NYC Drivers Who Run Red Lights Get Tickets. E-Bike Riders Get Court Dates
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> “Since e-bikes do not require a license, drivers of e-bikes can simply ignore their traffic summons with no repercussions whatsoever, making any enforcement futile,” the police spokesperson said. However, the new requirement that cyclists appear in court, or face an arrest warrant if they fail to, creates “a strong incentive to show up in court.”
Cannot speak for its accuracy.
Anecdotally (London not NYC) I feel like I am "endangered" by e-bikes much more often than cars, because they seem to regularly skip red lights and come silently shooting out from the other side of a car while you are crossing, which a car simply cannot do. They are far heavier than a normal bike and seem to be closer to a small incredibly quiet moped.
Obviously lives-saved is the most important metric, but that doesn't mean the "feeling of safety" component is worthless. The comparison around deaths is only useful if those figures are primarily car deaths caused by running red lights.
I feel like the most sensible policy is requiring licenses for e-bikes above a certain power level (not easy!) and then bringing parity to the treatment of cars vs e-bikes after that
This is already true in NYC. It just another law that there aren't enough resources to be enforced IMO
However, you do have car lane legal scooters that also ride in the bike lanes when convenient which are a real problem.
These aren't e-bikes, however, and are not supposed to be in the bike lane in the first place.
Speaking of NYC, not London, there are several reasons I see for this. 1. NYC has used bike lanes as pedestrian safety infrastructure, siting the bike lanes right against sidewalks, providing a buffer from cars. NYC DOT has done a lot of research every time a new bike lane has been added, and every time they did that pedestrian deaths and severe injuries dropped. However, the flip side is that you're gonna have e-bikes much closer to you than cars.
2. Street infrastructure, including red light timing, etc. is entirely based on cars and not bikes. The bike lights, for example, switch directly from green to red, providing no "yellow" period to stop. This actually makes sense because bikes are significantly safer, but it leads to different behavior than cars, which some pedestrians feel is "unfair". What would actually be fair would be to design the infrastructure suitable for bikers as well.
3. Pedestrians simply have different expectations of cars/ebikes. You will reliably see tourists not even look for bikes while crossing the bike path and stand in the middle of the bike path or walk in the bike path in a way they never would with a car lane.
4. Bikes are just given much poorer infrastructure. In NYC, you have narrow bike lanes, several of which are interrupted with slick and dangerous sewer gratings, and with no space to pass, with car parking right next to them leading to people constantly hopping through the bike lane from their cars to the sidewalk without looking, constantly creating a danger of opening their doors without looking causing bikes to be "doored", etc.
There's way too much "feels" in this discussion. It's about time someone provided some actual data that bikes, and even e-bikes, have even slightly increased risks to pedestrians, when all the actual data suggests otherwise, and it's about time we recognize that at least in places like NYC, the "danger" caused by bikes/e-bikes, is literally because the city has made bikers a buffer to protect pedestrians from the actual dangers on the road, the 1-2 ton cars traveling at incredible speeds through dense urban areas.
On narrow one-way roads with street parking, cars tend to go quite slowly and look out carefully for pedestrians coming out from between cars. At a stop sign you can check left and right, cross, and expect that cars will see you and stop even if they were for some reason planning on running the sign. It's even possible to safely jaywalk in most cases because the cars are going slowly enough that you can see them, judge their speeds, and cross before they reach you.
E-bikes as a rule do not behave that way on narrow roads. They will drive much faster than is safe (presumably because the road feels less narrow to them relatively) and end up outrunning their visibility and yours. I've never come close to being hit by a car in Brooklyn, but there have been numerous close calls with bikes, and they've all been on narrow roads with street parking where I was attempting to cross at a stop sign which the bike ran.
> There's way too much "feels" in this discussion
I agree that hard numbers are useful, but dismissing feeling entirely isn't useful. Feeling safe is an important quality for a city.
So I would like to see better e-bike laws that make it illegal to have a machine that's too heavy and/or fast, and to issue court summonses to people operating those machines in bike lanes. That seems fair. It's a clear hazard, it's a selfish use of resources, and if everyone did it they'd just close the bike path altogether because it'd become unusable.
Having said that, that's not what the city is doing. They're fixated on cyclists running red lights and stop signs, not distinguishing between different kinds of bikes. Bikes, and e-bikes, are safer than cars for everyone around them. We want to encourage people to bike more and drive less because they're so much safer. (Remember a bike isn't like a car -- if a cyclist hits a pedestrian, they're gonna get hurt too!) For this reason, many states allow bikes to treat red lights as stop signs and stop signs as yield signs. So NYC's sudden shift in policy, to me, feels backwards.
It sucks because if safety was really the major concern the mayor could have just built more and safer bike lines -- which was what he promised to do, made a plan to do, and then just didn't.
Probably worth noting at this point that the ultimate beneficiaries are people ordering food on various delivery services. In my experience, these overpowered bikes are almost exclusively used by delivery drivers.
I rarely order online (too much trash, too many hostile UX patterns of sneaking in fees disguised as "taxes" etc.), but when I do, I'd really prefer the delivery person would not risk their and others' lives running red lights all the way.
Absolutely agree this is silly and cities should be encouraging cycling.
> We want to encourage people to bike less and drive more
assuming you meant to flip this?
