E-Bike Crackdown Not Targeting 'Little Guy,' De Blasio Insists

NEW YORK — Mayor Bill de Blasio insisted delivery workers aren't the target of the city's crackdown on electric bicycles despite cases of police wrongly ticketing them instead of their employers. But cops can't pass on fines to the third-party delivery services for which many couriers work, NYPD officials say.

Many summonses have been dismissed because they were issued to workers caught riding the illegal throttle-powered bikes when they should have been given to the businesses they work for instead, as the city's Administrative Code states.

NYPD officials say cops have been trained on how to enforce the policy. But de Blasio said the city should "retrain folks at the precinct level" if needed.

"If there’s any gray about that fact that we’re not trying to go after the little guy, we’re trying to go after the employer, we’ll do a better job of getting that message across," the Democratic mayor said Wednesday at an unrelated news conference.

The mayor said restaurants shouldn't escape e-bike penalties, which can run up to $500 — and neither should third-party delivery services, such as Uber Eats and Postmates.

"Some people don’t just work for one restaurant and work for an intermediary company, if you will, in which case we should go after that company," the mayor said.

But the NYPD's Chief of Transportation Thomas Chan said cops can hit a roadblock when they stop riders working for those companies rather than a particular restaurant.

"We cannot issue a summons to a specific business itself, because they may be covering 10 different restaurants at any given time," he said.

The NYPD launched a crackdown on illegal e-bikes this year, spurred by anecdotal safety concerns.

Individual riders have so far borne the brunt of the enforcement, NYPD figures show. Police have issued people 590 Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings summonses for e-bikes this year as of Oct. 28, but just 204 have gone to businesses.

The mayor is right that food delivery services aren't exempt from the city code, said Steven Wasserman, a Legal Aid Society lawyer who's represented ticketed delivery workers.

It's important that those companies are penalized as they employ a growing share of delivery workers in the city, Wasserman said.

"They're all amenable to process in New York. They are actually in some ways easier to serve than a bricks-and-mortar establishment," he said. "... It is the law and there is no excuse. It's not hard to do."

But it's not so easy in the NYPD's eyes. The business for which a ticketed rider works has to have knowledge the worker is using an illegal electric bike, said Lt. John Grimpel, a police spokesman.

"If Uber Eats is based out of state or anywhere else, we can’t personally serve them and they have no direct knowledge of the person on the other end, what kind of bike they’re using," he said.

Precinct training sergeants give cops weekly training on how to enforce the policy, and Chan addresses the issue every week with precinct executive officers and traffic safety sergeants, Grimpel said.

An Uber spokesman said de Blasio should either legalize throttle-powered bikes or help workers convert them to the legal pedal-assist model, which give a motorized boost when the rider pedals.

"Tens of thousands of workers rely on these bikes to earn a living," the spokesman said in a statement. "If the Mayor really wants to make New York the fairest big city in America, he would support this workforce by working with companies to help finance conversion to pedal assist bikes or legalize throttle bikes."

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