“Stupid.” “Hot air.” “Insulting.” “Nonsense.”
These are just some of the overnight reactions to Mayor Adams’s hasty announcement late on Wednesday that he intends to create a 15-mile-per-hour speed limit for electric bikes — a rule change that will place more of a burden on hard-working, mostly immigrant delivery workers and none on the app companies that have unleashed them to quickly deliver burgers and groceries to the city’s élites.
“This is an incredibly stupid idea,” said Brandon Chamberlin, a lawyer who works with victims of road violence. “Imposing lower speed limits on e-bikes than on non-electric bikes would just lead to conflict and congestion in already-too-narrow bike lanes. It also will create dangerous conditions on roads without bike lanes due to even greater speed differentials between cars and bikes.”
Sara Lind of Open Plans called the 15-mile-an-hour proposed speed limit on e-bikes “essentially a war on cyclists [and] a very poorly planned one.”
“It’s frankly insulting to consider speed limiters on an e-bike when we can’t get speed limiters for repeat reckless drivers who are killing New Yorkers,” she said, referencing a state bill to require devices inside the cars of the worst recidivist speeders.
Mayor Adams released a quick-hit video to boost his enforcement push that did not mention car and truck drivers, who, according to the NYPD, have caused more than 99.9 percent of all injuries to pedestrians this year.
Many street safety advocates seized on the irony of treating users of e-bikes and drivers of cars so differently.
“Setting a lower speed limit for a 40-pound e-bike than a three-ton SUVs makes absolutely zero sense given the relative harm potential, but then neither does issuing a criminal summons to a cyclist for the same infraction for which a driver receives a traffic ticket,” said Eric McClure, executive director of StreetsPAC, citing reporting by Streetsblog that revealed that e-bike-related collisions and injuries actually declined this year in advance of the NYPD’s recent criminal crackdown on cycling.
“Rather than ending that dangerous and irrational enforcement effort, Mayor Adams is doubling down on it, very likely exposing more and more hard-working immigrant delivery workers, who still have gotten no relief from app company algorithms that force them to choose speed over deactivation, to encounters with the Trump deportation regime,” McClure added.
Still others used the current enforcement proposal to remind Mayor Adams that the four “e”s of Vision Zero do include “enforcement,” but also “education,” “engineering” and “equity.”
“Cooler heads know cars and trucks are the real threat to life and limb for pedestrians and cyclists. Wide bike lanes and workplace safety rules for delivery apps are the way to go,” said Danny Pearlstein of Riders Alliance.
Of the dozen activists to whom Streetsblog reached out late on Wednesday, only Charles Komanoff suggested that the speed limit isn’t bad on its face — but must be combined with a myriad of other efforts, similar to the approach of Mayor Adams’s failed bid to regulate the app industry.
“Pedestrians will experience less anxiety and injury,” with a speed limit, he said, but the mayor must immediately also create more incentives for slower travel, including “higher fines for traffic infractions by powered bikes [and] lower fines for infractions by traditional bikes; distance-graduated surcharges for deliveries beyond a one-mile radius”; enforcement of the ban on powered vehicles from bike paths and lanes; expanded auto and truck speed and red-light cams to every New York City street, with points on licenses; passage of the aforementioned Stop Super Speeders bill.”
Even the E-Vehicle Safety Alliance, which focuses its advocacy solely on reining in bikes and mopeds and has not supported efforts to address the 99.4 percent of road injuries caused by the drivers of cars and trucks, did not immediately cheer Mayor Adams’s announcement.
Instead, the group’s spokesperson Janet Schroeder again reiterated the EVSA support for e-bike registration and licensing.
“While we welcome a reasonable speed limit for e-bikes, without accountability through registration and visible plates, there is no mechanism for enforcement … and hence, a speed limit is just another symbolic gesture that will do little to make change,” she told Streetsblog.
The EVSA has said it has not supported the NYPD’s criminal crackdown on cyclists, a rare moment of solidarity with traditional safety groups.
Indeed, Howard Yaruss, a member of Community Board 7 on the Upper West Side, cited his board’s approval of a resolution demanding an end to the criminalization push in his comments about the new speed limit.
“This sounds insane,” he said. “How can they let the multi-ton vehicles that are responsible for 99.6 percent of pedestrian injuries go twice the speed of cyclists?”
And that could explain why state law requires the City Council to pass a law to impose e-bike speed limits.
“Eric Adams can’t do it himself by fiat,” said Chamberlin, the lawyer.
And one former Bloomberg administration official said the whole thing is unworkable.
“Different limits for bikes and cars, and for different kinds of bikes? I’d like to hear how the city that allows millions of cars and trucks to do anything and everything is going to make this work,” said Jon Orcutt, who worked at the Department of Transportation and now advocates for Bike New York. “Sounds like more flavor-of-the-month hot air from the Adams administration.”