An e-bike that can even do 20mph comfortably is much closer to a moped than a bicycle, partly due to weight, and partly due to "ease of speed". Obviously a person can easily cycle 20mph, but it just isn't the kind of thing you do on in a crowded area. Very different when it is just a throttle. So grouping them in with bikes, rather than mopeds or similar, is just extremely silly
Where I live I find cyclists to be the most reckless participants in traffic, way more than drivers and pedestrians. Cyclists never have to take even the most basic course even just in school to learn legislation or general rules. They always act like they own the road whether on the sidewalk among pedestrians, or on the street among cars. E-bikes just made this worse because everyone can cycle above their natural capabilities now.
But it's also clear that the "blast radius" of a cyclist is usually very limited compared to the damage a car can cause even with banal actions like opening a door at the wrong time. So I understand why their behavior is tolerated compared to when drivers to the same.
There are pedal assist ebikes hitting the market that are nearly indistinguishable from a road bicycle and weigh as much as a kitted out steel touring bike (i.e. ~35-40 lbs) and can comfortably do 20 mph.[0] I don't really think that's treading any sort of line of being close to a moped.
Also there are absolutely people riding analog bikes capable of having an average cadence of 15-20 mph who ride with reckless abandon on crowded mixed-used paths in cities - so maybe you don't do that, but there's a pretty large subset of cyclists who are doing that because biking is more of a sport activity than strictly pragmatic form of transportation. Bad bike path etiquette extends beyond ebikes
[0] ride1up is one brand making such bikes
They should be encouraging cycling, but not by making red lights a free-for-all.
I once lived on the corner of a pretty busy cycling street by the beach in Florida, with a stoplight in the intersection outside my window. We had these gigantic "trains" of cyclists regularly just blowing straight through red lights, because there typically wasn't a lot of traffic coming from the cross street. I remember one occasion where a car was entering the intersection from the cross street (car had the green light, major street had the red), and a huge train of about 20 bicycles at full speed ran the red light and slammed into the side of the car with a loud "thump thump thump thump thump thump..." Total wreckage. Busted bicycles all over the street after they fucked up, and the cyclists had the nerve to be irate. If I hadn't run out and started recording, the car driver probably would have been assaulted by these raging hotheads.
These guys need to obey traffic laws, too.
More curves, lower limits, more stops. Cities that implement more bike-friendly and pedestrian-friendly design are safer for everyone, cars included.
I've personally run two red lights in the last month or so. Both were late at night where I'm literally the only visible vehicle on the road at a timed (no sensor) intersection where I was waiting for over a minute for the light to change. That's obviously a very different scenario than when you have to interact with other drivers on the road.
Like, the reason pedestrians jay walk isn't that they're selfish, it's that the streets aren't designed for them and we put far too little crosswalks, with far too little protection. We can make the situation safer for everyone, a win-win.
It's not an us versus them type thing which is where I think most car design conversations go. When we de-prioritize cars, it helps everyone, including the cars.
But you know, go downtown, and ride around a bit in traffic, on the greenbelt, etc. And you'll see the cyclists are typically going to make a better decision for themselves and others than cars will.
Like I said, it's fine. If you can't understand it, maybe go experience it first hand.
I've seen many road bikes do exactly this on a crowded bike path of pedestrians, scooters, and e-bikes. I've also seen e-bikes wait patiently to pass and slow down when there's traffic. I think proclaiming that e-bike riders are worse than road bike riders is patently false.
So it's not really an "e-bike" problem. It's really a speed problem.
All else being equal, yes. But NYC drivers are exceptionally skilled relative to the rest of the country. They're nuts in a lot of ways, but they're also far more respectful of pedestrians, far more aware of their surroundings, far more willing to drive slowly, and far more happy to stop for pedestrians even if they technically have the right of way.
NYC e-bike riders (especially the Citi bikes) are the opposite. They're far less likely to stop, far more likely to be going way faster than is safe, and far more likely to blow through stop signs entirely.
There's a well-documented phenomenon in safety that the "safer" choice in the abstract can actually end up being more dangerous because it feels safer, which leads to riskier behavior. I fear this is what is happening in NYC: incentivizing people to ride bikes doesn't get you 10x as many of the good, respectful, careful bikers you had 10 years ago. It gets you a whole bunch of reckless amateurs who buy the hype that bikes are safer and bike like maniacs. We may well find that that's worse for pedestrian safety than the well-known and well-regulated dangers of cars.
Even having said that, I kind of agree that it's true that drivers in Manhattan tend to be pretty aware, considerate, and mindful compared to other cities, all the traffic lights notwithstanding. But they have to be -- even just a little bit of distraction and they will kill someone. I can't say the same for the Citi bikers as reckless as they may be. They're far more likely to hurt themselves than someone else, and I'd rather have the reckless amateurs be on bikes than driving cars.
The appropriate forums are filled with people outraged on the "ban on e-bikes" that NY State & City are leading the charge for. They were the first to ban non-UL certified bikes, and have proposed and/or enacted several other regulations against over-wattage bikes.
I'm not sure how effective the laws and enforcement are, but NYC is definitely doing more than nothing to get rid of the heaviest/fastest bikes.
https://gothamist.com/news/new-queensboro-bridge-walkway-ope...
Fwiw, shouldn’t we consider the weight of the bike (e-bike or not e-bike) + the weight of the rider?
On my 75lb e-bike and weighing 160lb, am I more dangerous than a 220lb dude on a 15lb Schwinn?
Speed’s an issue also, but I’ve had my road bike up to 55 mph (downhill) and never exceed 24 mph on my e-bike.
