The Adams administration tried to cover up concerns about its incoming 15-mile-per-hour e-bike speed limit, as advocates consider suing the city over the potentially illegal regulation they slammed as little more than a last-ditch campaign stunt.
The Department of Transportation's rule change will kick in on Oct. 24, City Hall announced on Wednesday — and the decree remains unchanged from when officials unveiled it in June, despite nearly 1,000 public comments, according to the agency.
Many commenters voiced concerns about restricting the devices while allowing far more dangerous car and truck drivers to continue going around the Big Apple at up to 20 miles per hour faster, but DOT officials downplayed or dismissed critics in order to whitewash their faulty rule change, according to legal experts and advocates.
"They’re trying to immunize themselves, but it’s bullshit," said Peter Beadle, a pedestrian and bike injury attorney. "They’re trying to pre-empt the alternative that they could and should be doing."
The agency's move is "completely backward" and goes against a majority of people who came out against the regulation, said Ben Furnas, executive director of Transportation Alternatives.
"Every New Yorker deserves to feel safe on our sidewalks and bike lanes, but Mayor Adams's new 15 mph e-bike rule is completely backward," said Furnas. "Throughout the rule-making process, hundreds of New Yorkers spoke up against this misguided change, but City Hall has decided to ignore them, misrepresent their comments in public documents, and move forward with their absurd war on biking."
The haphazard roll-out became even more clear when the city's social media account initially tweeted about the change with a picture of a traditional bike – not an e-bike – before deleting the post.
'Transparent lie'
DOT's notice of the final adopted rule included a raft of falsehoods about the public's reception of the controversial rule, which included an extensive 849 online comments and around two hours of input at a hearing in July.
The agency claimed that the comments "did not address the specified speed limit being proposed or whether the speed limit for e-bikes and e-scooters should be adjusted to a specific speed other than 15 miles per hour. Rather, comments were concerned with the existence of different speed limits for e-bikes and e-scooters than for motor vehicles."
But even a cursory search of the comments page revealed numerous examples of people offering other options.
- "I strongly encourage the DOT to not adopt the proposed rule and to instead lower the speed limit for all vehicles city-wide to 20 mph," Beadle himself wrote in the comment section.
- "I strongly urge the DOT to reverse this decision and restore the previous 18 mph limit — if not return to the original 20 mph setting," wrote Gabrielle Hoffman, referring to City Hall strong-arming Lyft to lower the top speed of an e-Citi Bike. "Lowering it further sends the wrong message about New York’s commitment to alternative, human-scale mobility solutions."
- "The new Citi Bike limitation is terrifying being on streets with cars that are significantly larger, significantly less aware, and are going 10+ mph faster than we are now. Speed IS A SAFETY FEATURE. Please allow at least a 17-, if not 20-, mph speed limit," wrote Andrew Harvey.
- "I support a citywide reduction in e-bike speed limits only if such a rule is accompanied by a similar citywide reduction in car speed limits (to 20 mph or below). Otherwise, a hard no to this absurdly discriminatory rule," wrote Kenneth Lay.
- "E-bikes being able to go 20 mph or so makes them a reasonable alternative to car trips in many cases. Every time someone replaces a car trip with an e-bike trip, people are less likely to die," wrote Dave Speranza.
Beadle said the city was trying to gloss over these concerns to keep the focus away from what's really needed: lowering top speeds for motorists.
"It’s a pretty transparent lie in order for them to try to control the narrative," Beadle added. "The last thing they want to do is entertain in the discourse that everybody’s speed limit should be lowered."
The city has the power to lower motor vehicle speeds to 20 mph after the state legislature passed the so-called Sammy's Law, but Adams's DOT has used that power only on a few road segments and one small slow zone in each borough.
The agency also noted that several commenters were concerned about the dangers of capping e-bikes at far lower speeds than motor vehicles whizzing past them 20 miles per hour faster, but claimed that "DOT is not aware of any evidence that a differential speed limit would increase safety risk."
That statement flies in the face of a substantial body of research showing that larger differences in speeds produce more crashes between cars on highways, and the fact that a former DOT policy adviser sounded the alarm about the very issue. DOT's press office at the time dismissed the data because it did not cover different transportation modes on local streets.
The agency also waved away concerns that the rule will disproportionately affect immigrant delivery workers who rely on e-bikes for their work by claiming that e-bikes "traveling at high speeds present a serious danger to public safety," while not offering up any evidence that the rule will provide more safety.
"I don’t see them citing an actual data-driven justification for the rule," Beadle said.
DOT spokesperson Will Livingston admitted that pedestrian injuries caused by e-bike riders "remains low," but that there has been a "notable increase fatalities as e-bikes have gained popularity in New York City in comparison to traditional bikes."
Livingston reiterated that the studies of speed differentials "do not apply to the case at hand" because the research doesn't cover e-bikes, and the rep argued that Beadle's suggestions to cap speed limits in the city at 20 mph were "about changing the speed limit for motor vehicles," – even though the latter wrote it was about all vehicles.
'Bizzare' priorities
There was however a massive chorus of commenters calling on DOT to instead focus its energy on the real danger on the roads – drivers of cars and trucks, who account for more than 99 percent of all reported pedestrian injuries in the city. DOT deflected by saying that this rule "does not affect other rules addressing safety issues caused by motor vehicles."
That ignores Adams explicitly declaring that the city's Vision Zero initiative he inherited had focused on motor vehicles for "far too long," and following through with policies that might as well say, "Two wheels bad, four wheels good."
This is the same administration that has launched an evidence-free and violent crackdown against cyclists and e-bike riders giving them criminal summonses for low-level offenses, and the same DOT that ripped out a part of the Bedford Avenue protected bike lane.
That dogma is also evident in the fact that DOT has slow-walked or actively resisted proven street safety measures within its remit.
Just 2 percent of eligible streets have received slower speed limits from DOT since Sammy's Law took effect last year, according to Transportation Alternatives, and the agency has campaigned against universal bans on parking near intersections, a safety design known as daylighting.
"It's especially galling that the mayor is ramming through this ridiculous rule while the ability to slow down the dangerous drivers that are killing New Yorkers sits on his desk," Furnas said. "We need real solutions, not bizarre vendettas."
Lawsuit potential
Since the city published the rule proposal in June, lawyers have said that only the City Council can change regulations about e-bikes.
There is a bill by Manhattan Council Member Keith Powers, but only six of the body's 51 members have publicly signed on in support.
Officials have maintained that the DOT commissioner can generally set "rules and regulations for the conduct of vehicular and pedestrian traffic in the streets," under the City Charter, but the state law governing e-bikes specifically singled out the devices, saying that local governments need to make the change "by local law or ordinance," including to their "maximum speed."
"Albany implemented a comprehensive regulatory scheme for e-bikes in New York and provided within that that localities could go beyond that, but that they would need to pass a law," said Brandon Chamberlin, an attorney with the street safety-focused firm Adam White Law. "A more specific thing almost always trumps a more general thing."
Chamberlin said that one option to challenge the rule would be by filing a lawsuit under a state law known as Article 78, which allows people to challenge government decisions that exceed their authority.
"We’re going to look at it quite seriously," the attorney said.
