Let e-bikes power N.Y.’s transit future
Providence, R.I., just became the 13th city to develop an electric-assisted bike-share system with Jump Bikes, which runs or is developing bike-share networks in cities across the United States, including in Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Phoenix.
Ironically, the Brooklyn-based company cannot operate in its hometown of New York City, which would be the largest market for their product by far, due to the wrongheaded ban on electric bicycles.
Electric-assisted bikes, or ebikes, enable riders to cover more distance by adding battery-assisted power to each pedal stroke. In many major cities in the U.S. and abroad, e-bikes are flourishing and helping to solve major urban challenges.
Paris, for example, now subsidizes purchases of e-bikes for 200 Euros. Stockholm is adding 5,000 e-bikes to its bike-share system. UPS is delivering packages in Hamburg using electrically-assisted cargo tricycles. And San Francisco’s DoorDash food delivery service has found ebikes to be the best mode to navigate heavy traffic and limited parking.
In striking contrast, New York City insists e-bikes are banned under law, and enforces that interpretation of statute with strange zeal. More than 900 e-bikes were confiscated and more than 1,800 summonses were issued by the New York Police Department in 2017 following Mayor de Blasio’s decision to crackdown on usage of “motorized scooters.”
The crackdown stands on dubious legal and statistical ground. Defining e-bikes as scooters presents a creative interpretation of the city’s administrative code. In a Trump-like, media-influenced move, de Blasio appears to have been triggered by a WNYC report on an Upper West Side speed measurement hobbyist, who used a radar gun to detect speeding food delivery workers.
No NYPD data or records exist to show e-bike-related safety incidents.
Who does the e-bike crackdown hurt? The e-bikes confiscated in 2017 primarily belonged to food delivery workers, who are overwhelmingly immigrants from Asia and Latin America. New Yorkers love their delivery: A new study from the New York City Department of Transportation found that more than half of city residents receive food deliveries “at least a few times per month.”
In fact, the top three neighborhoods for e-bike summonses — the Upper East and West Sides and East Midtown — are also comprised of more than 70% Caucasian residents. It’s difficult to divorce the penalty of workers of color from the predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods to whom the meals are delivered.
Delivery workers are typically paid based on how many meals they deliver within a 12-hour shift, and e-bikes significantly improve their productivity. However, workers who receive NYPD summonses for using e-bikes are required to pay a $500 fine. This fee, unthinkable for employees whose base pay before tips is $7.50 per hour, winds up punishing the very low-paid immigrants de Blasio usually claims to want to protect.
It is true that the rush to maximize delivery numbers leads to higher speeds and potentially hazardous biking. To that end, the city should improve and enforce safe cycling and expand bicycling infrastructure to ensure safe passage for cyclists and pedestrians.
Outside New York, cities and companies are finding that ebikes are nimble, have low carbon footprints and require less space than cars on contested city streets. As New York City seeks to reduce congestion, improve air quality and encourage active modes of transport, it is bewildering that a mode that checks all of those boxes would be outlawed.
The city must stop pedaling backwards on both viable transportation modes and the racially charged policies surrounding them. It is time for New York City to embrace e-bikes as the eminently useful, worker-enabling, nimble and environmentally-forward mode that they are.