So, I guess I’m saying to be equitable, set speed and combined weight limits on all things with 2 wheels.
I would tend to agree but it needs qualifying. If e-bikes run reds but cars do not, then this might not be true anymore.
Cars are much more dangerous than bikes, but they rarely leave the lanes, travel in (mostly) known directions - though I’ve learned from experience to always look both ways even on one-way streets.
Bikes aren’t that terribly dangerous (though a pedestrian hit by an e-bike at 28 mph can be killed), but they’re entirely unpredictable and seeming appear as if by magic from directions you wouldn’t think possible.
It feels like you're contradicting yourself here. The restricted tracks and predictability make them by definition more safe than cars. And that bears out in fatalities. I get what you're going for in that trains are more scary from a mass standpoint, but we don't measure safety by how dangerous things look. We look at actual metrics. And trains are safe.
Cars suffer from too much maneuverability - they do avoid most of the incidents and accidents.
Injuries sustained is much more difficult to quantify yet it's the more interesting comparison. The article says the ratio is 120 to 1 of lives taken by cars vs ebikes. I think that is because a car accident is significantly more likely to kill the pedestrian rather than only injure them. I would be interested in reading how many pedestrians are injured at all by other people's ebikes vs other people's cars.
It's also estimated that there's 10-50x as many car injuries as car-related deaths...
Which means even to get to the injury rate of cars - you're looking for, potentially, as many 6000x as many serious bike accidents.
It's possible, but it doesn't seem likely.
But I would exhort city bikers and e-bikers, I know it feels convenient to flip back and forth between being a "car" and a "pedestrian" at a whim, but please don't. You're generally supposed to be a "car", at least where I live. And the step where you were a pedestrian a moment ago and just come wandering into my lane because you're a "car" now is probably about the most dangerous thing you do on a daily basis. Pick a lane, literally and metaphorically.
I'm aware of this issue so I'm watching you like a hawk if you're doing this, but I'd advise against betting that everyone else is watching that well. That ped->car transition is very rough on everyone around you.
I'll also agree that cars need to be a lot more aware of bikes in general, but this particular issue is definitely on the bikers.
Meh. I have no problem if a cyclists wants to flip back and forth between a "car" and a "pedestrian".
It's just that a "pedestrian" uses their feet to move. So if you want to get off the bike to walk across an intersection with pedestrians; I really don't see a problem.
> You're generally supposed to be a "car", at least where I live.
In NYC, cyclists can follow pedestrian walk signals even when traffic light is red.
https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=2...
Notice how it says "Status: Filed (End of Session)" at the top?
Other legislation will say something like "Enacted" [1]
[1]: https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=2...
https://legistar.council.nyc.gov/LegislationDetail.aspx?ID=3...
I don't know about the UK or US, but here in France, the majority of pedestrians killed each year die on "protected" crossings. So whether those are traffic lights or "zebra" crossings, yes, that's a very major source of accidents.
Addendum:
Would love to see per-modality statistics on this for UK/US. Here in France, the preliminary stats for 2024 look like this:
https://masto.bike/system/media_attachments/files/114/521/93...
The table shows the deaths per modality (leftmost column, "tués") and in collision with which modality they were killed (and "sans tiers" for "no counterparty").
Needless to say, cars and trucks are dominating the "who kills the most people" contest, far outweighing their percentage in transport usage.
Source: https://www.onisr.securite-routiere.gouv.fr/sites/default/fi...
Yeah, stats are difficult.
That seems like it would allow school kids to cross the road much more safely than painted lines would.
This viral video is from where I grew up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp4gouR2Ei4 The Volvo truck that juuust manages to stop when kids are running out behind the bus.
Au contraire, it is fairly easy.
Around here, e-vehicles are classified according to weight, power amd max speed. These parameters define where and how you can use them, what features are required, what protective gear is required and what licenses or insurance are required to operate them.
https://www.traficom.fi/en/transport/road/electric-personal-...
That's already the case in the UK. Only e-bikes with assist limited to IIRC 15.5mph (you can pedal quicker than that, though) are legal to use on public roads without the usual license, registration, number plate and insurance. Basically, unrestricted e-bikes (e.g. throttle activated ones that provide power without needing to be pedalled) are the same as e-motorbikes and covered by the same laws, though there's certainly lots of them around. I would guess that the e-motorbikes cause less problems than the typical distracted car driver does and so the police aren't prioritising them.
In Washington DC last year, people finally were fed up with all the psycho moped riders zipping around. When the police investigated, the said the city only had 150 registered mopeds, which were most likely not the offending vehicles. So they took trucks around the city and checked every moped, seized 500 on sight, and arrested 129 people. These were unregistered (a crime/misdemeanor), and they were all operated by unauthorized immigrants.
The response from a DC "community organizer"? "It's an education issue".
By the way, they never bothered enforcing electric bikes/scooters, and they don't need a license or helmets.
https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/investigations/dc-police-...
It’s already the case in the EU and the UK. An e-bike is limited to 250 W and 15.5 mph (25 km/h). Above that it’s a speedbike and require a license, helmet, insurance, licence plate, and cannot use cycle lanes.
Also, actual e-bikes aren’t that much heavier than normal city bikes, maybe 5 kg extra.
Expanding bicycle lanes is great. Bicycles are great and I’m a fan of reclaiming more land from car traffic for cyclists and pedestrians.
