Bring some order to the e-bikes on NYC’s streets 75%
By New York Daily News Editorial Board98%
8/6/2026, 1:00:41 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 24 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Negativity Bias, and Anchoring Bias, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 21.7% saturation with 125 hits. Analysis detected 891 faulty-reasoning hits from 576 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 58.9% and a BS Rank of 75% (7,564 of 30,190 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 74.90% of the article peer group.
Legalized by Albany during COVID, but after that left unregulated, the e-bikes and stand-up scooters now everywhere on city streets (and sidewalks) are in the gray area between DMV registered vehicles requiring DMV licenses to operate and traditional pedal bicycles.
That has to change, especially for those being used for commercial purposes by deliverymen.
Mamdani took a good step yesterday with legal action against 42 companies selling dangerous motorized devices which are illegal on NYC streets and he was joined by state Attorney General Tish James, together warning the retailers not to sell to people living in the five boroughs.
Some of these machines can go more than twice the legal 15-mph speed limit that applies to e-bikes and e-scooters.
Of course, someone can get around that by having one of these high-speed vehicles shipped to an address outside of the city, but it’s still a start.
The City Council, under Speaker Julie Menin, is looking at 17 different bills relating to e-bikes and scooters and will hold a hearing next month.
Also good.
We all know the problems.
They zoom faster than the posted legal limits.
They ride on sidewalks.
They ride the wrong way on one-way streets or against traffic on two-way streets.
They don’t stop at red lights or stop signs.
They don’t display running lights, making them invisible at night to cars and pedestrians.
Mamdani is correct to get the illegal vehicles off the road, but the legal ones have to operate responsibly.
The big delivery services that restaurants contract with — DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub — are now subject to rules making sure that their hired deliveristas use only lithium-ion batteries that don’t explode and have safety training and equipment.
Those rules should also be extended to the restaurants that directly contract with deliverymen, which is a largely immigrant workforce that is easily exploited.
Who is at fault when there’s a crash?
Just the deliveryman or shouldn’t there be some liability to be shared by the company or restaurant that hired him?
Are the commercial drivers carrying insurance?
Of course, not all crashes are caused by commercial riders, like the tragic death last week of a 17-year-old Brooklyn boy who died riding an illegal high-speed e-bike, but better regulation of the commercial riders who are using the public streets to conduct business will make the streets safer for everyone.
The danger is growing.
So far this year, 12 people have been killed while riding e-bikes.
Another nine have died using stand-up e-scooters, which compares to three who died while riding old-fashioned pedal bikes.
Last year those figures were 17 dead on e-bikes, six from e-scooters and four on regular bikes.
And there are many more crashes, with the NYPD listing 560 crashes with e-bikes and 795 with standup scooters so far this year.
Compared to the same time period in 2024, those numbers have climbed 28%.
Since the top legal speed in the city is 15 mph, why are any of these machines, for commercial or casual use, allowed to exceed that?
One of the All-Stars of the previous Eric Adams administration, then-Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi, had a smart idea for a Department of Sustainable Delivery to bring together all the various agencies dealing with commercial e-bikes and e-scooter uses.
It didn’t pass, but it would be wise to bring it back to help get the e-bikes under control.
Speakers
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