Yesterday, we testified at the New York City Council Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure's marathon oversight hearing on e-bikes, billed as "Planning Our Shared Streets in New York City: Integrating Micromobility Options." The hearing was focused on Intro 606, legislation sponsored by Queens Council Member Robert Holden that would require that all e-bikes and e-scooters be registered with the New York City Department of Transportation. We expressed our strong opposition to the bill, which we believe would do little to actually improve safety while creating new problems.
At the same time, we offered our support for Intro 1131, Transportation and Infrastructure Chair Selvena Brooks-Powers's bill that would create a task force to study options for making street design and infrastructure safer in consideration of increased use of electric bicycles and other powered micro-mobility devices.
Our full testimony follows below.
Intro 606-2024 – Strongly Oppose
It’s not hard to understand the motivation behind Intro 606, which would require that all e-bikes and e-scooters be registered with the New York City Department of Transportation and display a license plate. The rapid adoption of powered micro-mobility devices has altered the landscape of many city streets, and government’s ability to manage that growth hasn’t kept up with the technology. Such vehicles have been involved in crashes resulting in injuries, and in a few cases, deaths, to both operators and pedestrians, and any injury or death is unacceptable and demands a policy solution.
However, we believe Intro 606 would create a faulty and misguided approach that would lead to many more problems than it would solve. The proposed legislation would require registration of any electric bicycle, including pedal-assist e-bikes such as the type offered by Citi Bike, as well as cargo bikes that have an integrated motor, and any powered scooter. Pedal-assist e-bikes are limited to 20 miles per hour, and their ability to make it easier to cover longer distances and to climb a bridge or a hill is key to their soaring popularity among commuters, working cyclists, the elderly, and people of limited mobility. Class II e-bikes, which have pedals but can also be operated by a throttle, and are popular among delivery workers, are also limited to 20 mph. These vehicles are legally defined as bicycles under New York State law.
Mandated registration would have a deeply negative effect on the widespread adoption of e-bikes at a time when the shifting of trips from cars to bikes is overwhelmingly seen as beneficial. Creating the infrastructure within NYCDOT to manage registration would be extremely costly and cumbersome. It’s virtually guaranteed that such a program would be unable pay for itself, and the diversion of resources in a challenging budget environment would surely detract from programs that are proven to improve safety, like the creation of protected bike lanes, safer crosswalks and intersections, and other complete-streets treatments. As it stands, we’re woefully behind in implementing the Streets Plan. Furthermore, few jurisdictions around the country or the globe require licensing and registration of bikes; most cities that have tried or contemplated it, including Los Angeles, Toronto, Houston, and Washington, D.C., quickly abandoned the idea, and the handful of places that do require registration use it almost exclusively to combat theft. And in any place that has raised barriers to cycling, the number of people biking has declined, in turn making cycling less safe because of an inverse safety-in-numbers effect.
We also believe that a registration requirement would be an invitation for police officers to conduct pretextual stops of anyone riding a bicycle or scooter of any type, especially if those persons are black or brown. Fear of a new stop-and-frisk program for bicycles is not hyperbolic. The difference between devices that are motorized and those that are not is often not readily apparent, and we know that historically, people of color have been stopped at far higher rates than other New Yorkers, whether for biking on a sidewalk, crossing a street outside a crosswalk, or just going about their business. This Council clearly recognizes that disparity, as it took needed action to legalize “jaywalking” just a couple months ago. Immediately adopting a new law that would very likely lead to a big increase in police interactions for people on bikes and scooters, especially when the vast majority of the city’s delivery workers are immigrants facing a very uncertain future given the coming change in presidential administrations, would be a shockingly misguided backwards step.
We also must point out that the behaviors that lead to people feeling unsafe, and understandably so, mainly riding on the sidewalk, failing to give right of way to pedestrians at stoplights and stop signs, and riding the wrong way on one-way streets, are already illegal, but almost universally unenforced. NYPD wrote fewer than two tickets per precinct per day for red-light running last year, and that’s for all vehicles, cars and trucks included. In the tragic case of Priscilla Loke, the rider who struck her was on a Citi Bike that had an identification number, stayed on the scene, and was interviewed by police, who then let him go; it was only later that he was issued a summons for failing to stop at a red light. Targeted enforcement against dangerous operators, done fairly and equitably, could help begin to get the message across that such actions are absolutely not okay.
At the same time, it’s important that we make a concerted effort to address the underlying conditions that lead to some of these unsafe behaviors. A principal driver of that is the explosive growth in food delivery by third-party app companies. Delivery workers are held to impossible standards for delivery times and distances and face a constant threat of deactivation by app platforms if they arrive late or refuse a job. This perverse incentivizing of risky riding decreases safety for everyone, and app companies have managed to almost completely skirt responsibility and liability while reaping the lion’s share of profits. The boom in delivery orders certainly does not appear to be abating, and it’s critical to the success of an increasing number of restaurants, most of which are mom-and-pop businesses. Deliveristas need a new paradigm, something that the Office of Sustainable Delivery is working toward, and which the Council should be pushing forward.
Rather than restricting the use of micro-mobility devices, the city should be increasing its investment in safer infrastructure. We know that protected bike lanes make streets safer for everyone and reduce both riding on sidewalks and speeding. Wider bike lanes allow room for safe passing and provide space for devices of varying speeds. Daylighting of intersections increases visibility and allows all street users to better see each other and have more time to react. And robust public charging infrastructure can greatly reduce the associated danger of battery fires while also encouraging the use of e-bikes rather than mopeds.
On that note, the city is beginning to make progress on reining in the use of illegal, unregisterable mopeds. With the passage of a point-of-sale moped registration bill this year in Albany, buyers of mopeds now won’t be able to leave the dealership without a registration or proof of a driver’s license. This means that mopeds will have to have a necessary Vehicle Identification Number. We’re already seeing that a growing share of the mopeds in operation in the city have required license plates.
Intro 1131-2024 – Strongly Support
As opposed to Intro 606, we strongly support Intro 1131, which would establish a task force to study the growing use of e-bikes and make recommendations for upgrading street design and infrastructure to improve safety for all street users.
We know that many New Yorkers are concerned about the growth in the use of e-bikes and other micro-mobility devices. Change is always unsettling, especially in a dense, crowded city with limited street space. Assembling a team of experts to make recommendations about how to implement design upgrades and better integrate these new devices into the city fabric is a common-sense step as opposed to a draconian overreaction that has been proved not to work in other places. The task force will also make recommendations for legislation and policy changes, and will do so on an accelerated nine-month timeline.
Those recommendations may include changing the way we allocate street space, changing the way we regulate the speeds of micro-mobility devices, accelerating the implementation of the Streets Plan, perhaps some variation on e-bike registration, or maybe even something like an Idaho Stop law. The important thing is that the members of the task force should have expertise in these matters.
We strongly urge the Committee and the Council to pass this bill without delay.
