Residents of the Upper East Side, a long-documented bikelash hotbed lustily cheered Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch as she touted her e-bike crackdown to her wealthy neighbors and got exactly the reaction she expected.
The top cop deployed her usual talking points for the NYPD's policy change of upgrading traffic tickets to criminal court summonses, also known as C summonses, for cyclists caught committing low level offenses like going through red lights or riding on the sidewalk, at a Wednesday morning talk at 92NY, formerly known as the 92nd Street Y.
"Recently, I understand, that the Police Department has decided to be more aggressive about enforcing some of the rules when it comes to e-bikes," said her interviewer, the community center's CEO Seth Pinsky, which prompted the audience to erupt into cheers. "That’s garnered a fair amount of controversy — though apparently not in this room."
According to Tisch, New Yorkers all across town have thanked her since she launched the sweeps in late April aimed, she said, at reining in so-called "out-of-control" e-bikes, though, in fact, has targeted many riders of non-electric bikes. And her claim that the crackdown is "data driven" has been repeatedly refuted, first being revealed as merely the fruit of privileged complaints, and then as being unsupported by recent data revealing that injuries from e-bikes actually dropped ahead of the summons blitz as more and more New Yorkers got accustomed to them and as fewer cars were creating chaos on the streets thanks to congestion pricing.
"Whatever borough I go to in the city of New York, people thank me for the enforcement of e-bikes," said Tisch. "They complain about out-of-control e-bikes careening through crosswalks, running red lights, driving up on the sidewalks, creating hazardous conditions."
Wednesday's confab was in one of the most receptive parts of the city for harsher penalties against people riding on two wheels.
Tisch, who reportedly lives in a $12-million duplex in the same neighborhood, arrived chauffeured in a Chevy Suburban and didn't take questions from the press. As she came on stage, she joked that she probably knew a bunch of people in the audience.
Pinsky, who previously served in the Bloomberg administration as the head of the quasi-public Economic Development Corporation, started his question about the e-bike policy by sharing a story about his wife getting hit by a cyclist and breaking her elbow in the uptown neighborhood.
"My wife a few years ago was stepping into the street to cross on Lexington Avenue and a bike going the wrong way down the avenue knocked her over, she broke her elbow, and I know lots of people who have had similar experiences," Pinsky said. (The comments echoed those of Tisch's own mother, Merryl Tisch, who once said at a public meeting that she knew of many such cases, but then admitted to Streetsblog in a private conversation that it was not many at all.)
The police commissioner also said she has heard many similar stories at community meetings, precinct council meetings, and senior centers, and slammed the $190 fines of the past "meaningless," before queueing up her not-so-subtle push for the City Council to license e-bikes.
"The only reason, or the main reason, people pay a traffic ticket or show up at traffic court, or follow the rules of the road, is because they don’t want points on their license, or they don’t want their license suspended," Tisch said. "With e-bikes there are no licenses. And so by giving them a traffic summons, it’s basically burning police resources. It is meaningless enforcement.
"Unless and until our City Council changes the laws and the regulatory framework for how we govern this mode of transportation that has exploded in New York City over the past decade, that C summons is the best enforcement mechanism that we have," she added, to more applause.
Tisch and the NYPD have yet to provide any data that e-bike riders and cyclists were dodging fines at a higher rate than drivers, who account for virtually all of the traffic deaths and injuries – despite being licensed. In fact, she declined to answer Streetsblog's question about that at a presser about crime stats on Tuesday at City Hall.
Meanwhile, there have been 1,125 reported crashes injuring 545 people in 2024 in local Community Board 8 – more than 10 people hurt each week – including 134 pedestrians. Twenty of those people on foot were injured in a collision that involved e-bikes or bikes in some way, though it is unclear from the stats if the cyclists were the cause of the crash.
Citywide, in 2024, 37 of the 9,610 pedestrians injured in crashes were injured by e-bike riders, the NYPD said. That means e-bike riders caused just 0.4 percent of pedestrian injuries.
That pattern continued citywide in the first three months of 2025, with one pedestrian out of 2,271 overall, injured by an e-bike rider — or less than 0.04 percent of the reported pedestrian injuries.
The ritzy area has been a battleground whose influential denizens – including Woody Allen, former Rep. Carolyn Maloney, and a Cuomo sibling – have fought off safe street infrastructure.
Were she to leave the echo chamber of a well-endowed community center in the middle of a workday when the less-wealthy members of the Upper East Side, or the workers who deliver them food, are busy earning a living, Tisch might hear something else about her crackdown. Indeed, community boards on the Upper West Side and in Midtown East have weighed in against the policy, voting overwhelmingly for resolutions calling on Tisch to end it immediately.
And members of the City Council have demanded that Speaker Adrienne Adams push back on the crackdown.
