in half.
While automobiles remain the greatest threat to cyclists and pedestrians, fast-moving e-mobility devices have created their own set of problems. Bicyclists, e-bike riders and users of other legal e-mobility devices shouldn’t have to share narrow, supposedly safer corridors with machines capable of exceeding the city’s 15 mph speed limit, much less those capable of approaching 40 to 50 mph.
At the same time, getting New Yorkers out of cars and onto bicycles and safer e-mobility devices is a good thing. The answer isn’t to turn back the clock on a transportation revolution that has given thousands of people cheaper, cleaner and more efficient ways to get around. Nor should delivery workers and other New Yorkers who depend on e-bikes for their livelihoods be scapegoated for a problem created in part by app companies that incentivize speed.
Recently, City Council members said it would come up with a plan, including 17 bills, that could better regulate e-bikes and scooters. The council is scheduled to hold a hearing on the bills Sept. 30, where members will question transportation, public safety and consumer protection officials.
The council’s discussion should confront a broader but fundamental question: At what point does a powerful electric two-wheeled vehicle cease to be a bicycle and become, for purposes of safety and infrastructure, a motor vehicle?
Should such “motor” vehicles be registered, licensed and relegated to automobile traffic lanes? Should some super-high-speed models be banned outright? Whatever the regulatory mechanism, devices capable of motorcycle-like speeds don’t belong in narrow bicycle lanes — at least in the narrow lanes we have now.
At the same time, city leaders should look at why 17-year-old boy was tragically killed at the intersection of Chambers and Centre streets in late July, was riding an illegal e-moto device from his home in Bensonhurst rather than a legal e-bike, such as a Citi Bike, in the first place.
One reason could be that vast swaths of the outer areas, including Bensonhurst, are outside Citi Bike’s service area. Besides, Citi Bikes, which reach legal speeds of 15 mph, are prohibitively expensive to use for many New Yorkers.
This could also be a moment for bold thinking about future investment for bike-centric capital projects that build more physically protected bike infrastructure wide enough to safely accommodate the variety of electric vehicles New Yorkers now use and will likely use in the future.
The city’s challenge is to embrace the enormous promise of e-mobility without allowing increasingly powerful motorized devices to undermine the sense of safety bike lanes were created to provide.
