City Vows Crackdown on E-bikes

E-bike in the wild.

Electronic bikes can race through city streets at more than 20 miles an hour. But the city says that's not fast enough to escape the coming crackdown on their use. Mayor Bill de Blasio says the main target will be businesses that use e-bikes to deliver their goods and services.

"They are profiting by violating the law," he warned Wednesday at a press conference in Verdi Square on the Upper West Side as manifold forms of traffic zoomed around him. "It's as simple as that. It's not acceptable." They mayor was quick to add that a new regime of fines would be slapped not on the delivery people who use the bikes but their employers. 

Beginning Jan. 1, businesses that dispatch the fastest class of e-bikes — those with throttles — will be fined $100 and then $200 for each subsequent violation. "That could mean hundreds and thousands of dollars in fines very quickly," the mayor said. "And when a bike is confiscated by the police, the business cannot get it back unless they pay all their fines."

The enforcement regime is designed to convince business owners to abandon the motorized bikes, which, by a quirk of law, are legal to own in New York but illegal to use.

Smaller and lighter pedal-assisted e-bikes will continue to be legal. That's good with Chris Nolte, owner of Propel Electric Bikes, a shop in Brooklyn that sells pedal-assisted bikes. He said users of the other kind of e-bike — the illegal kind —were able to operate for a long time in an era of lax enforcement. But then too much reckless driving prompted the crackdown. "The unfortunate fact is that the community has not really self-policed," Nolte said. "As a result, it's gotten out of control."

The crackdown was set in motion after civil activist Matthew Shefler called into the "Ask the Mayor" segment on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show. Shefler was also featured in a WNYC investigation that found police had not been fining businesses for using illegal e-bikes.

NYPD Chief of Patrol Terry Monahan said the danger posed by e-bikes swerving on sidewalks or bombing down bike lanes in the wrong direction has become one of the most common complaints to 311. Monahan said that in the coming month, officers will be told to put an end to that, and trained to follow a streamlined system for fining offending businesses.