However many e-bikes - I don’t know what percentage - are just technically under the legal limit for being classified as motorcycles. That is not the intended use of the bike lanes. Similarly, Amazon now has motorized delivery vehicles driving through the bike lanes in the city. They are exactly the width of the lane. It’s great to prevent congestion on streets, and a clever piece of engineering, but again, not a bicycle, even though it has pedals.
If you’re driving a motorized vehicle then don’t ride in the bike lane! If you’re on a road then follow the laws and don’t run red lights!
Because you're talking about ebikes on bike lanes, but this article is entirely about court cases vs traffic tickets for red light violations. It mentions bike lanes only offhand as evidence of general trends.
> “Since e-bikes do not require a license, drivers of e-bikes can simply ignore their traffic summons with no repercussions whatsoever, making any enforcement futile,” the police spokesperson said. However, the new requirement that cyclists appear in court, or face an arrest warrant if they fail to, creates “a strong incentive to show up in court.”
And if you don’t, you lose your license.
But there is no licensing for bikes or e-bikes, so the leverage they have isn’t there.
Around here the fines are equal in money but you can lose your license to drive a murder machine. (Sarcasm)
It might be worse if the allowed speeds around intersections and cultural preference to speed though red are higher. And by allowed speeds I mean natural speed through traffic calming.
But the legal penalty is nothing to do with what risks you took. You could have the view that the state should punish making mistakes that can kill your (in which case the bike penalty would be higher), but I (and I assume most) people wouldn't say this.
The reason the penalty exists is to disincentivise the action. If people were truly rational with all these risks, the problem wouldn't exist in the first place.
It would be incredibly odd to suggest, say, that burglars should have lower sentences if they risked their lives while doing the burglary.
The point should have been: if you drive a machine which can result in deadly harm to others you should be more responsible and thus the fine heavier (no longer being allowed to use such machine). Try killing someone with a bike. Not impossible but more a challenge than with a car.
The severity of the penalty can be determined by legislators elected by the people. Some of those people may want to increase the fine amount for automobile drivers. That seems like an ok thing to want.
* - often, but not always -- I realize that some jurisdictions legalize varying forms of it for some vehicles
You can arrest people for failing to pay traffic fines.
Of course its possible this is just being draconian or whatever, but if I were a betting man I'd wager they are doing this because it is in some way necessary
Necessary does not imply fair, or correct, or anything. Just that I would be surprised if they are doing it if the simpler alternative works
Sure, e-bikes don't require a license but they are still operated by a person. The cases that are all listed are people over 18 who absolutely have forms of ID that they can present to the officer to establish where to send a fine to and who to collect it from if it goes unpaid.
It's literally just as strong as the court requirement. Like if they guy doesn't show up to court who are you going to arrest!?
So they're using a court summons, because that relies on ID, and is enforced by tracking people down. Whether it is 'just as strong' or not depends on if the person has a driving license. If you don't the traffic summons has no power over you.
It doesn't.
It just relies on being able to identify somebody. Whether that's a school photo or a drivers license doesn't matter. In this situation, the bicyclists likely were carrying identification so the cop could reasonable assume who they were issuing a ticket to.
Automated enforcements typically use the license plate and mail the traffic ticket to the registered owner but we're talking about a scenario where a cop has stopped somebody and in those cases the ticket go straight to that person who may not be the registered owner of the vehicle.
> They don't track people down or chase them
They do.
You will get an arrest warrant (eventually) if you don't pay your traffic tickets.
And as stated in the article, cops did chase bicyclists.
> They have no process for people who are driving without a license
They do.
If they didn't nobody would get a drivers license... It's generally not criminal to drive without a license but additional (criminal) charges might apply depending on the situation.
You're presuming there's an office on the spot AND the cyclist stops. The penalties for a car driver to run are heavy and likely: license plate tracks to the owner, and the cop identifies (or "identifies") the owner in court. On a bike? "Be on the lookout for a blue bike, and a guy wearing a yellow windbreaker."
The article clearly states there was an officer present that stopped the bicycles.
But to your actual question. There's a trivial response of where is the camera going to send a court summons to? The article is about bicycles being issued court summons instead of tickets. My claim is that you can literally just send the ticket wherever you gave the summons to and when they proceed not to pay the fine you send a future court summons (later backed by arrest warrant) and increased fines to wherever you would've send the original court summons to.
If you are stopped because of a traffic violation (crime) in New York state you need to be able to identify yourself - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_and_identify_statutes
There are e-bikes (1) that are essentially electric Vespas with unusable pedals sticking out the sides. Depending on the jurisdiction, they may even be “technically” allowed on sidewalks because the wheel size would be under a certain diameter (~ <24”).
They are very intimidating to pedestrians, and there is usually no enforcement because there may be no by-law to enforce. Getting on one breaks a social contract about what it means to respect one another’s safety and comfort.
I want to see these folks try to pedal their “e-bikes” without busting up their ankles.
Same for the Amazon ones. They either are or aren't bikes/are or aren't eligible for the bike lanes.
"not the intended use of the bike lanes" doesn't have the same force and certainty of "not allowed to use the bike lanes by statute".
Agree completely on regular bicycles though.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/04/18/exclusive-cops-writin...
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/05/02/policy-change-nypd-wi...
If the police don't care about the difference, why do you?
And the answer is no.
Every time a bike lane is installed on a street/avenue the safety rate for pedestrians increases dramatically.
Because the police are more often wrong than they are right. We shouldn't be modeling our laws over what's most convenient for police, that's just asking for abuse.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2022/09/06/the-nypd-and-dmv-are-...
