A former head of Transportation Alternatives argues in favor of a 15 mph speed limit for e-bikes.
Not since the 1980s has New York been so roiled by bicycles. The offending element then was unruly bicycle messengers slicing through Manhattan gridlock with contracts, renderings and other valuable bits of commerce and culture. Today’s controversy is more diffuse. It encompasses a new industry (food deliveries mediated by rapacious app companies); a new class of workers (immigrant deliveristas, whose economic precarity is now compounded by Trump’s crackdown on undocumented workers); and a new technology (the e-bike) that lets any rider hit cruising speeds of 20 or even 25 miles per hour.
As e-bikes proliferate, a good chunk of the citizenry is discombobulated, the authorities are flummoxed, and cycling advocates appear confused. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch proclaimed in April that red-light running and other traffic violations by e-bikes, mopeds and such would be met not with the customary $190 fine but with summonses answerable in criminal court. Last month, first deputy mayor Randy Mastro began readying a citywide e-bike speed limit of 15 miles per hour. Cycle campaigners, led by the venerable advocacy group Transportation Alternatives and the “livable streets” news outlet Streetsblog, declared Code Red.
The advocates are right to see a double standard when Tisch proposes criminalizing traffic rule-breaking by two-wheeled travelers but not by motorists. But they are wrong to inveigh against the 15 mph e-bike speed limit.
Activists’ adamant refusal to consider any speed governance for powered bicycles is blinding them to this new technology’s singular potential. The true liberating value of e-bikes doesn’t lie in helping riders go faster ― it’s in unlocking city cycling for the multitudes who badly need cycling’s utility but also require help surmounting its physical demands.
I’m speaking about New Yorkers who because of age or disability or temperamenthave been deterred by cycling’s strenuousness or whose personal circumstances leave them with little margin to arrive at their destination even slightly disheveled, and who at the same time await deliverance from torturous transit commutes that consume hours but which an e-bike could trim to 20 minutes.
We cycling advocates are chasing our tails in a circle.
I have in mind 67-year-old Bronx clothing boutique manager Nazir Zahid, who in 2017 told a New York Times reporter he spends an hour and 45 minutes riding and transferring among four buses to get from Kingsbridge to East Tremont Avenue ― a four-and-a-half mile commute he could manage aboard an e-bike in half an hour. (A New York City “bus mayor” unafraid to carve out a bus lane on Fordham Road would help, too.) And teacher Megan McCormick, who must allow an hour for what she told the same reporter should be a mere 20-minute hop by bus to her East Flatbush school from Bensonhurst.
The reporter was Sarah Maslin Nir, and her stories affected me when they appeared in 2017 and 2018 (“Left Behind by the Nation’s Largest Subway System”; “The Subway Is So Late, It’s Making New Yorkers Early”). “These commutes,” I told Maslin Nir then, “seem to me precisely the daily journeys that electric-assist bicycles could enable to be made expeditiously, reliably, inexpensively and humanely ― without having to break a sweat or become a bicycle enthusiast.”
I believe the same today. Which explains why I’m vexed by the latest verbal merry-go-round over e-bike speeds. We cycling advocates are chasing our tails in a circle. I would like us to break out of our bind, beginning by ceasing our offputting, knee-jerk “First do cars” line of attack that would forbid intruding on two-wheeled vehicles until cars and trucks are brought completely to heel. We should instead tout the emancipatory power of small electric motors to banish many New Yorkers’ commuting drudgery and toil. As part of this new orientation, cycling advocates should accede to a 15 mph limit on e-bike speeds ― even “in traffic” ― until new geo-fencing technology enables e-bike speed limits to be confined to lanes and paths.
Let’s also put aside the claim that cyclists need the safety boost that only higher-speed e-cycling can confer. “I can tell you it feels much safer as a cyclist if you’re going close to the speed of the traffic than if you’re going half the speed of traffic," former city Department of Transportation senior official Michael Replogle posted to a city online comment page, as Streetsblog reported earlier this month. Replogle, co-founder of the seminal not-for-profits Bikes Not Bombs and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, said he helped the de Blasio administration determine “that 20 mph was a more sensible [e-bike speed] limit because it better corresponded to matching car traffic speeds, which cyclists need to do to remain safe when they’re biking in traffic.”
