Park Slope Mom Speaks Out After Son Hospitalized By E-Bike On Sidewalk

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — Judy Applebaum can never forget the day her son woke up bleeding from the head in Bellevue Hospital, if only because reminders keep zipping onto the sidewalk in the form of electronic bikes.

Applebaum's fear of e-bikes began last November, when her 22-year-old son Jason was walking home from a performance of his then-girlfriend’s play in Union Square, she said.

An e-bike on the sidewalk hit Jason, an emerging concert pianist, from behind and sent him careening head-first toward the cement, witnesses later told first responders.

Applebaum — who said Jason is on the spectrum, but has been traveling independently since he was 16 — rushed to the hospital to see her son.

“I was horrified,” Applebaum told Patch, “it was a devastating sight.”

Jason spent eight hours in the hospital and was released about 2 a.m. after doctors “basically glued his head shut,” Applebaum said.

Recovering from a concussion kept him home for about a week.

“I was confused and scared,” Jason said of the aftermath. “And I feel upset that those guys are still on the sidewalk.”

After the accident, Jason wrote a statement about what happened, saying that he was “furious” about riders on the sidewalk.

“It makes me scared to even walk on the sidewalk now," Jason wrote at the time. "I'm afraid I'm going to be hit again."

Applebaum says that you don’t need to go to Manhattan to get nearly hit by e-bikes zooming on the sidewalk.

Even in sleepy Park Slope, her home for the past 16 years, she finds increasingly that she has to share space with the speeding two-wheelers.

“I feel like I’m taking my life into my own hands everyday,” Applebaum said of walking on the Slope’s sidewalks, “it just feels like it’s getting worse.”

“They should make the sidewalk only for pedestrians,” Jason said, “like, can they enforce a stricter rule about that?”

Jason and his mom aren’t alone in feeling the frustrations in sharing sidewalk space with e-bikes.

Park Slopers frequently complain and share stories of near misses. And although scores more pedestrians die each year due to automobiles than e-bikes, the idea that sidewalk space is not only for pedestrians frustrates many.

State Senator Andrew Gounardes recently asked the DOT to install signage threatening a $100 fine for riding on the sidewalk. In his letter, he wrote that over 680 people were involved in injuries caused by e-scooters alone, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Applebaum doesn’t entirely blame the bikers, many of them delivering for food services, knowing that many are under pressure to make high-volume deliveries quickly.

“A big problem is that they're paid such horrible wages,” she said, “they can't make a living unless they hit their quota.”

But she’s also fed up with feeling like she can’t walk safely down the sidewalk and is planning on writing her own letters, too.

“Everyday is a game of Frogger,” Applebaum said, “it seems like a new normal.”