It's been more than a year since Mayor Adams announced that he would create a new city agency to regulate multi-million-dollar delivery companies that rely on a vast underpaid independent workforce speeding across the city on e-bikes and mopeds. The year came and went without follow-through, and in that time the city has become more divided on the place that e-bikes and mopeds, the tools of choice for delivery workers, have on our streets.
But there's a bright green change afoot — a fleet of fluorescent green e-bikes from a three-year-old company called Whizz. Founded by Mike Peregudov, Alex Mironov, Ksenia Proka, and Artem Serbovka, Whizz has been quietly growing. Streetsblog spoke with company CEO Peregudov about what he’s learned from working with the city’s growing delivery worker population and what the city can learn from Whizz in their quest to bring more order to the streets.
We present this condensed and edited interview because we feel Peregudov's experience in the business can shed some light on the challenges faced by all New Yorkers trying to get around these days:
Streetsblog: Why did you start Whizz?
Peregudov: The mission of the company is to help delivery workers enter the profession and start earning money. Because in recent years, there came thousands of immigrants who were trying to find a job. Delivery is a job that is perfect for a starting point. But an electric bike costs actually up to $2,000 and 90 percent of these people don’t have access to this amount of cash nor do they have access to credit because they just arrived. That kind of pushed them into different gray zones, partly legal stuff – buying all these used bikes, dangerous bikes with low-quality batteries.
So we saw this as an opportunity, being immigrants ourselves [Peregudov and his co-founders are from Russia]. I understand these problems — like when you don't have a credit score, when you have to go through all of the bureaucracy, it takes time. But you need to earn something to live, right? The idea was very simple, we can rent the e-bike out on a monthly basis. These guys are going like 80 miles per day, 600 miles per month on average on our bikes. And something always happens with the bike, like a flat tire, brakes, it also can be stolen. So we decided that we will not only rent out the bikes but we will maintain them and it will be included in the price.
Streetsblog: How many users do you have and how have you seen your user base grow since you started?
Peregudov: So right now, we have more than 3,500 electric bikes on the roads, and it's growing more than 100 percent year over year. A year ago, it was 1,500. And that’s just our active fleet. We serve way more customers because they usually rent for five to six months on average. Technically, in 2024 we rented out bikes to more than 8,000 customers. The lifetime in this profession is less than a year and that's why rental is very popular.
Streetsblog: Last time we spoke, you had said that the city’s changing regulations and politicians' changing posture towards e-bikes was challenging. What do you think about the way the city is approaching e-bike regulation?
Peregudov: In the last five years e-bikes have exploded. The number of e-bikes went from zero to approximately 100,000 in New York City, and most of these are delivery e-bikes. It was not regulated at all. In my opinion, it should be regulated. But I think the current regulation and the current initiatives being proposed are over complicated, and they don't actually solve the problem in the best way.
There are two basic problems with e-bikes. The first one is battery fires. The problem was that e-bikes were not regulated so the city was flooded with these low-quality batteries. Now we have the “UL certification,” which works, but it takes time. We still have fires because there are still so many old batteries in the industry. Batteries usually depreciate in two to three years, so it will take two to three years to get rid of most of these poor batteries.
Streetsblog: Have any Whizz bike batteries caught fire?
Peregudov: We are pretty proud of the fact that we have had zero fires with our batteries. We understood this problem from the very beginning, because we had previous experience with similar businesses overseas. From the very first day, we were using the best available batteries and battery cells in the market.
Streetsblog: So what is the second part of the regulation needed?
Peregudov: The second part is behavior. In other words, some of the bikes are going too fast, and they're probably too heavy, and maybe too powerful. And here, I think, that existing regulation is a little bit over complicated. Now there are Class 1, Class 2, and Class 3 e-bikes. And the laws are different in each state. So the guys in New York can ride Class 3 [which goes up to 25 miles per hour], but cross the river to New Jersey and you can only ride Class 2 [which can only go 20 miles per hour]. So when we rent out Class 3 in New York, some guys will go to New Jersey to work there and then have a problem that they don't really even realize. It means it's too complicated. My personal opinion is that we probably should eliminate Class 3. Class 2 at 20 miles per hour is fine, if you want to go faster, you need a moped.
Streetsblog: You went to the City Council hearing about Intro 606, a bill that would require all e-bikes to be licensed and registered with the DOT. What was your perception of the proposed bill and of the hearing in general?
Peregudov: It was a pretty interesting experience. I expected, I don't know, like 10 people. But there were hundreds of them. What surprised me was that it was pretty emotional, and because it was emotional, it was less logical. Also the Department of Transportation was against the bill because the professionals understand that registration will not work. Also nobody seemed to care about the fact that statistically, e-bikes are causing only a tiny number of crashes. So statistically, we should take all cars off the road if we follow [the logic of the bill's supporters]. You may be interested in the statistics that we have. Up to 25 percent of our customers have been in a crash with a car.
Streetsblog: I know you’ve heard about the mayor’s promise to create a Department of Sustainable Delivery. Tell me about whatever involvement you've had with this new department?
Peregudov: There were a couple of round tables organized in the first half of 2024. We were invited, and these were round tables with maybe 20 to 25 participants. These were just round tables where people discussed all these challenges, open discussions, gathering opinions, stuff like that.
Streetsblog: And what do you think the city can learn from a business like yours in its quest to regulate this industry?
Peregudov: The city always says that all the apps should be somehow involved in regulation. I think they should be. It's very hard to control what kind of bike some particular guy uses. But for these app-companies, DoorDash and Uber, for platforms, it's easier. They actually know the information. They can require this information. So for example, if you want to deliver on the app, you have to go through the onboarding process, and you have to download a lot of documents. The platforms can create, together with the city, a database of e-bike providers and vendors like, "Hey, if you want to work on our platform, you can rent out or buy a bike from these particular providers." It already happens in Europe — and in Europe, most platforms subsidize the vehicle. For example, a platform can say, ‘If you rent or from this vendor, we will subsidize, let's say, 50 percent of the vehicle." So that is actually what happens in many European countries, it incentivizes buying safe and legal bikes.
