On Aug. 4, the City Council announced a Sept. 30 hearing on more than 15 different legislative proposals addressing e-bike and e-scooter safety, particularly for delivery workers. One day later, on Aug. 5, Mayor Mamdani announced that the City has issued cease-and-desist orders to 42 online retailers selling illegal high-speed e-bikes and stand-up scooters in New York City.
On Aug. 19, State Assembly Member Jenifer Rajkumar published an op-ed in the New York Post calling attention to her bill, Priscilla’s Law, which would require the State Department of Motor Vehicles to establish a program to register and issue license plates for e-bikes.
The urgency to act is due, in large part, to two recent fatal crashes. In the first incident, 17-year-old Gabriel Nacato was killed in Lower Manhattan near City Hall after colliding with an SUV while riding a Deepower QS7—a 100-pound device marketed as an e-bike despite featuring a 1500-watt motor capable of reaching 30 mph (well past NYC’s legal 750-watt and 25 mph limits for these devices).
In a separate incident earlier this year on the Queensboro Bridge, a rider on an illegal motorized scooter traveling at speeds up to 53 mph collided with a bicyclist, resulting in the deaths of both individuals. Legally, e-scooters in the city are capped at a maximum speed of 20 mph.
Illegal e-bikes and scooters such as these account for a majority of rider fatalities, and City data shows e-bike collisions are up more than 30% this year alone.
The mayor’s cease-and-desist orders are the right policy. The majority of severe crashes involve these “e-motos,” the illegal faster, heavier vehicles that operate like motorcycles but do not have features that enable them to be registered as mopeds with the DMV.
Matthew Daus
The best way to keep people from riding e-motos on our streets is to stop the flow of illegal devices from overseas manufacturers. The cease-and-desist letters promise the online retailers that they will face fines of $2,000 for each offense—significant enough to encourage these businesses to comply.
A City crackdown on storefront retailers of illegal e-bikes and e-scooters has proven successful at eliminating that source of the devices, though continued monitoring is required to prevent new storefronts from getting back into this business.
Priscilla’s Law would require owners of e-bikes and e-scooters to register and insure their devices. Owners of illegal e-moto devices cannot register their devices, of course, and so in theory registration will enable NYPD to easily distinguish between legal and illegal e-bikes.
Putting the compliance burden on the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who own legally compliant e-bikes and e-scooters is a questionable policy that should be further debated and explored. Major cities including Los Angeles, Seattle, and Madison all launched mandatory bicycle registration schemes, and each of those cities repealed their programs due to low compliance, high administrative costs, and limited benefits. In fact, there has not been a successful large-scale municipally- or state-administered bicycle registration scheme in the nation.
New Jersey launched an e-bike registration and rider licensing program in mid-July. The early days of the program’s rollout have proven rocky.
As of Aug. 11, only 11,000 of the state’s estimated 300,000 e-bikes have been registered. E-bike owners report showing up to register their e-bikes at New Jersey’s Motor Vehicle Commission only to learn that the office had run out of registration stickers. Bike shop owners report sales of legal e-bikes have dropped by more than half because customers are confused about what the state allows.
Of course, the mandate is only a few weeks old—but if New Jersey’s registration scheme works, it will be the first in the nation.
The Council has indicated that they do not support Priscilla’s Law, a decision which was likely informed by New Jersey’s rollout. Many of their proposals are precisely targeted at the key issue, the illegal e-motos.
For instance, Council Transportation Committee Chair Shaun Abreu would require NYPD and DOT to establish dynamometer testing to test e-bikes’ motor wattage and top speed, which will facilitate enforcement. Abreu also would prohibit the marketing of e-motos as e-bikes, which gives regulators more tools to stop the flow of those devices.
Council Member Crystal Hudson proposes prohibiting the sale of Class 3 e-bikes, which are the legal e-bikes that are favored by delivery workers. Class 3 e-bikes do not require pedaling and have a top speed of 25 mph. Chair Abreu would then require the City to establish a trade-in program where people can exchange their Class 3 bike or illegal e-moto for an e-bike with a lower top speed.
The Council is also expected to pass legislation that will increase the responsibility of delivery app platforms like DoorDash and Grubhub for e-bike safety. Council Member Lynn Schulman has introduced legislation requiring those platforms to obtain a license from the City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.
Council Member Gale Brewer has introduced legislation that would require delivery app platforms to share trip data, which will facilitate safety enforcement, as well as legislation requiring delivery app platforms to maintain insurance to cover liability that arises from e-bike crashes.
Addressing the growing safety concerns surrounding e-bikes and e-scooters requires solutions that are both realistic and enforceable. The Mayor’s targeted focus on the sale of illegal e-motos will help stanch the flow of these devices into the City. The City Council’s proposals mentioned above will all serve to reduce the number of faster, legal e-bikes and hold delivery app platforms accountable. These ideas will work.
Before the Council and the Mayor consider blanket registration mandates like Priscilla’s Law, which impose heavy administrative burdens on compliant riders, there should be more enforcement to see if that solves the problem first.
By prioritizing targeted regulatory tools over broad mandates, New York City can better ensure public safety without stifling lawful micro-mobility options. The priority now should be to rid the city of illegal and dangerous e-bikes and e-scooters, but for the legal devices, NYC streets have become the wild west, and the NYPD should launch serious efforts to fine and penalize reckless users of these devices who do not comply with vehicle and traffic laws.
Matthew Daus is the transportation technology chair for the University Transportation Research Center, Region 2 (NY/NJ) at the City University of New York