A brief recount of an experience I recently had that repeats itself all too frequently, and violently, on the streets of our great city: While attempting to cross a northbound avenue, as all New Yorkers have done more times than we can recount, looking to ensure that oncoming traffic was stopped at the intersection’s red light, I stepped from the sidewalk’s cement to the roadbed’s asphalt.
An electric bike, traveling at a high speed southbound against traffic, smashed into me.
I remember it in snapshots: I’m in shock. My right leg is obviously broken. I’m taken by ambulance to a hospital for surgery and the fusing of a titanium rod on the tibia, broken in three places. Immobile for weeks, I had to learn to walk again. I recognize that I was the fortunate victim who suffered crushing trauma but, thank G-d, still alive, without a severe brain or head injury.
Over the past year and a half, more than 30 people have been killed by electric assisted two-wheel vehicles, and dozens of more victims have undergone a whole range of calamitous injuries with varying degrees of harm and debilitation.
When seniors and other vulnerable pedestrians fear crossing the street…
When electric assisted bike delivery workers take the lives of those pedestrians, and their own, into their hands by speeding the wrong way down one-way streets, driving through red lights and stop signs for fear of losing out on the next dispatch from the app…
When families and friends fear the uncertified lithium-ion battery, charging or dormant somewhere in their building exploding and causing a life-threatening conflagration…
That is a veritable civic crisis, that calls for urgent moral clarity and decisive action.
Delivery workers have turned the bike lanes into a game of pedestrian “Frogger.”
But the streets of New York are no game board, and in the “on demand” world within which we live we are all complicit.
Changing social norms have no quick fix. There are numerous steps that need to be taken by both New York State and New York City.
The city needs a comprehensive approach that holds everyone accountable, especially delivery apps looking to do business in New York. We need to be able to get data from the delivery companies and make sure their business models are not pushing workers to behave recklessly on the road to chase a dollar. Companies need to drive the behavior change, getting workers to slow down using positive incentives, rather than punishment of first-generation New Yorkers.
It will help the city finally understand who is using our streets for profit, and professionalize the workforce with things like health insurance and workers compensation.
It will help us eliminate rogue lithium-ion batteries which are cheaper and go faster that the UL-certified ones —a priority of the administration for sure, but the scourge until recently has been hard to snuff out.
The documented fires they cause are nothing short of a humanitarian crisis. Lithium-ion batteries have started more than 730 fires in New York since 2019, killing 29 and injuring 442 more — a sign as clear as the turn of the 20th century’s Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in which 146 garment workers, mostly young women, died — that something must be done.
A crucial piece of this sustainable delivery work must be meaningfully regulating not just today’s equipment but of tomorrow’s, a fact which tech company leaders should feel as strongly about as we do.
Too often, government isn’t able to keep up with the pace of technology, which certainly happened with the pandemic delivery boom. Now is the time to get ahead of the crisis, and smartly regulate all the technologies that want to use our streets for profit today and into the future.
We must address the dangers electric assisted bikes pose — it has evolved into an urban social justice imperative.
It is time for the City Council to act.
And while we design a long-term solution, let’s not forget the pedestrian who steps into the intersection today or tomorrow. It’s time to start more seriously cracking down on bad e-bike rider behavior, not just delivery workers but everyone.
The city is getting serious about ghost plates and red-light running speedsters (good riddance).
But an e-bike, going 20-30 miles per hour the wrong way can be every bit as fatal a conveyance as a four-door sedan.
It is time for the city to start more seriously writing tickets and summonses, and for the Council to pass legislation to help expunge this modern-day fear factor from New York’s streets for good.
Miller, a rabbi, is the former CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York.
