As e-bikes have steadily grown more popular in New York City, whether they be used for transportation, work, or both, some are asserting that their presence is making the streets increasingly unsafe.
In particular, many New Yorkers find delivery workers on e-bikes to be way too fast, not adhere to traffic laws, move out of bike lanes, and sometimes even go in the wrong direction. Their lawlessness has been blamed for making city streets “a nightmare.”
“There are scenarios where people have the right to be upset,” Elijah Orlandi, told the Times. Orlandi lives in the Bronx and has himself been making e-bike deliveries for Grubhub, in addition to his 9-to-5 job, since October. He says has seen e-bike riders “swerving in between cars and all that kind of stuff.”
Though Orlandi also expressed hopes that New Yorkers have some compassion for delivery workers. “People got to understand, we’re working,” he said. Delivery apps, he noted, keep track of how quickly workers make their drop-offs and ding them if they take too long.
“Sometimes you’ll be going somewhere and Grubhub will send you another order, and then no matter what you do, you’re going to be late,” he said. “So that’s why you’ll see a lot of people rushing.”
In efforts to alleviate some of the congestion and collisions caused by the rise of e-bikes, an organization named NYC E-Vehicle Safety Alliance is supporting a bill that would ban e-bikes and other e-vehicles from parks and greenways. Additionally, it would push for the government to require that e-bikes be registered and the riders licensed.
The NYC E-Vehicle Safety Alliance was founded by Janet Schroeder and Pamela Manasse, who was hit by an electric vehicle in 2022 and suffered a severe brain injury. Schroeder said the organization includes 74 people who have been injured by e-bikes. In nearly all cases, she said, the rider fled immediately.
However on the other side of the issue, e-bike riders are also susceptible to being hit on the street. Zoey Laskaris and Mustafa Hussein, researchers at CUNY, recently published a study that found that food delivery gig workers in New York City face a high risk of injury and assault.
Some also argue that vehicles themselves, electric or not, should be taking a significant amount of blame for chaos on the streets.
According to StreetsBlogNYC, there were 95,567 reported vehicle crashes in NYC in 2023, which is up to roughly 263 per day. In those crashes, roughly 54,235 people were injured, or 149 per day.
Of these reported injuries, 9,077 were pedestrians while 5,177 were cyclists, and of the pedestrians injured last year, only 344 (or 3.8 percent) were caused by e-bikes.
