First, the good news: the Brooklyn-based company Revel has announced that it will end its moped-sharing program, freeing New York streets from the tyranny of its two-wheelers, which turned the city into a bad “Mad Max” remake.
Now, the bad news: Thousands of more Citi e-bikes are set to hit city streets by the end of next year.
They’re exactly what those of us who are already on edge of over Gaza, subway-pushers and $29 hot dogs don’t need.
Are our leaders high on goofballs — the heroin-methamphetamine compound — when they make decisions that impact our daily lives?
Or are they merely smoking adulterated, mind-numbing pot from the thousands of unlicensed dealers?
Mayor Adams and Department of Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez were plainly under the influence of something when they announced a deal last week to let Citi Bike double the number of e-bikes in its 27,000-strong fleet to 10,000 by the end of 2024.
The millions who get around on foot will soon face greater peril than ever. Like many elected officials, Adams is cowed by Transportation Alternatives lobbyists who show up at City Hall and community board meetings and shout down opposition. The Big Apple is in the throes of so many crises with gutlessness at the top of the list
The goal of having more e-bikes to “promote micromobility” is the micro-brain pipedream of woke types who’d ban cars altogether if they could. It’s a tasteless, heartless move, coming less than two months after a Citi e-bike struck and killed beloved Chinatown school teacher Priscilla Loke, believed to be the first Citi Bike pedestrian fatality.
City Hall’s impulse to remove whatever sense of safety our streets and sidewalks once had is of a piece with its seemingly turning a blind eye to shoplifting, illegal pot-vending and forever-standing scaffolds.
Once merely congested, our streets are now the anarchic domain of drunk motorists, wrong-way cyclists — both motorized and analog — and tourist-schlepping pedicabs that round corners like rogue Harley-Davidsons.
Now, get ready for thousands more Citi Bike riders who don’t know how to ride. Although not usually aggressive, they’re as scary as expletive-shouting sociopaths who zoom by at speeds appropriate to UCI Road World Championships.
Having learned to ride a bike when I was 8-years-old, I consider myself qualified to spot those who don’t belong on two wheels. Most Citi Bikers clearly never learned how to pedal and keep their balance at the same time.
They wobble on their wheels like tipsy reverends, leaving us clueless as to their next move. They start to go to your left, then to your right, only avoiding catastrophe with last minute maneuvers.
As my colleague Nicole Gelinas recently pointed out, “Many Citi Bike riders have no experience driving a motor vehicle or motorcycle” and might not know that moving at 18 mph — which supposedly is Citi e-bikes’ top speed —“is dangerous to themselves and to pedestrians.”
I once wrote tongue-in-cheek that crossing a street was so dangerous, pedestrians should have to sign liability release to step off a curb.
That was in (slightly) less insane times — that is, May 2022, when the number of daily Citi Bike rides was 30% fewer than today’s roughly 126,000.
But once the e-fleet expansion takes effect, an armor suit might be more appropriate.
It might have protected my friend Doree Lewak, a former New York post writer, who was struck and nearly killed by a wrong-way e-biker on Sixth Avenue and West 37th Street in 2019.
Or “Gone Girl” actress Lisa Banes who died of brain injuries after she was struck by an electric scooter —a close e-bike cousin — on the Upper West Side in 2021.
Or poor Priscilla Loke, an innocent New Yorker merely trying to cross the street, whose tragedy surely won’t be the last.