I feel very strongly about bicyclists running red lights, and I'm always the one looking like a nerd who stops at the light. But I am very concerned about bicyclists getting criminal summonses for them when our system of checks and balances is consistently not working even in the unambiguously legal cases.
https://old.nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/01/31/85-year-old-drive...
One of many
I'm all for e-bikes. They're great. We need police to start giving a fuck and ticket people riding on the sidewalk. Even for the ones classified as bicycles, in NYC you're only legally allowed to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk if you are 12 years old or younger.
E-bikes are a totally different story. They'll shoot through narrow streets twice as fast as the cars do and blitz through stop signs without even slowing down. There have been multiple occasions where I was nearly hit by one of them.
They seem to think that because they're smaller they don't need to care as much, but at the relative speeds of cars and bikes on those narrow streets I'm pretty convinced they'd do more damage to me than the 5-10 mph car would.
To me, many of the pedestrian <=> cyclist conflicts are due to bad infrastructure and a prioritization of cars, having cyclists and pedestrians forced to share or accept bad solutions.
Street lights are for the benefits of cars. To me they should all be just pedestrian crossings where cars have to yield. Pedestrians should be top on the totem pole, and should be able to walk in the city as they please. Having to wait to cross is just a way to increase the throughput of cars, forcing you to press the "begging button". And here's some of the issue as well. If it was only cyclists and pedestrians, we wouldn't need red lights. But how it's built today doesn't take into account that cyclists can pass safely through an intersection if it weren't for the cars. So it feels almost like an affront to you when you have to stop due to the infrastructure being tailored for someone else.
I never bomb through a red light myself, as I said, I prioritize pedestrians above cyclists, but I do understand why it's happening. More ticketing or "enforcement" won't help, as it doesn't solve the underlying issue:
Cities are prioritizing cars, when it should prioritize humans.
So forgive me if it's a bit hard to take this seriously. I'll still try to address this because for once I'm not handicapped by my lacking French. :D
The reason you don't feel as threatened by cars as you are by bikes is (without knowing you in person) twofold:
1. As societies, being collectively used to cars and accepting things we'd never accept in any other context when things relate to cars. Search the webs for "motonormativity" if you want the slightly more academic take on this. Since you were a kid, you were probably taught how to "co-"inhabit the road with cars. I put the quotes there because in most places, it's really cars who inhabit, and everyone else who's accepted onto the road, provided they don't impede on drivers' comfort.
2. Infrastructure is built in most places to more or less cleanly segregate pedestrians from cars. There's nothing stopping us from doing the same for bikes and pedestrians, but in most places we don't. Even though inside cities bikes can and do often move faster than cars, and therefore have a higher speed differential wrt pedestrians, their infrastructure is often woefully inadequate to deal with this. Here in southern france they even often put bikes explicitly on the sidewalk, which comes down to a "no biking" policy. Even where bike lanes are put in place, they're often ill-conceived. It turns out, the bike/pedestrian interaction in traffic is not at all the same as the car/pedestrian interaction. The Netherlands and other places have decades of experience in this by now, yet somehow this knowledge is not actively pulled by hesitant local authorities.
I was already quite interested in all of this but recently I also read "Movement" by Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet [1] and I loved it. If you're wondering why certain things in cities suck so hard, IMHO it's a good start.
[1]: https://islandpress.org/books/movement
edit: had swapped "cars" and "bikes" in one sentence, that made no sense. :D
Neither of your two points covers the reason I feel more threatened by e-bikes, which is that the last time I was in Manhattan I stepped out into a one-way street without looking the other way (my bad) only to be nearly hit in the bike line by an e-bike coming the wrong way at max speed.
The person you were responding to pointed out that the operators of bikes simply don't obey traffic laws (perhaps France is different, but I doubt it). That is at least forgivable if you're trying to conserve hard-pedaled momentum but not if you're operating a 75-pound motor vehicle at 28mph.
Perhaps my chance of being killed by an e-bike is still lower than it would be for a car, but it's not totally irrational for people to prefer things that are higher risk, but more predictable, to those that are lower risk but still dangerous and aren't at all predictable.
It's easy to say that cars obey laws but really they don't, that's part of the reason why cars are orders of magnitude more likely to kill you. That's why, despite cars being the golden child of transportation infrastructure, they're still the most dangerous. Because people don't obey laws. They speed, they follow too close, they roll through stop signs, they stop on crosswalks, they turn right as pedestrians are crossing, and on and on. And, when they do disobey laws, it's much more difficult for them to abort.
The stated reasoning behind this new policy is not backed by data; e-bike collisions and injuries are down in NYC and are insignificant compared to the harm caused by cars. Rather than looking at the data to determine the urgency of the problem, the police merely listened to complaints from community members and assumed that the complaints had merit.
Which caused this:
https://thevillagesun.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/e-bikes...
PS: I think bicycles and E-Bike shall be not considered as the same type of vehicle. In Austria they distinguish even between roadbikes (can always select safest surface depending on their speed: road, cycle lane, cycle path) and bicycles (should use distinct cycle paths when possible).
eBikes can be dangerous, OK, we get it, but this discussion is about the uneven enforcement. If this is about keeping peds safe, why are drivers of automobiles not getting this treatment?
They're giving court dates to riders of normal bikes as well.
It comes down to who usually rides eBikes. They're trying to get the working poor into the criminal justice system. I guess quotas aren't being met now that weed is legal.
