How did a mayor claiming he wanted a multi-pronged approach to reining in the tech giants and their delivery apps end up unleashing the NYPD in a single-minded war on bikes?
In what was supposed to be Bike Month, Mayor Adams and his Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch ramped up their efforts to end what Tisch calls a “consequence-free environment” for bike riders – framing e-bikes as the city's singular street safety threat, all while drivers of motor vehicles continue to kill and maim New Yorkers at levels phenomenally higher than their two-wheeled counterparts.
The resulting policy — handing out criminal court summonses to cyclists instead of the normal traffic tickets that drivers get — re-criminalizes behavior that was already decriminalized during the landmark criminal justice reform of 2016.
And last week the mayor added a new wrinkle: a 15-mile-per-hour speed limit for e-bikes, saying in an Instagram reel that he has heard about speeding e-bikes at "every town hall in the city."
The announcement led First Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro to demand that Citi Bike — whose e-bikes are currently capped at 18 miles per hour — to immediately lower the speed of the electric fleet, citing e-bikes as “an emergency threat to life and property.” (NYPD's own statistics refute this, citing that e-bike riders caused just 0.04 percent of the pedestrian injuries in the first three months of 2025.)
Mastro also created a new rationale for Adams administration inaction on street safety measures. Where the Adams administration previously hailed e-bikes as "an exciting glimpse into a future where New Yorkers are less dependent on large, more dangerous vehicles to get around,” Mastro is now saying they “hinder the city’s ability to advance bike lanes and micro mobility infrastructure.”
Advocates are appalled that Mayor Adams, who always calls himself a cyclist, would lean so heavily into the bikelash.
“This is a bizarre escalation of the administration’s misguided war on biking,” said Ben Furnas, executive director of Transportation Alternatives. "Already, the NYPD is giving out thousands of criminal summonses for routine traffic violations to people on bikes, and this [speed limit] announcement will ask police officers, who have far more important work to do protecting our city, to waste their time sending New Yorkers to criminal court for biking 16 mph. These criminal summonses could clog the court system while subjecting people to the risk of jail or deportation — just for choosing to ride a bike."
And delivery workers, who are the main riders targeted by these policies, are begging the administration to direct some of its energy on the app companies that profit from their labor, rather than penalizing the low-paid immigrant workforce for fulfilling the corporate demands.
“Without holding app companies accountable for prioritizing workers’ rights and public safety, the mayor’s ill-conceived and rushed initiative will not achieve the results this city needs to safely adapt to the new age of e-micromobility. Instead, it unjustly places all responsibility for the collective goal of street safety on the backs of vulnerable immigrant workers,” said Los Deliveristas Unidos, a collective of delivery workers fighting for labor rights, in a statement.
So … how did we get here? (If you prefer a video version of this story, it's here and at the bottom.)
Perceived danger
It was during the pandemic when a lot of people — including cops — started noticing delivery workers. Even as they were keeping the city running by bringing food to those sheltering in place, these essential workers were still subject to tickets and seizures by the cops because the electric bikes they preferred were still illegal.
Then-governor, and now top mayoral challenger, Andrew Cuomo, changed that by legalizing electric bikes in 2020. But that law did nothing to regulate the still-rapidly growing industry, which sends "independent contractors" on electric bikes speeding across the city to stay in good graces with the algorithm. And it’s not just meals from restaurants. New Yorkers want their groceries delivered, their laundry delivered, their medication delivered, and more.
The result is the supposed e-bike “chaos” that is brought up at community boards and precinct community councils, but chaos has many mothers: app companies that don't even technically employ the workers they dispatch and don't use their vaunted technology to rein in bad actors; an influx of cheap and often illegal mopeds that go much faster, yet are not included in latest crackdowns; roads that are not designed for the most-vulnerable users (pedestrians and cyclists); an increase in cars registered in the five boroughs; elitism; and, yes, racism.
The E Vehicle Safety Alliance, a group of mostly upper Manhattan locals who feel terrorized by the proliferation of e-bikes, has perfected a brand of public outrage. The group leans hard on blaming bike riders and delivery workers yet ignores the damage done by cars as well as the fact that members' neighbors are the very people who order the most food for delivery.
Commissioner Tisch has consistently said that her reason for implementing the criminal summons policy are such public complaints, and are not, as she initially claimed but Streetsblog debunked, based on any data proving a real problem.
Broken promises
Mayor Adams initially said he would step into this breach and fix the problem.
In January 2024, Adams made his most promising announcement yet to those who want to see app companies held accountable, announcing the “Department of Sustainable Delivery,” which would be an entirely new agency to regulate the growing delivery economy.
In that "State of the City" pledge, Adams acknowledged that some New Yorkers feel lawlessness on the streets, but assured his administration would prioritize practical solutions that get to the root of the problem.
“Public safety is also about safer streets for pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and delivery workers. New Yorkers welcome the future of transit and new electronic technologies — but we cannot have mopeds speeding down our sidewalks and forcing people to jump out of the way,” he said at the time. “That is why we are in discussion with the City Council to create the 'Department of Sustainable Delivery,' a first-in-the-nation entity that will regulate new forms of delivery transit and ensure their safety. … New Yorkers must know that their city is looking out for them, because traffic safety is public safety.”