Say what? If 20-mph cycling is truly safer than 10- or 15-mph cycling, how is it that New York City e-bike fatalities exceed traditional-bike fatalities fivefold? (Please don’t retort by citing the app companies’ slave-driving terms of employment. Those help explain why deliveristas feel compelled to speed; they do not support an argument that slower delivery cyclists would die at even higher rates.) Equating higher cycling speed with greater cycling safety is preposterous.
I have racked up nearly 10,000 hours biking daily in the five boroughs since the early 70s with barely a scratch. I go fast when I can, but it’s not fundamental to my safety. Being assertive, predictable, hyper-aware and attentive to traffic is how I minimize my chances of hitting or being hit. I also ― confession coming ― slip through red lights to gain clearance from cars and avoid the energy drain from frequent stopping and starting. None of that requires I go above 15 mph or, as I age up, beyond my current ambient speed of 10 or 12 mph.
Trad cyclists in bike lanes and on bike paths now must constantly look over our shoulders and attune our ears to make sure we maintain our line and don’t get clipped and toppled by a fast-overtaking e-biker whom we didn’t know was coming.
Replogle is no outlier in arguing against a 15 mph speed limit. As I was finalizing this article, my inbox lit up with an action alert from Transportation Alternatives that deemed the proposed e-bike speed cap “unfair, dangerous, and part of a broader war against New Yorkers who bike.” Transportation Alternatives doesn’t just reject the social merit of topping cycle cruising speeds at 15 mph, it denies cyclists’ inherent visibility deficit as well. Like it or not, people on bikes present a lesser visual profile than cars. The motorcyclist motto, “Loud pipes save lives,” isn’t just a rationalization for love of loudness. A bicyclist going 20 mph is more likely to be unseen by drivers (as well as by pedestrians and other cyclists) than one riding at 10 or 15.
Thanks to groundbreaking work by advocates like Replogle and Transportation Alternatives, we in New York now do a lot of our riding on an extensive network of protected bike lanes and exclusive bike paths on which cars and trucks present zero threat. What is threatening there, to a 10-12 mph traditional cyclist like myself, is e-bikers who need only turn a dial to go at twice my speed.
We trad cyclists in bike lanes and on bike paths now must constantly look over our shoulders and attune our ears to make sure we maintain our line and don’t get clipped and toppled by a fast-overtaking e-biker whom we didn’t know was coming. This new vigilance is consuming some of the acuity we previously devoted to watching the action in front of us. Or we ride less, diminishing the safety-in-numbers effect that helps reduce cycle-car collisions.
One thing we can all agree on is that New York needs more people riding bikes ― both electric and traditional — for their benefit as well as ours. We’ll get it sooner if instead of fetishizing e-bikes’ speed, we valorize their capacity to help everyday working New Yorkers get up on two wheels. We must grapple with the reality that too-fast e-bikes ― along with motorized stand-up scooters and the like ― have become yet another risk factor making traditional cycling more dangerous and less appealing to people who should be our allies and fellow travelers.
The 1980s civic froth over bicycle messengering reached a remarkable resolution in 1987 when Mayor Edward I. Koch first sought but then abandoned an intended ban on weekday cycling in midtown. That came after the messengers won over public opinion with pedestrian-friendly protests and Transportation Alternatives won a State Supreme Court ruling invalidating the ban on a technicality. In the aftermath, newly energized cyclists fought for and won expanded cycling infrastructure, and the city experienced a pronounced reduction in bike-pedestrian conflict as each constituency came to regard the other as more ally than adversary ― a saga I recounted a dozen years ago in “The Bicycle Uprising,” a multi-part series published in Streetsblog.
Our city is no less riven by bicycles today, even as the technology and the actors have changed radically. Resolving the multiple competing interests will be no easy task. Let us begin by acknowledging the social value of controlling e-bike speeds as we help electric-assisted cycling infuse dignity and autonomy into the working lives of everyday New Yorkers.