NYPD’s Tisch Skips City Council E-Bike Hearing Despite Focus on Enforcement

NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch blew off Wednesday’s City Council marathon hearing about e-bike safety — sending subordinates in her stead who didn’t even both to deliver a prepared testimony for a hearing that ultimately focused mostly on the NYPD’s purview, enforcement, rather than the record-setting 23 legislative proposals on the day’s agenda.

A police spokesperson told Streetsblog the NYPD had not been asked to share prepared testimony, but a rep for City Council Speaker Julie Menin (D-Manhattan) said legislators gave police officials the same ask they gave the two other departments at the hearing — both of which sent their top official to provide extensive written testimony and take hours of questions.

Commissioner Tisch instead spent the day at a welcome ceremony for the department’s new recruits, according to a post on X. In her place, NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Legal Matter Michael Gerber’s initial testimony consisted of all of 10 words: “We look forward to answering any questions you may have.”

A police spokesman insisted Tisch’s absence from the meeting was standard practice.

“The department sent our subject matter experts — the deputy commissioner of legal matters and chief of transportation — to participate and engage with the council in today’s hearing,” NYPD spokesman Brad Weekes told Streetsblog. “It’s not unusual for an agency to send subject matter experts to best address questions.”

Menin called the hearing address a concerns New Yorkers have over the behavior of e-bike riders — even though NYPD stats show pedestrians are more likely to be struck or injured by car or truck drivers, who have killed 20 cyclists, most of them on e-bikes, so far this year.

In total over 140 people have died in car crashes on city streets so far this year. None of them were killed by the riders of e-bikes or e-scooters. (A cyclist struck and killed a 41-year-old pedestrian in Central Park earlier this week — the first pedal bicyclist to kill a pedestrian since 2014.)

“Zero of those people have been killed by e-bikes or e-scooters,” said Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso testified to Council members. “Yet here we are at a hearing [on] 21 bills aimed at regulating e-bikes and e-scooters. None are about regulating dangerous driving and only two are about infrastructure.”

So far this year, 417 pedestrians have been injured in collisions with the riders of two-wheelers, that’s slightly up from 403 the year prior (through August), that includes pedal bikes, e-bikes, e-scooters, and moped riders. That is far below the amount of reported injuries pedestrians have suffered at the hands of car and truck drivers. Data from this year is incomplete, but last year a total of 9,114 pedestrians were injured on city streets.

At a press conference before the hearing, Menin told reporters she planned to hold another hearing on street safety more generally on Oct. 27.

Wednesday’s agenda included a whopping 23 individual e-bike legislative proposals — 21 bills and two resolutions calling on action from Albany — from requiring NYPD to use speed and power testing devices called dynamometers to measure whether a device is street-legal, to prohibiting the sale of the currently legal Class 3 e-bikes that can go up to 25 mph.

But the sheer amount of bills on the meeting’s agenda, which Menin suggested may be a record, made it impossible for Council members to talk about any one proposal at length with the agency reps.

Instead, each Council member presented their own legislation and their own grievances, often repeating the same lines of questioning.

“Because there was a blizzard of bills on the agenda people are mostly speaking from their own experience, whatever that’s worth,” said Riders Alliance Director of Policy and Communications Danny Pearlstein, who tuned into the hearing.

“That’s a recipe for a lot more heat than light on the topic, which is already a very heated topic. We didn’t find anything out at this hearing that we didn’t already know going in.”  

Instead of the legislation at hand, Council member questions focused overwhelmingly on the NYPD and other agencies’ enforcement of existing laws, including proposals to regulate the delivery app industry responsible for sending out around 80,000 mostly e-bike-riding workers onto city streets. E-bike critics jumped on concerns expressed by both city officials and legislators that enforcement could potentially target immigrant delivery workers, with the New York Post charging that officials “care more for delivery riders than victims.”

“It’s really unfortunate that everyone seems to be focusing only on delivery workers and apps as though no one else is on NYC’s streets or contributing to a lack of street safety,” said April Herms, the deputy director of the Worker’s Justice Project, which helps organize the Los Deliveristas Unidos labor union.

Members of the E-Vehicle Safety Alliance, who fervently support licensing and registration for all e-bikes, and are critical of the street safety advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, were also disheartened by the way the hearing was run.

“I just want to take a moment ahead of my testimony here to register the outrage which I actually found common ground with Transportation Alternatives today. We’re all ticked off that it takes four and a half hours to get the public’s input on this important legislation on street safety,” said Andrew Fine, an Upper East Side resident and one of the group’s leaders.

Answering Council member questions, NYPD officials reiterated the department’s ramped-up enforcement against people riding two-wheeled devices.

But Gerber and NYPD Chief of Transportation Olufunmilola Obe admitted their officials can’t really ever tell which e-bikes are legal or not. Legal e-bikes must have a motor of no more than 750 watts and can’t reach speeds of over 25 mph. NYPD has seized 10,080 mopeds and 1,206 e-bikes so far this year, but Gerber admitted the department doesn’t follow-up to determine whether the bikes were in fact street-legal.

“If it’s legal — whether it’s Class 1, Class 2 or Class 3 — in most situations, it’s not going to matter for us,” said Gerber when pressed by Council Transportation Chair Shaun Abreu (D-Manhattan). “Can we just tell by looking at the e-bike what the max speed is? No, the answer is no.”

Despite that knowledge deficit, Gerber said the department opposes Abreu’s bill to require the department to use dynamometers to test e-bike legality — because of questions of “procurement, cost, and operational functionality.” He told Abreu he would be willing to attend a demonstration of the technology.

Los Deliveristas Unidos also opposes the dynamometer bill, as well as a bill to ban the use (but not sale) of Class 3 e-bikes and another bill to force delivery apps to track worker riding habits.

“We cannot put workers’ livelihoods in the hands of delivery companies to police themselves, and we should not deploy more NYPD officers to target delivery workers,” said Executive Director Ligia Guallpa.

NYPD commissioners have been noticeably absent from “Vision Zero” public appearances since at least 2016 when then-Commissioner Bill Bratton, Tisch’s mentor, told the crowd at Transportation Alternatives’ Vision Zero Cities conference that he did not believe the city could achieve his boss then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s goal of zero traffic deaths.

“We’re not going to get to zero,” Bratton said at the time. “It’s a great goal, and we’re still striving … but the reality of it is much like the reality of crime. As long as we have humans who are walking and riding, bicycles and cars — as long as we have people, we will have crime.”

Bratton’s hosts in turn suggested the commissioner didn’t “fully understand the policy.” Bratton left the department six months later.

Wednesday’s City Council hearing had not ended at the time of this article’s publication — more than 10 hours after its scheduled start time.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly said Los Deliveristas Unidos opposes a bill backed by Transportation Alternatives to ban the sale of e-bikes.