My guess is that NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch hasn’t ridden a bicycle in New York City traffic for decades, if ever — unless she's cosseted in a protective phalanx of cops.
But if Tisch were conversant with cycling, she’d know how exposed a cyclist is — exposed to suffocating heat or freezing cold or pelting rain. Exposed to your bike getting jacked or getting spat at or hit on. Or, worst of all, exposed to miscreants behind the wheel who willfully imperil your safety to gain a few seconds of saved time.
If Tisch had such exposure, she might have thought twice before ordering a policy change to issue criminal citations to cyclists running red lights or committing other minor moving violations that include reckless driving [sic], operating under the influence of alcohol or drugs, driving [sic, again] the wrong way, and disobeying a red light or "Stop" sign.
Prior to last week, a cyclist running a red risked a $190 traffic ticket. That was bad enough — I'm still smarting from the one I got last September hanging a right from Central Park West onto 110th Street at Frederick Douglass Circle (en route to a South Bronx Climate Week event). But the new policy of criminally citing cyclists takes the penalties to a bad new level.
Whereas a summons can be discharged via check or digital payment, a criminal citation has to be answered in court (at pain of being slapped with an arrest warrant). For the tens of thousands of migrants who populate the city’s food-delivery workforce, the stakes are, of course, vastly greater: detainment, imprisonment, deportation.
Bad outcomes
How will this Draconian new policy translate to city streets? While no one can say for sure, here are some possibilities:
- Fewer “normies” — non-deliveristas — will ride a bike.
- The drop in cycling will crimp cycling’s enormous “population-level” health benefits: cardiovascular, cognitive, psychological.
- Those who keep cycling will be made less safe, due to a diminished “safety in numbers” effect.
- Cyclists will need to divide their attention between the standard hazards — broken pavement, other road users, people absently stepping off the curb — and cops ready to pounce.
- Red light-observant cyclists will find their travel more taxing and sweaty. Remember that paper by a Bay Area physicist in 2000 that revealed his dropping from 10 mph to zero (at stop signs) and then re-accelerating to 10 mph took one-third more physical effort than maintaining a 10-5-10 mph pattern (as one would at a "Yield" sign)? I do, especially as I age.
- With all that waiting at intersections and slowing and restarting, it’ll take longer to bike where you’re going.
- Worst of all, people biking will be exposed to motor traffic up-closer and for longer. Goodbye to those moments of safe roadway we got by proceeding through intersections — a split-second to get ahead of drivers that was the impetus for the city allowing cyclists to go through an intersection on the pedestrian "Walk" signal.
The rationale was what, exactly?
NYPD Traffic Division CO Brian O'Sullivan last week told the City Council’s Public Safety Committee that the criminal citations will be concentrated in corridors with the most complaint calls to 311 and 911. Tisch also spoke of complaints at an April press conference: "It's actually one of the largest pieces of feedback that I get from New Yorkers about e-bikes and scooters, either out of control or up on the sidewalk."
Yet what exactly have been the venue for these complaints? Streetsblog’s Kevin Duggan revealed last week that the city’s 311 and 911 systems have no intake categories for registering reckless cycling. And while Tisch didn’t mention 311 and 911, she also didn’t disclose where or how the purported “feedback ... from New Yorkers” actually reaches her. (Editor's note: Nor has the NYPD responded to any of our questions about where the data for their "data-driven" approach comes from.)
So, whence the new policy? Sure, it’s sick fun to view it as a ransom payment to bicycle- and immigrant-loathing President Trump from Eric Adams. But that notion overlooks Tisch’s leverage over the mayor. She has more than enough power to refuse him. Firing her would be the final nail in Adams’s political coffin.
Alternatives to criminalization
Let's start by acknowledging that the new motorized mobility devices have unsettled many vulnerable road users.
Tunnel vision and bad faith aside, anti-cycling advocates like NYC E-Vehicle Safety Alliance are tapping into the genuine peril felt by many New Yorkers. And longtime cyclists also decry the tension they experience navigating roadways and bike lanes alongside vrooming wheels, including bright lights like Michele Herman (lead author of Trans Alt’s 1993 bike-plan bible, The Bicycle Blueprint) and Rich Miller (insatiable rider and former longtime TA board member, now Brooklyn Greenway Initiative board chair).
I share their distress. And, no, I don’t have "the answer," just a conviction that any solution will have many parts. Here are some possible components:
- Rescind the new criminal citation policy for low-level cycling violations.
- Failing that, Commissioner Tisch must pledge to never share NYPD criminal traffic citation data with ICE and other federal agencies, as the NYPD apparently did by sharing the sealed arrest record of an innocent Palestinian woman who attended a 2024 protest.
- Reduce motorized delivery miles traveled with distance fees on app-based motorized food deliveries, as I proposed in 2023 and again in 2024. (Note that this program would generate revenue for city government whereas NYPD enforcement expends it.)
- Redirect NYPD street traffic enforcement away from bicyclists and onto car and truck drivers so their proportions match the relative injuries inflicted on pedestrians.
- Enforce serious but lesser known driver violations such as dangerous passing and dooring, which has ended so many lives, including Georgios Smaragdis on Broome Street last week; ditto aggressive turning that endangers pedestrians as well as cyclists.
- Stop lumping mopeds, motorbikes and motor scooters with bikes (electric or otherwise) in NYPD data and media statements.
- And, yes, write normal traffic tickets to genuinely reckless operators, whether on two wheels or four.
Lastly, let's get Commissioner Tisch on a bike so she can feel what we feel, risk what we risk, and, yes, exult like we exult at the joy of getting around on two wheels. Throughout my 40 years of cycling advocacy, I’ve longed for city officials to experience New York as cyclists. Their windshield view of this city — shared by only a sliver of residents — is distorting their policies.