One person described bike lanes as a war on the working class, yet the bikers interviewed who got hit with a summons were gig workers or construction workers. Please don't fall into this trap of turning against the working class in service of the monied class. I assure you, the construction worker in the bike lane is just trying to the job site. They aren't starting a war.
FTA
> “Since e-bikes do not require a license, drivers of e-bikes can simply ignore their traffic summons with no repercussions whatsoever, making any enforcement futile,” the police spokesperson said. However, the new requirement that cyclists appear in court, or face an arrest warrant if they fail to, creates “a strong incentive to show up in court.”
To answer the “why not do this to drivers?” question, the answer is arguably that the enforcement mechanisms for drivers were more effective than the enforcement mechanisms for bikes. Whether or not this justifies what they’re doing is another question.
Whether or not it’s actually making pedestrians safer is an open question. If the threat of a court date actually leads to less dangerous behavior by riders, it’s entirely possible that it could make pedestrians safer.
That still wouldn’t be sufficient to conclude it’s a good policy.
Another approach would be to level the playing field between drivers and riders and use the same enforcement policies/mechanisms for both, but that also has side effects that people would not like.
E-bikes are often even more dangerous because of their speed and additional weight, but I've often wished the cops in my city would actually go after cyclists more often.
Like I mentioned above, whether or not the solution described in the article is a good way to do this is another question. But I don't see an issue with them going after rule-breaking cylists regardless of bike type.
The equivalent to ticketing a cyclist proceeding safely through an intersection without the light would be ticketing drivers for blocking the box, rolling through stop signs, making a right on red without coming to a complete stop, double parking or parking in bike lanes, or going 1mph over the posted limit.
No, they’re dangerous.
> but drivers in NYC kill hundreds, maim thousands, and hit tens of thousands every year.
This strikes me as an argument from whataboutism. I don’t have the stats, but I strongly suspect that the volume of cars is also significantly higher than the volume of bikes on top of the size/weight difference, so it is not surprising that the numbers are significantly higher. This doesn’t make the status quo with dangerous behavior on bikes ok to ignore.
Here in Chicago, I’ve been clipped by a bike while walking on the sidewalk, hit by a drunk cyclist while riding my bike, causing me to crash, and witness stupid close calls and ridiculous behavior on a daily basis. I’ve had more close encounters with bikes as a pedestrian than I’ve ever had with cars.
Clearly the stats show that vehicle deaths are far greater, but again, this is a numbers thing, and not a valid reason to ignore bike safety.
> Add to that the fact that NYPD is NOT focusing on dangerous behaviors or mopeds
Running red lights is dangerous. Period. The fact that many cyclists do it without causing an accident doesn’t make it less dangerous.
And I disagree that the police aren’t targeting dangerous behaviors here. If the goal is to stop rule violations by people who are doing dangerous things, that necessarily involves going after the people engaged in obvious rule violations.
Think about this from an enforcement perspective: if I see someone run a red that causes an oncoming driver with the right of way to slow down to avoid a collision, that’s pretty obviously a problem and worth citing.
But the line between “dangerous” and “safe” is often not clear cut, and so it doesn’t seem unreasonable to target rule violations across the board if the goal is to achieve a major behavior change among cyclists.
> The equivalent to ticketing a cyclist proceeding safely through an intersection without the light
Except most cyclists who run red lights do not do so safely, and I think this is a poor characterization of the issue and risk.
To reiterate an earlier point, I’m not sure I’m a fan of the how here, i.e. threatening people with an arrest warrant feels heavy handed. But I also understand why to some degree. I’m tempted to say I’d prefer some kind of law change such that riders have similar legal responsibility to respond to citations as drivers, but I also am not a fan of some of the potential implications of that, e.g. I don’t want bicycle licenses to become a thing.
I’m curious how you’d address the issue, if you can acknowledge for a moment that there is indeed a real issue that needs to be addressed.
> Running red lights is dangerous, period.
Do you feel the same way about pedestrians crossing without the light? Because if you do, you obviously do not live in a city. Cyclists are far closer to pedestrians than drivers, in the sense that they move relatively slowly, are agile, have less mass and therefore pose a lesser danger, and have an unobstructed field of view.
This demand for cyclists to follow rules designed for drivers -- which drivers also pick and choose from, see previous list of routine violations -- is really your typical strategy of using selective enforcement to punish an outgroup.
> Except most cyclists who run red lights do not do so safely, and I think this is a poor characterization of the issue and risk.
Come on, how many collisions do we actually see? Further, if we accept the premise that the majority of cyclists have a death wish, why would ticketing them change their behavior?
The reality is that drivers hitting and crushing pedestrians and cyclists to death don't even get a ticket. There are no consequences for obscured or deliberately damaged plates; unpaid tickets, including dangerous ones; and for many drivers wealthy enough to drive in Manhattan the cost of tickets are hardly a deterrent. In the exceedingly rare situation where licenses do get taken away, drivers will still drive anyway!
As for dashers engaging in actual unsafe behavior, sure, ticket them. But given the scourge that is Uber and Lyft drivers, I'm not holding my breath.
The difference with drivers is that moving violations often result in higher insurance rates. If you don't pay, you eventually can't register their car, can't get insurance and lose their license. Similar enforcement doesn't exist on e-bikes. I'm not sure how many people would pay e-bike tickets, but I imagine the penalty and repercussions of not paying would be a big enough deterrence.
