Dangers Of Electric Bikes Not Backed Up By City Records

NEW YORK CITY — As a crackdown on illegal electric bikes commonly used by restaurant delivery workers was announced last week, the city promised figures detailing a problem it said plagued the city's neighborhoods.

The problem is, that data apparently doesn't exist.

The NYPD does not track crashes or 911 calls specific to the so-called e-bikes, and the city’s 311 system only records complaints about ongoing problems with cyclists in general.

Starting in January, the city will fine business owners who let their delivery workers use the bikes, in addition to confiscating the vehicles, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced last week. Police have confiscated more than 900 so far this year, a 170 percent increase from 2016.

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NYPD Chief of Patrol Terence A. Monahan said there’s been a recent rash of 311 complaints about the bikes, which let riders travel upwards of 20 MPH without pedaling and are assailed by critics as dangerous to pedestrians. At a press conference last Thursday, Monahan and the mayor said they’d provide the exact numbers of calls about e-bikes and crashes involving them.

“The community complains on a regular basis at community council meetings that we're having, this is an issue that's growing and growing,” Monahan said Oct. 19, flanked by de Blasio and other city officials.

“We've seen these numbers. We can get you the exact 311 complaints on e-bikes.”

But there’s no way the 311 system could track that number, according to a city spokeswoman.

311 operators don’t track "illegal activity in progress" and, because e-bikes are illegal to ride in New York City, callers reporting them are forwarded to 911, spokeswoman Natalie Grybauskas told Patch.

The NYPD’s public information office said 911 calls "are not tracked specific to e-bikes."

311 does record persistent, “chronic” problems caused by biking, rollerblading or skating, but doesn’t break down those complaints to show how many stemmed from e-bikes, Grybauskas said.

About 400 such calls have been made in the past year, with most coming from the Upper West Side, Grybauskas said. But that number includes complaints about all kinds of bicycles, as well as skateboarders and roller-bladers.

De Blasio last week said he was unsure whether city data “does a good enough job of differentiating traditional bikes and e-bikes.” But officials and residents are concerned about them injuring pedestrians, not killing them, he said.

“Again, thank God, fatalities from my understanding is not the central problem. It's other types of injuries and accidents,” de Blasio said on Thursday. “But again, we've seen a growth, and we've seen a huge growth of complaints from neighborhood residents.”

Asked for the number of accidents involving e-bikes so far this year and over the same period last year, the NYPD said, “Collisions are not broken down to that level of specificity.”

The NYPD does track collisions involving bicycles, which are compiled in the city Department of Transportation’s annual Bicycle Crash Data reports. Bikes actually injured 50 fewer pedestrians last year than in 2015 and haven’t killed anyone since 2014, according to that data.

But it’s unclear whether those numbers count e-bikes as bicycles, which are outlawed as “motorized scooters” under city and state laws.

The DOT classifies them as motorcycles when tallying pedestrian fatalities, a department spokesperson said. But the NYPD didn’t answer emailed questions asking how e-bikes are classified for the purposes of reporting injuries and total crashes.

The lack of hard data on the dangers of e-bikes supports cycling advocates’ stance that the city’s crackdown is a red herring, given that cars and trucks are much more dangerous to pedestrians, said Caroline Samponaro, deputy director of the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives.

Cars were the culprit in more than three quarters of pedestrian deaths from 2012 to 2014 when it was known what type of vehicle was involved, according to a city Department of Health report.

“To pull enforcement resources away from that epidemic is not a good decision given that the data's not supporting e-bikes as the problem,” Samponaro told Patch.

(Lead image: An e-bike is seen on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Photo by Noah Manskar)