NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) — On most days, crossing Broadway on foot near New York City’s Herald Square requires a keen sense of one’s surroundings. In addition to avoiding yellow cabs and other vehicular traffic, pedestrians must negotiate a high-speed parade of bikeshare riders, delivery workers on e-bikes, and cargo bikes hauling trailers of goods in both directions.
New York City’s streets are a window into a fast-expanding universe of micromobility. The sheer number and diversity of vehicles on the road — bikes, scooters, mopeds, electric unicycles, e-bikes, along with traditional cars, trucks and buses — can make for a dizzying experience. The explosive growth of e-scooters and e-bikes has also led to tensions with drivers and pedestrians and brought demands for more regulations governing this new segment of vehicles.
In December, the New York City Council held a hearing on a suite of micromobility legislation, including a proposal that would require all e-bikes and e-scooters be registered with the city’s Department of Transportation. The eight-hour marathon session did not yield a vote on the bill and its passage remains uncertain, yet the intense debate reflects a broader, global struggle to create use and safety requirements for these increasingly popular modes of transportation.
“Law has figured out this framework for cars,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a professor at the University of South Carolina’s School of Law who studies mobility regulations. “What do we do about all of these other things that aren’t cars?”
Cities all over the world have seen e-bikes and e-scooters explode in popularity since the onset of the pandemic. E-bike purchases now represent the majority of bike sales in Austria, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. The US, France and Switzerland have seen rapid gains as well, with American e-bike sales representing 18% of the bike market in 2023, up from 2% in 2016. In 2023, riders in the US and Canada took a record 157 million trips on shared bikes and e-scooters, according to the National Association of City Transportation Officials.
New York City’s bikeshare system, known as Citi Bike and operated by a subsidiary of Lyft Inc., has become increasingly electrified since the service first rolled out pedal-assisted bikes in summer 2018. In 2023, e-bikes accounted for 46% of bikeshare rides in the city and made up one-fifth of the system’s fleet. The city has also been seeing an increase in mopeds — gas or electric vehicles that are much heavier and faster than e-bikes and are prohibited from bike lanes. Revel, a Brooklyn-based e-vehicle startup, discontinued its moped sharing service in late 2023 amid plummeting ridership and safety concerns.
Battery-powered bikes and scooters can help close transit gaps for communities that are not reliably served by public transportation, and they reduce traffic congestion and emissions. But their popularity has also raised safety concerns both for riders and pedestrians. A group of advocates called the NYC E-Vehicle Safety Alliance has emerged in recent years to push for regulations like e-bike registration and prohibiting electric vehicles from parks. It counts nearly 100 victims of moped and e-bike crashes as members.
New York City Council Member Robert Holden, who’s behind the e-bike registration bill, said his legislation was aimed at the “lawlessness” that pervades among riders who don’t follow traffic laws and sometimes hit pedestrians. The law is known informally as “Priscilla’s Law” after a 69-year-old woman who was struck and killed by an electric Citi Bike rider who ran a red light in Chinatown in 2023. The rider was given a ticket for running the light.
“My bill is the result of having eyes and looking,” Holden said. He’s seen riders on the sidewalk or riding against traffic in the central Queens district he represents. He argues that the bill will help keep riders and pedestrians safe.
Cars, trucks and other large motor vehicles are responsible for the vast majority of traffic fatalities around the world. That holds true in New York City: 114 of the 120 pedestrians killed in New York City last year were struck by a motor vehicle, according to the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives. Still, at least one pedestrian was killed after being struck by an e-bike, the group said, and e-bikes are involved in an increasing share of the city’s bike fatalities, accounting for 17 of the 25 rider deaths in 2024. Twenty-two of those bike fatalities were the result of a collision with a car.
With that in mind, the infrastructure and rulemaking should focus on keeping people safe from cars and other motor vehicles, said Alexa Sledge, a spokesperson for Transportation Alternatives, which opposes the bill.
To combat riding on the sidewalks, the city could add and expand protected bike lanes and remove Citi Bike docks from sidewalks, so that people don’t have to use pedestrian paths to lock and unlock the shared cycles, Sledge said. She also pointed to infrastructure changes like raised sidewalks and pedestrian islands to further separate foot traffic from street traffic.
Registration regimes hinge on a crackdown that’s likely to have a negative effect on communities of color, Sledge said. Many of the city’s e-bike riders are delivery workers. She also pointed to a report from 2022 that found bicycle tickets were more prevalent near public housing developments and more than 80% of them went to Black and Latino riders.
Holden’s talk about safety “doesn’t really square with the legislation,” Sledge said. “We’re focused on preventing these crashes in the first place.”
New York City isn’t the only jurisdiction to propose a bike registration regime. Last year, New Hampshire, New Jersey and New York state introduced legislation that would require registration for electric personal mobility vehicles. Those bills failed to get any traction.
Licensing and registration rules are a way for governments to quantify what’s happening in their streets, said Walker Smith. But municipal efforts to license bicycles are rare: A handful of jurisdictions in North America, including Honolulu, several Northern California cities, and Montgomery County, Maryland, have laws in place. Other cities, like Toronto, eliminated historic bike licensing laws decades ago.
These regimes can be hard to enforce. To get a grasp on the e-scooter use in the United Kingdom, the government limited their use to city center trial areas and required individuals to have a driver’s license. A review found that more than half of the deaths and serious injuries occurred outside of trial areas and the majority of the 750,000 e-scooters in the UK are owned illegally. New York requires driver’s licenses for moped riders, and the vehicles must be registered with its Department of Motor Vehicles. There are roughly 4,891 mopeds registered in the state, yet the New York City Police Department seized more than 18,000 in 2023.
Both riders and pedestrians in NYC face a particularly risky landscape, the advocacy group People for Bikes has pointed out, in part because of the proliferation of “Class 3” e-bikes, which can hit up to 25 miles per hour without the use of pedal assistance. This type of bike — often prohibited in other jurisdictions — is widely used by the city’s take-out food and grocery delivery workers, and was also associated with a deadly rash of lithium-ion battery fires in 2023.
Some lawmakers and advocates see the delivery app industry as key to getting a handle on micromobility safety. New York City’s 65,000 delivery workers made 2.6 million restaurant app deliveries per week in the second quarter of 2024. At least 10 delivery workers were killed on the job in 2024, according to an analysis by the publication Documented.
New York State Assembly Member Alex Bores, who represents a district that includes the Upper East Side of Manhattan, said he and his colleagues are hoping to introduce a bill that would hold delivery companies responsible for tickets incurred by their riders. Another piece of legislation would ask the companies to craft algorithms that weigh rider safety equally to delivery speed and volume.
Accountability efforts should focus on these lightly regulated, large companies rather than individuals, said Ligia Guallpa, who leads the Worker’s Justice Project and co-founded Los Deliveristas Unidos, an advocacy group for delivery app workers. The organization opposes Holden’s legislation.
“Street safety is a priority for everybody — for deliveristas, for pedestrians and for communities,” Guallpa said. “New York City has failed to deal with the root causes of the problems that exist. Our streets have not been adapted to handle the volume of people who use transportation alternatives.”