For Pedestrians (and Against Chaos)

A brief manifesto on e-bikes, scooters, and mopeds

Pedestrians belong to a special underclass in New York City. They are the slowest moving, the most vulnerable, and the least likely to be protected by any interest group. This city remains, despite its sprawl and chaos, quite walkable, and it is possible to lead a life here while never learning to drive. To choose to walk—either to a subway stop, a bus, or just somewhere else—is to do what is healthiest for yourself and the built environment, to take as little as possible and, in your own way, give back greatly: you are not spewing emissions and not causing anyone physical harm.

The automobile kills. We need less of them in New York City. There are parts of the city, the outer boroughs especially, where a car becomes more necessary; I, a resident of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, own a car, and use it to navigate the gaps in the subway system, the east-west trips that would be two-hour bus rides without my Hyundai Elantra. I support speed cameras, I support congestion pricing, and I support the pedestrianization of as many streets as possible. One of Michael Bloomberg’s great masterstrokes was the pedestrianization of Times Square. Another was introducing bike lanes. If a tolling plan for Manhattan will never survive political backlash, a future mayor—Eric Adams lacks the gumption—should start closing off major streets in Manhattan to non-essential traffic. If you’re not a first responder, a taxi, or a delivery truck, you don’t drive there. Imagine how much more peaceful that might be for the person on foot. The city, in the meantime, can continue its efforts to remove free street parking in a bid to discourage driving as much as possible.

And here we come to the electronic vehicles—the e-bikes, e-scooters, and mopeds. Let me finish my throat-clearing exercise and agree that automobiles, absolutely, are worse. These vehicles, unless you count the deadly lithium battery fires—and you should—do not regularly kill. An e-bike cannot crush a human body like a four-door car or SUV. What they have done, however, is introduce a fresh and unsteady terror to the streetscape; they have created obstacles, for pedestrians, that barely existed a decade ago. In 2019, Andrew Cuomo, who was then governor, signed off on the state legislature’s push to legalize e-bikes and e-scooters. At the time, this was sold as enlightened and equitable transportation policy. It would, in theory, be better for the environment because it would encourage New Yorkers to ditch automobiles for cleaner alternatives. Progressives championed legalization because police were arresting immigrant delivery drivers using illegal e-bikes to do their jobs. Legalization for e-bikes and e-scooters was pitched like marijuana legalization—taking police out of the equation would make the lives of the working poor much less fraught.

The problem, in retrospect, was obvious. New motorized vehicles were added to a limited streetscape without the subtraction of anything else. Automobile congestion did not dissipate. It turned out that most New Yorkers who owned cars were not eager to trade them in for scooters or cargo bikes. Anecdotally, this makes sense; if you’re used to the relative comfort of driving a car and getting groceries that way, why switch? And the new, legal electronic vehicles opened a pandora’s box for mostly unforeseen illegality. If Adams, as mayor, has failed on many fronts, he is not wrong to send the police after mopeds. There is plenty of handwringing about this because vulnerable migrants use them, but they are both against the law and a danger to all pedestrians—including fellow migrants who want to cross a street in peace. High-powered mopeds are menacing a popular, pedestrianized stretch of open street in Jackson Heights, Queens. Some electronic vehicles follow traffic laws and others plainly don’t. It’s no longer uncommon, in the five boroughs, to see e-bikes, scooters, and mopeds rushing through red lights, going the wrong way up one-way streets, and taking to sidewalks. For ordinary bikers, existence has only grown more precarious in the e-vehicle era. E-bike delivery workers regularly use bike lanes, zipping at much higher speeds. Transportation infrastructure designed for basic pedal-powered bikes has now be turned over to fast-moving electronic vehicles. And just as a new permission structure has been created for mopeds in pedestrian spaces, so have smaller motorcycles and high-powered scooters tyrannized paths once reserved for walking and biking. An advantage of living in Bay Ridge is being on the waterfront and enjoying one of the lovelier promenades you’ll find anywhere. In the early 2020s, e-bikes, e-scooters, and motorcycles have steadily encroached, weaving around families and joggers.

It is easy to dismiss this all, absent a death toll, as a moral panic. That gets harder, of course, once the rising number of battery fires are seriously considered. What has changed my perspective on all of this—and made me wish, when I’m feeling especially ornery, that we return to the pre-2019 status quo of a blanket e-bike and e-scooter ban—is traveling abroad. Advocates and lobbyists for e-vehicles in New York will often argue for them as a form of progress, and cast Americans as an unenlightened lot next to their global peers. We are the car-obsessed troglodytes, unlike the bike-friendly Europeans. I’ve had the privilege, since 2022, to travel to many major cities, including London, Paris, Dublin, Edinburgh, Rome, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto—and what I’ve found, largely, is an absence of e-bikes and, in particular, e-scooters. What I’ve also discovered, despite the abundance of public transit options, are cars. Europeans and Asians do drive. Even Amsterdam, which is a bike utopia, has cars, and I was surprised to see many of them parked along the famed canals. Amsterdam was revelatory because the streets there were managed so well. Bikers kept to protected bike lanes and followed traffic laws. Cars did not run red lights. Pedestrians knew where to go. There was order in density. Missing were e-scooters and mopeds. I looked around for them and couldn’t find any. (I learned, later on, they are restricted in the Netherlands.) Parisians had them, decided they were a nuisance, and voted overwhelmingly to ban rentals. London, in the meantime, seems to be slowly embracing them.

In New York, arguments for e-vehicles, bikes in particular, typically revolve around the app companies. Uber and DoorDash have created expectations for consumers that delivery workers must meet. Without e-bikes, how will workers make a living? The app companies are notorious for punishing workers who fail to take orders or meet certain delivery thresholds. For the working class and poor, many of them immigrants, food delivery is a lifeline. But liberals find themselves in a strange place defending this Dickensian status quo. Rather than target Uber and DoorDash for exploitative labor practices or demand an end to this very recent and predatory paradigm, they decry laws that make it harder to speed on city streets with soup-up electronic vehicles. For decades, food delivery in New York followed a very straightforward logic. Restaurants delivered within a small radius and locals only ordered from places nearby. Most apartment-dwellers kept Chinese takeout and pizza menus, with numbers for restaurants that might be, at best, one or two miles away. A phone call was placed to the restaurant directly—imagine that!—and a worker pedaled out to the apartment. There was no middleman, no exploitative app giant, to skim off the profits and no demand for the delivery worker to arrive at an inhumanely fast clip. The rise of Uber and smartphone technology changed all of this. Now, it’s no longer uncommon to call in deliveries from restaurants halfway across a borough or the city itself, and for workers to be expected to make this journey in a timely fashion. None of this is particular sustainable.

There are answers here; they are just difficult, and bound to anger some powerful people. App companies should be forced to pay for the equipment their delivery workers use, including the batteries. If this isn’t possible, the city and state should consider limiting the use of e-vehicles—a scooter ban, like Paris—or going even further and returning New York to its pre-2019 status quo. For pedestrians, this new era is plainly worse. Forever last in any political calculus, they should, this time, be put first. Let the city make it harder for anyone to operate a vehicle here, whether it’s an automobile or an e-bike. Let the state pursue genuine upgrades to public transit—new and better bus lines, an extension of the subway system—so there are fewer temptations for alternatives. Let it be a joy to go outside, to take in the summer air and stroll wherever you like.