New York City officials are moving quickly to cap e-bike speeds at 15-miles per hour, while ignoring the hard-won, state-granted power to slow down cars that has proven to be an unqualified success in saving lives.
Manhattan Council Member Keith Powers will introduce a bill on Wednesday to lower the e-bike speed limit to 15 miles per hour, following Mayor Adams's announcement last week that he wanted to slow down the devices — but no one in power has unsheathed the most effective street safety tool: lowering car speed limits to 20 citywide that Albany gave the city last year.
Car and truck drivers were responsible for 99.96 percent of all reported pedestrian injuries in the first three months of 2025, according to the NYPD — a statistic that makes some street safety advocates shake their heads over the mayor and Council's misplaced urgency.
"Clearly they’re putting the emphasis in the wrong place, given what we know about the relative dangers of motor vehicles and e-bikes," said Eric McClure, executive director of StreetsPAC, a political action committee dedicated to improving safety, mobility and livability on the city's streets.
The state granted the city the power to lower its speed limit from 25 miles per hour to 20 miles per hour in June 2024 under a bill sometimes called "Sammy's Law." But the Adams administration has only used that power on a tiny number of streets and several multi-block residential zones where speeding has not been a major issue.
Meanwhile the Council under Speaker Adrienne Adams has dragged its feet to legislate a citywide lower speed limit.
"It’s not really clear what the thinking is by the administration or the Council in pushing more quickly to lower e-bike speeds than implementing 20 mph speed limits across the city," McClure said.
Both the mayor and lawmakers have echoed concerns from New Yorkers that e-bikes are a menace on the streets, even as the data show again and again that the true danger is still cars.
E-bike crashes accounted for 0.4 of the nearly 10,000 reported pedestrian traffic injuries last year, a trend that improved in the first three months of this year when e-bikes crashes were to blame for just 0.04 percent of pedestrian injuries, according to the NYPD.
Nonetheless, Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch began a criminal crackdown on cyclists on April 28, saying that e-bikes represent an "out of control" danger — but according to DOT stats, the number of pedestrians wounded by e-bike riders dropped by a whopping 50 percent this year compared to last.
Both sides of City Hall have also gotten into fights this week, pointing fingers via social media memes about who is to blame for the lack of progress on broader regulations of delivery app companies that incentivize unsafe e-bike riding among their workers.
It's all par for the course for a city government that has failed to meaningfully hold dangerous drivers accountable or build out safe street infrastructure. Even an existing law that applied to repeatedly reckless drivers — the Dangerous Vehicle Abatement Program — was allowed to expire by the City Council.
It's not looking any better in the state Legislature, either. Albany electeds declined to pass the Stop Super Speeders bill – the prime piece of legislation safe streets advocates had fought for this session. The proposal would require recidivist reckless drivers to install a device into their cars to prevent them from speeding — a law that could have prevented a repeat speeder from mowing down a family in Brooklyn earlier this year.
Council priorities
Just hours after Mayor Adams confirmed reports on Thursday that he planned to lower e-bike speed limits as soon as July, Powers announced his proposed bill [PDF] to do the same.
The East Side lawmaker and Manhattan Borough President wannabe told Streetsblog that he prefers Council legislation to Adams's proposed rule-making process in order to have "oversight hearings on it, have the public involved, and have an opportunity to best address what is good policy for keeping our streets safe."
But the pol did not have hard data to back up the need to slow down e-bikes, saying simply that he, like Tisch, has been hearing complaints from constituents.
"If you ask any elected official in Manhattan this is a topic that comes up in many or all meetings that we go to," Powers said. "I’m talking to people all throughout the borough right now and they want to see some changes in behavior when it comes to cyclists."
But neither Powers nor his Council colleagues have introduced a bill to lower the city's default speed limit to 20 mph under the power Albany granted them. Speaker Adrienne Adams, who is running for mayor, has called into question whether the Council will even enact the change at all.
For now, Powers remained focused solely on e-bike speed limits — though he suggested he was "open" to introducing a speed limit reduction for the four-wheeled behemoths that are killing and maiming tens of thousands of New Yorkers every year.
"I am interested in all measures that might address keeping our street experience here in the city feeling much safer and slowing down any vehicle or device or instrument that could hurt someone," he said.
The last time the standard speed limit dropped from 30 to 25 miles per hour in 2014, the Council and then-Mayor Bill de Blasio implemented the change within months of the Albany giving them the green light. Traffic fatalities dropped by 22 percent afterward, and pedestrian deaths declined even further by 25 percent, according to Transportation Alternatives.
Where's the mayor?
The Department of Transportation can spot-change speed limits, but has done so on less than 1 percent of the city's streets. The minuscule pace of change under the Adams administration earned the contempt of Amy Cohen, the founder of Families for Safe Streets and the mom of Sammy Cohen Eckstein, whose death under the wheels of a speeding car galvanized the street safety movement.
"It just does not need to be this way when it’s obvious that he’s willing to expedite it [with e-bikes]," Cohen told Streetsblog. "They are not the things that are killing people."
When asked about his administration's slow progress on reining in cars, Adams seemed to be unaware that he even had the power to lower the speed limit below 25 miles per hour.
"When it comes down to cars it’s my understanding – and if I need to be corrected I’ll be corrected – that for cars we have to get the assistance from Albany," Adams told reporters at his weekly open press availability on Tuesday.
When Streetsblog reminded the mayor that he already had that power, he again diverted blame away from three-ton motor vehicles to pedestrians and riders of e-bikes and mopeds.
"What is often missing from the conversation, street safety, it involves everyone. It involves pedestrians crossing at the green. There used to be a commercial: ‘Cross at the green, not in between.’ Nobody engages in that conversation, but I will," the mayor continued. "It involves bikers who run red lights, and who drive on sidewalks, are recklessly driving. It involves scooters and mopeds that speed through bike lanes. Everyone must be involved."
Everyone but car drivers.
With Sophia Lebowitz
