By: Hadassa Kalatizadeh

E-bikes zigzaging around cars and zooming across sidewalks, are accused of making the streets a “nightmare” for residents.

E-bikes gained popularity during the pandemic, allowing food delivery riders (who were then considered “essential workers”) to make faster deliveries. The pandemic has thankfully ended, but the popularity of home deliveries has lingered on. As per a recent article in the NY Times, electronic bikes have also remained popular, for delivery drivers as well as commuters, but with increased traffic for both vehicles and pedestrians, many residents feel this has made the streets more dangerous. “In the last three years there’s been an enormous shift. The quality of life has gone down.” said Susan Simon, a NY resident since the 1970s. “The streets are very dangerous. “What used to be a wonderful walking city for tourists, for pedestrians, has become something of a nightmare,” Simon said.

She noted that e-bikes are faster and heavier than regular bikes, increasing the risk. In 2024, there have already been seven million ride rentals on electric Citi Bikes, per city data. Commuters and delivery drivers find e-bikes help get them places faster—which for delivery and food apps translates into more orders fulfilled. “People got to understand, we’re working,” says Elijah Orlandi, who makes Grubhub deliveries after his 9 to 5 job.

He concedes that “There are scenarios where people have the right to be upset,” admitting he has seen e-bikes “swerving in between cars and all that kind of stuff.” He claims though that the drivers are just trying to keep up with demand. “Sometimes you’ll be going somewhere and Grubhub will send you another order, and then no matter what you do, you’re going to be late,” said Orlandi. “So that’s why you’ll see a lot of people rushing.”

Zoey Laskaris, a researcher at CUNY, who together with Mustafa Hussein recently published a study that found that food delivery gig workers in NYC themselves face a high risk of injury and assault, says that to some extent New Yorkers are part of the culture to blame for the speeding e-bikes. “We’ve all created this scenario,” Laskaris said, “where there’s ‘on demand, I want things delivered.’”

In the Upper West Side, for instance, there are some 14,000 food delivery orders a day, by some counts. That is the neighborhood where Pamela Manasse was hit by an electric vehicle in 2022 and suffered a severe brain injury.

Manasse, together with Janet Schroeder, went on to found the NYC E-Vehicle Safety Alliance, which works to promote regulations for e-bike riders. Per the NY Times, the alliance is pushing a bill to ban e-bikes and other e-vehicles from parks and greenways. It also wants a requirement for e-bikes to be registered and riders licensed.

Schroeder said their organization includes 74 people who have been injured by e-bikes. In nearly all those cases the rider fled the scene immediately, she said. “It’s a free-for-all with no consequences whatsoever for the people on these bikes and mopeds,” Schroeder said.

The city’s bike lanes are crowded with over 70,000 delivery workers, says Meera Joshi, New York’s deputy mayor for operations. “We want to be accommodating to the convenience of technology and modern life,” she said, “but there’s no question we need to cut down on the Frogger feeling on our streets.”