They should consider doing something similar for toll evaders on subways and buses. Increased enforcement doesn't really scale but you can make the cost much greater to deter criminal activity. Make that person go to court. About 45% of bus fares are evaded in NYC, and it make sense. If a ticket is $3 and a fine is up to $100 after the first offense, then enforcement has to be really high.
https://www.mta.info/press-release/icymi-governor-hochul-ann...
Fares are already too low to cover operational costs, so at this point it's practically theater.
Users should pay for the services they use.
Highway system is mostly funded through gasoline tax, which although not perfect, is pretty good proxy for how much you use public roads.
Regarding police, private security does exist and works pretty well. Whether you're installing an alarm on your home or paying off-duty police to escort you around, it's an option and often provides better service and more options due to the profit incentive.
I wish more public services had a profit incentive as long as there was a choice. Like with fire insurance, I can choose my coverage and its priced competitively. The insurance company also has an incentive to not have your house burn down, so they mandate you have fire detectors and other such preventative measures. Seems like a pretty good system.
You say this like it's a fact I have to accept but it simply isn't. It's an ideological position I wasn't convinced of at the beginning of this conversation and still am not.
guess what's built in to the tax code? means testing
we eliminate piles of bureaucracy when we eliminate fare systems
On the "free transit" point, unless you convince bus drivers and train operators and the tens of thousands of people that operate MTA to work for nothing, then it cannot be free. It can be paid for by someone else (e.g. taxpayers), but in general if you have a third party paying for something, you run into big problems related to expense growth, under investment, and inefficient use of resources in general.
Seeing your fare go up due to bloated expenses and mismanagement is an important signal. Hiding it and hoping everyone is honest and diligent with resources is naive.
Modern e-bikes are large and fast, and many of their riders ride unsafely and abuse bicycle infrastructure (which have been designed to accommodate pedal cyclists, who did the work fighting for them), making bike lanes and bike/walking paths dangerous for unpowered users. I'm of the opinion that they should be licensed and treated like motorcycles/scooters/mopeds unless limited (and inspected) to operate below a certain speed.
But restricting smaller e-bikes and pedal bikes from proceeding through red lights when safe is also excessive. Forcing cyclists to wait for when the cars next to them can move puts them at danger of right hooks. I've spoken with Cambridge MA bicycle police about this (who've been issuing warnings to cyclists doing this) and they were willfully obstinate and disingenuous to the point I wondered if they'd ever ridden a bicycle before.
I believe it's called the "Dutch protocol" or something (EDIT: "Idaho stop"!), that cyclists should treat stop signs as yield signs, and red lights as stop signs, which is an accepted and safe way to adapt car infrastructure to bicycles. NYC and Cambridge politicians and police seem too thick headed to understand bicycle safety though.
(Larger e-bikes I maintain should be subject to the same rules as motorcycles for lights and stop signs. They're immaterially different.)
In any case, criminal summons is ridiculous. Abuse of power that is putting noncitizens in danger.
So what is a bicycle police if not one that rides a bike?
In my area, bicycle cops are the officers on bicycles, so of course they've ridden bikes before. In my area, officers that enforce bicycle laws are just, you know, officers.
The officer I spoke to didn't understand what a right hook was, despite standing next to a bicycle.
I live in Ireland, and own a class 3 e-bike. (That is, with motor assist up to 45kmph)
That’s legal here, though in practice power limits mean I don’t get above 35-38 kmph unless the wind is on my back. However, the law states that I cannot use the bike lane; I must take the car lane at all times.
I do that, of course, except when someone tries to run me off the road. I’ve been stopped twice by the police, though they weren’t sure what to do about me; one asked me to keep up with the traffic please. Right…
In practice I cause traffic jams every time I cycle to work, but on the bright side nobody is going to miss my existence.
I've pondered but haven't been able to figure out the right solution to this in general, as I'd love e-bikes to displace cars as the dominant means of transport. Maybe a 3rd differentiated lane?
The closest similar vehicle I can think of is the motorized scooter (e.g. Vespa). They can't (and shouldn't) be allowed in bike lanes. But they're too slow for all but dense cities. In my region, I know famously they're the source of lots of contention on the island of Martha's Vineyard (which has few if any bike lanes).
But, in the States, most places that have dedicated bike lanes are dense cities. Vehicles can't legally or practically drive much faster than 30 MPH (~45 kph) anyway. Even as a pedal cyclist I can usually keep up with traffic. So it's largely not a problem here yet for the larger e-bikes to stay in the car lanes.
So that’s fun.
Even weirder thing is the disabled peoples mini cars must use the cycling path and park on the curb. (NOT the bigger 45kph things which look like fiat pandas in size, those are never allowed on any cycling path despite people doing so). Though I guess since you have to be disabled to get one that sort of makes sense for safety reasons.
As a cyclist in Boston you might not be aware of the overwhelming popularity of electric bikes in New York. Between Citi Bike and the delivery guys they are by far the dominant variety of bike. At this point it's wrong to think that electric bikes are stepping on the turf of the analog bicyclist.
E-bikes are becoming dominant in Boston/Cambridge also. The Citi Bikes are fine, they're small and slow (and frankly the problem with them is new riders who are seemingly completely unaware of anything). It's the huge delivery bikes, the bros on pseudo-mopeds, and the humongous (and usually empty) baby-cart bikes (e.g. Tern) that are dangerous in bike lanes and mixed-use paths.
(Again -- I love that these are displacing cars. I just wish they physically displaced the cars also, and not pedal bicyclists and pedestrians.)
