Video: 'Nobody Cares' About E-Scooters Despite E-Bike Crackdown

NEW YORK — Despite his best efforts, Tim Stiefler just couldn't get a ticket.

The chief marketing officer for Levy Electric, a fledgling electric scooter company, went up to 20 cops the week before last on one of his firm's two-wheelers — which are illegal to ride in New York — but not one slapped Stiefler with a summons.

One uniformed officer in a Times Square police station said he was OK to ride it on the street. Another cop raced Stiefler on foot. Others asked where they could get a scooter of their own.

"It was just two amateurs running around literally trying to get a ticket at all costs, and (we) couldn't get a single one," Stiefler said.

The NYPD's lax attitude toward Stiefler's scooter stands in stark contrast to the continued police crackdown on electric bicycles, even though both are illegal to use under city and state law.

Stiefler and Eric Levenseller, Levy's founder, captured the experiment in a promotional video posted to YouTube Friday morning. The clip ends with a simple message: "Dear New York, Nobody cares."

Manhattan-based Levy unveiled the video the same day that state lawmakers held a hearing on a bill that would legalize electric bikes and scooters across New York. The clip underscores the case for allowing New Yorkers to use both, Stiefler said, as there's a "double standard" in how the law is enforced.

"People that buy electric scooters, they’re usually young adults or people who have decent jobs and can afford it," Stiefler said. "But most of the people that are getting screwed over by the e-bike stuff are delivery workers, and they just can’t afford to have to get a bike that’s been impounded or pay a $500 fine."

Electric bikes that still require the rider to pedal are allowed in the city. But the NYPD has targeted the throttle-powered e-bikes commonly used by delivery workers since January 2018 by ticketing riders and confiscating their bikes. Some precincts have even tweeted photos of their hauls.

There has been no such coordinated crackdown on e-scooters, which are popular in other large cities such as San Francisco and Nashville. In Levy's video, Stiefler was able to ride up to a cop and tell him he was "blocking the scooter lane" without getting a ticket. Another officer admitted that cops have tried to ride scooters, "but we suck at it."

"E-scooters are considered illegal for the same reason that throttle-propelled e-bikes — the type largely used by immigrant delivery workers — are," Joe Cutrufo, a spokesman for the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, said in an email. "But the mayor has empowered his NYPD to crack down on delivery workers, not people who ride scooters."

The NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the video. But police officials and Mayor Bill de Blasio have maintained that the e-bike enforcement is driven by safety and quality-of-life concerns.

Available data, though, shows that e-bikes were responsible for just 0.3 percent of traffic crashes that caused injuries last year, according to an analysis reported by Streetsblog.

"I believe that the first thing we have to consider in public policy is safety, and right now we have a really challenging situation where e-bikes are illegal ... by state law, and we have a real safety problem," de Blasio, a Democrat, said Tuesday at an unrelated news conference.

"My hope is that the Legislature will act, while there's still time, to come up with a regulatory approach that makes sense, or to defer to localities."

The crackdown has hit delivery workers particularly hard. That's why state Sen. Jessica Ramos has introduced a bill to legalize electric scooters and bikes statewide. It now has 21 sponsors in the Senate and about 50 in the state Assembly with less than two weeks left in the legislative session.

Passing the bill would make sense because e-scooters are already functionally legal in the city, according to Stiefler. His company offers a $499 foldable scooter that goes as fast as 17 MPH.

"It’s working out in other places. This bill’s on the table. Just pass the f---ing bill," Stiefler said.