Three months after the Mamdani administration asked Lyft to stand down on plans to implement facial-recognition age-verification technology for Citi Bike rentals — and a month before the City Council is due to debate a raft of proposed e-bike safety bills — Council Speaker Julie Menin is asking the city’s transportation department to restart age verification talks with the rideshare giant.
“Protecting privacy and protecting our children should not be mutually exclusive,” Menin wrote in a letter sent Monday to Transportation Commissioner Mike Flynn, whose department contracts with Lyft to run the bike-share system.
As first reported by the Daily News, the Mamdani administration asked Lyft to stop developing an age verification system requested by the mayor’s predecessor, citing fears that the system could not properly secure personally identifying information.
Citi Bike was examining using biometric screening — using photos or videos of prospective riders’ faces — to verify if they were old enough to ride, sources told The News at the time.
The minimum age for Citi Bike rentals is 16.
But city officials had expressed concern over facial recognition’s tendency toward misidentifying the age of younger users, and the documented potential for racial bias in facial recognition software, sources said.
In her Monday letter, Menin sought a middle road.
“I believe there is an opportunity to find a path forward that protects New Yorkers’ privacy while also preventing children from accessing e-bikes they are not legally permitted to ride,” she wrote.
Menin noted that cities like Tokyo, London and Washington D.C. have age-verification systems in place, and suggested that the city explore “technology that captures a live photo to verify a rider’s age” — though it was not immediately clear how such a system would differ from the one already rejected by City Hall.
The Department of Transportation declined to comment on whether conversations with Lyft regarding age verification were ongoing, and referred further questions to City Hall.
The council speaker’s letter comes ahead of a hearing scheduled for late September, at which the City Council is expected to hear testimony on more than a dozen different pieces of legislation regarding e-bikes and other small electric vehicles.
The push comes in the wake of several fatal e-vehicle crashes involving illegal, high-speed devices.
As previously reported by The News, electronic Citi Bikes are limited to a top speed of 15 mph in accordance with the city-wide e-bike speed limit. Pedal powered Citi Bikes will still go as fast as you can turn the cranks.