Advocates believed that the city would finally catch up to the app companies and create real solutions instead of enacting piecemeal regulations. But it never happened.
“Here we are, almost 18 months later, and there's nothing,” said Eric McClure, the executive director of StreetsPAC. “The adoption of e-bikes has outpaced the city's ability to manage it. We should have been on top of these things all along in the process.”
So … what happened?
After the mayor’s announcement, his administration did get to work meeting with industry stakeholders about the new department, according to those invited to the discussions.
The leader of the initiative was then-Deputy Mayor of Operations Meera Joshi, who gained experience with app-based logistics during her time leading the Taxi and Limousine Commission.
Joshi's initial comments about the department were promising, indicating that she saw that the problem was not the e-bikes, but the job their riders were being forced to undertake. “We need to reduce the city's carbon footprint by encouraging the growth of micro-delivery," she told Gothamist. "And we also need to support street safety for workers and for everyone else who uses our streets.”
And she clearly understood the value that the app companies had seized from the public. In a podcast interview last October, she called the city’s bike lanes "the most lucrative bike lanes in the nation" and teased the "work ahead" that she was doing with the City Council that would "license the big users of the commercial corridors."
The mayor is indicted
After the mayor was indicted for bribery, illegally accepting foreign donations, and wire fraud, among other things, key personnel began a mass exodus. But after the Justice Department dropped the charges against Adams — a move many associate with a quid pro quo between the Mayor and President Trump — Joshi also announced that she was leaving.
Weeks before her departure, on Feb. 5, her team leaked the "Department of Sustainable Delivery" plan to the press. In place of a new department, the 28-page bill proposed new rules. App companies would have to buy a license to operate in the city, register their workers, provide those workers with safe and regulated e-bikes, stop incentivizing speed and instead incentivize safe riding, and do far more safety training.
Since then, the legislation has sat on the desk of City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams. Under questioning from Streetsblog, the Speaker maintains that discussions are ongoing, but that does not appear to be the case. At the first democratic mayoral candidate debate last week, Speaker Adams was asked about the 15-mile-per-hour speed limit proposal, and she said the fault was with Mayor Adams for not working with the Council.
"E-bike riders are people that deliver food to our homes, and they have families as well. ... As the mayor normally does, he does not collaborate with the City Council. Had we done that collaboration together, we might have come up with a different solution other than 15 miles [per hour], which I believe is a penalty," she said at the debate.
The mayor blames the Council, saying that the legislature should legislate ... with his bill.
“We announced this nine months ago,” the mayor said last week of the bill that he never actually announced, but merely leaked to the press. “Part of running for mayor, you have to do your day job also. We've communicated with their staff over and over again and they have it on their desk so they should move forward.”
The new guard
Joshi resigned in a cohort that included the powerhouses of the Adams administration: First Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom and Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Chauncey Parker.
The mayor plucked Randy Mastro, a former high official in the Giuliani administation to replace Torres-Springer, and he immediately took aim at livable streets projects. The plan for a separate pedestrian path on the over-crowded Queensboro Bridge, years in the making, was once again held up because Mastro had to be “briefed” (it has since opened). The Elizabeth Street Garden, a city owned site slated for affordable housing for low-income seniors could now remain storage for a some guy’s sculptures because of Mastro’s meddling.
And now the 15-mile-per-hour speed limit, which Mastro himself is championing, demanding Citi Bike comply.
“This is a guy who argued in court against the Prospect Park West bike path and argued against congestion pricing in court on behalf of the State of New Jersey,” said McClure of Mastro. “So this is somebody whose track record on street safety and transportation issues is abysmal, and now he's in the position of reigning over all of this in City Hall.”
And with the era of Mastro came a new era for Mayor Adams, who has abandoned the Democratic party to run for re-election as a right-leaning independent. He's now charting a new course as an outsider candidate who isn't afraid to praise Trump.
The same mayor who once said that delivery workers were “essential to New Yorkers' way of life and to our city's economy,” and proposed a regulatory and non-punitive fix to the city’s disorganization is now going on the radio and praising Trump for his treatment of immigrants and that criticism of his policies from the “far left” means they want to live in a world without consequence. (Commissioner Tisch has parroted the same language to say that cyclists want to live in a "consequence-free environment," though they were always subject to the same traffic tickets as drivers.)
Last week, in an interview with John Catsimatidis and Rita Cosby on WABC’s “Cats & Cosby,” the mayor was asked about what the hosts considered the “number one item” making people leave the city. It wasn't crime. It wasn't the housing crisis. It wasn't filth. It wasn't the persistent threat of being killed or maimed by a car driver. It wasn't homelessness. It wasn't the fear of growing old without proper services.
It was “quality of life."
"To go from the taxi cab or Uber to the sidewalk without getting run over by bicycles,” the host said.
Adams started using White House talking points when he turned his attention to criticism of his e-bike crackdown.
“Now, are there those who are protesting and yelling at me that I'm inhumane because, you know, people are going to be summoned because they're speeding? ... You have the far left who believe that you can do anything you want in this city"
Then the mayor made a Freudian slip that reminded listeners of the one thing that this war on bicycles revealed:
"The thing no one can say about me is that I'm not inconsistent in what I believe we should be protecting working class people and their families in the city. I'm not on the other side. And I think it's time for elected officials to decide whose side are you on?”