Our (Cambridge) bike infrastructure has really just come into its own after decades of advocacy by pedal bicyclists. So seeing it suddenly flooded with what are effectively mopeds and Vespas really hits a nerve, like it's 1990 all over again.
In Berkeley the local safe streets advocacy org is now easily 80% ebike moms. I could bore them with my story of how back in my day (ten entire years ago) I took my kids to school on a manual-pedal longtail, but I don't.
The red-light-running bicyclist blows past the stopped traffic that just had to safely navigate getting around the bicyclist occupying a vehicular travel lane, only to be forced to do it all over again.
And we're talking about areas with dedicated and often physically separated bike lanes. We don't interact with you except at intersections.
The only vehicles that get to blow red lights are emergency vehicles with lights and sirens. Everyone else should be waiting their turns, including pedestrians and bicycles. And, maybe, rights on red (but not in NYC you'll note).
That safest thing for a pedestrian to do is often avoid lighted intersections all-together and cross in the middle of the road when its clear. Crossing at an intersection is a great way to get a car doing a right turn or worse, a left turn right into you.
>That's why it's a light not a stop sign. I don't care what special lanes are present. You're running the intersection and increasing the complexity for everyone else who is obeying their green light.
The Idaho stop has you treat red-light as a stop-sign, you are not increasing complexity for the green-light drivers, because if there are ANY green-light drivers, you shouldn't be in the intersection. And if there were drivers with the green light, and you go thru, you are not doing the Idaho stop.
>Blow red light
Please, "blowing a red light" might not be a well defined term, but most accept it as going thru a red light, without stopping, at some speed. That is not the Idaho stop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_stop
The entitlement of calling it a vehicular travel lane probably means you have a strong bias against cyclists, but I'll try anyway: Doesn't this just prove that it's moot to overtake cyclists in the city? Whenever a car pushes past me (quite often dangerously) I'll overtake them next time they hit a red light anyways. And there I'll filter to the front of the queue (not cycling on red), and be on my way while the car might have to wait a cycle or two more to get through.
So why do it? Just relax and drive slow, you'll get there in the same time eventually, without risking someone's life.
I just want the lights to apply to everyone in travel lanes equally. I don't care if you are in a clown car, a bus, on rollerblades, dragging a surfboard, etc. Just obey the frigging light.
I'd also like the lights to apply to everyone: by removing them. Lets all yield to pedestrians, and then bike through intersections otherwise without waiting. Then cars can sort their own mess out. The lights are for them, an implicit prioritization of cars over humans. I'd like to remove that.
Do you feel so strongly about pedestrians crossing when it is safe regardless of whether they have the walk signal? The risk profile is similar, in that the risk is mostly to the pedestrian or cyclist themselves.
I thought the point framework apply for licensed drivers, though. I guess that's where lawyers' license comes into play.
The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that the real reason they're doing this is to help ICE nab a bunch of delivery workers.
It's normal for these motorized vehicles to be speeding down the narrow sidewalks, and also speeding through crosswalks on red.
Where there are bike lanes, these motorized vehicles have started using them like their own express lanes, including ignoring red lights (like many bicyclists do, but this time motorized).
They also often just barely miss pedestrians, seemingly by intention, like they're confident they can control it and won't slip, and so don't leave much safety margin.
When you're on foot, I think being hit by one of these at speed will probably cripple or kill you.
I've also seen "e-bikes" that look suspiciously like full-sized electric motorcycles, cruising along sidewalks to beat traffic. Sometimes these are obviously delivery drivers or couriers.
Also, I might be noticing a bit more of the random most obnoxious non-motorized bicyclists on the sidewalk than usual. If so, I don't know whether they're emboldened by the e-bike and scooter people they see, or it's all the bike rental stations on the sidewalk now, or something else.
Ideally, I want to see people behave responsibly, just because they're conscientious and decent.
When that fails, and the behavior will almost inevitably lead to life-altering injury or death for someone else, then we probably need the government to step in.
The article contrasts with lax enforcement for cars, and I'd say we need to also enforce cars more. It's gotten worse in recent years here. It used to mostly be many cars not using turn signals, and a convention of a few cars running every red, and people just learned to be careful of the unofficial rules many follow. Now, watch for one light on a busy intersection in town, and you might see half of people on cars moving through the intersection sidewalks while looking at a phone/tablet (sometimes even hands on the device, to the detriment of steering ability).
There's also a popular belief on local online forums that car drivers involved in crashes with bicyclists are rarely punished. Before the surge of e-bikes and scooters causing their own problems and precedents, I used to wonder whether some of the irresponsible bicyclist behavior was due to an oppressed defensive mindset from cars, turned combative. Now I have to wonder whether the recklessness of the motorized bikes and scooters is contributing.
"Massholes" [1], and their kin from other states, have discovered the motorized "bike", it's in some ways even more dangerous than the car, and we need to change the culture, before healthy walkers end up confined to wheelchairs or morgues.
[1] https://www.fodors.com/world/north-america/usa/massachusetts...
Also, the e-bike problem is a current rampant menace to pedestrians. I’m sure there are relatively few fatalities from e-bikes but low fatalities != low injuries/low danger.
The problem is that some cyclists seem to have a tendency to feel that the rules do not apply to to them, and e-bikes create a situation where (essentially) there is a new class of motorcyclists that have the same systemic disregard for traffic regulation.
A more stringent approach to enforcement is a logical response to systemic endangerment of pedestrians.