NYC must rein in e-bikes now — and stop the carnage on our streets

New York’s City Council, to its members’ credit, now sees the need to control the e-bikes and other motorized devices that have made Gotham’s streets more dangerous and less pleasant.

Its Wednesday hearing will launch debate on 23 bills and resolutions that could rein them in.

But the sheer number of proposals indicates confusion.

Councilmembers need to focus: E-bikes and scooters should offer no speed advantage over regular bikes.

For decades, New York’s street-safety story was one of success.

Traffic deaths tumbled from 701 in 1990 to 206 in 2018.  

But bicycles weren’t a big part of that story.  

In 2007, the year New York got its first protected bike lane, the average number of annual cyclist deaths, smoothed out over three years, was 21.  

By 2019, the average annual number of cyclist deaths remained . . . 21.  

Yet the rate of deaths fell, as more people were cycling.  

That’s in part due to NYC’s policy choice to mitigate speed.  

In unrolling the Citibike bike-share program in 2013, Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s administration ensured that the blue bikes couldn’t move quickly: No Citibike rider died until 2017. 

Since 2020, however, New York has made speed a top priority.

That year, the council legalized e-bikes that can go up to 25 mph. 

Deaths soared: an average of 25 cyclists annually over the past three years.  

This year so far, 19 people have died — despite Mayor Eric Adams’ move to limit bike speed to 15 mph. 

And people are dying mostly on e-bikes, which were responsible for 16 of this year’s 19 fatalities, versus three victims on regular bikes.  

Moreover, this year’s figures don’t include another 11 deaths on stand-up e-scooters.  

Citibike’s six-year-old e-bike program has become an attractive nuisance — like an uncovered swimming pool to a child.  

This month, when two girls joyriding downtown attempted to overtake a heavy truck from the right, one of them, 15-year-old Daria Serkov, was crushed — the latest Citibike e-bike death.  

No, this doesn’t absolve car and truck drivers.

But New York chose to take its already chaotic streets and add small, speeding vehicles to them.  

That’s why people are now regularly dying in collisions that don’t involve a car or truck.

This month, 77-year-old Thomas Bakas, riding a stand-up scooter, died in a crash with a cyclist in a bike lane.  

In May, a man on a stand-up scooter going well over the speed limit killed himself and a bicycle rider on the Queensboro Bridge. 

This week, a traditional bicyclist careening down one of Central Park’s newly widened bike lanes killed 41-year-old pedestrian Richie O’Brien — one year after an e-cyclist died there in a similar collision.  

Why’d we redesign the park’s bike lanes? To create a new “fast” lane.  

Pedestrian deaths at the hands of e-device drivers were once near non-existent, but at least seven people died that way last year.  

Not until 2023 did Citibike claim its first pedestrian victim, 69-year-old Priscilla Loke, in downtown Manhattan. 

Meanwhile overall pedestrian deaths, mostly caused by cars and trucks, remain near record lows, averaging 78 through September over the last three years, down from 99 a decade ago.  

So the new danger is unequivocally posed by e-bikes. 

The point of encouraging bicycle use was to slow traffic and encourage good health — but now e-devices are a source of peril and anxiety.  

What should the council do?  

First, it must realize that the only way to enforce speed is licensing, plates and insurance.  

The council must call on Gov. Kathy Hochul to use the DMV to regulate these vehicles the same way it does any other motor vehicle.  

Then it should require fleet bikes, including Citibikes and app-based food-delivery devices, to geofence their equipment and ensure that no driver can exceed the speed limit or ride the wrong way. 

And it must ban e-bikes and other motorized e-vehicles from parks altogether.  

Central Park is for recreational cycling at a responsible speed, not for deadly racing.  

Park drives don’t need a fast lane; they need speed bumps and rumble strips around crosswalks, as London’s Hyde Park has installed.  

But remember, a marathon hearing like Wednesday’s is not an achievement.  

The council has already wasted time on a proposed ban on horse carriages — even though they’ve killed one person in all of Central Park’s history. 

So don’t give council members credit for thinking.

Give them credit for acting — and only when you feel safer on the streets.  

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a CCNY Moynihan Center senior fellow.