Mamdani Commissioner Pledges to Hold App Companies Accountable for Road Safety
The city’s new leadership will hold app delivery companies responsible for their violent impact on traffic safety, Mayor Mamdani’s pick to run the city’s chief regulatory agency told Streetsblog in an exclusive interview at Thursday’s inauguration.
Speaking on the frigid City Hall Plaza, newly minted Department of Consumer and Worker Protection Commissioner Sam Levine pledged to push back on app company business models that pressure delivery workers to use e-bikes and cars recklessly.
“One of the things that I’m really interested in is: are these delivery companies making it impossible for deliveristas to actually earn pay because they’re setting such high volume quotas that deliveristas [are] putting people’s safety at risk, and people are having to choose between their livelihood and their safety,” Levin said. “I’m absolutely going to be having conversations with these companies to make sure that they’re not putting the safety of deliveristas at risk and also putting the broader safety of New Yorkers at risk.”
It’s the latest salvo against the app companies from the Mamdani team, which rolled out Levine’s appointment last month with an opening blast that accused the apps of “misclassifying” their workers as independent contractors. Levine, who worked in the Federal Trade Commission under President Biden, has called “ensuring that money and power cannot trample the rights and dignity of working people” his “life’s work.”
Levine and Mamdani are hardly the first city officials to talk a big game about reeling in app delivery companies.
In 2024, then-Mayor Eric Adams announced he would create a Department of Sustainable Delivery to regulate the industry. A leaked plan for the new agency promised to flip the industry on its head by forcing the companies to act more like employers who hire workers rather than technology platforms simply facilitating deliveries. But the proposal sat on former Council Speaker Adrienne Adams’s desk collecting dust and never came to fruition.
In the absence of legislative action, Mayor Adams’s attitude towards delivery workers went from promises of protection to siding with the corporations that workers accuse of exploitation. Last year, Adams launched a criminal crackdown on e-bike delivery workers, enacted a 15-mile-per-hour speed limit for e-bikes and vetoed a Council bill to expand the city’s delivery worker minimum wage to grocery delivery companies like Instacart, which the Council subsequently voted to override.
DCWP (which started distancing itself from Adams even before he left office) has also said it needs more funding to effectively expand delivery regulations. Mamdani pledged on the campaign trail to double the agency’s budget.
Levine on Thursday said he will do as much as possible with the resources he has.
“The fact is we are vastly outgunned when it comes to some of the largest corporations in the world ripping off the people of the city of New York,” he told Streetsblog. “That said, I want to be really clear, whatever resources we have, and they are too few, we are going to use them as much as we can to go after the biggest harms facing New Yorkers, the biggest threats to affordability in this city.”
— with Sophia Lebowitz
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