Hell on wheels now has no limit.
At least no speed limit, after City Hall gave e-bikers license to run roughshod over New York City.
As of March 27, the NYPD will no longer issue criminal summonses to e-bikers and cyclists for traffic offenses, spiking an Adams-era policy to criminally charge reckless riders for blowing stop signs or illegally zipping along city sidewalks.
This new edict guarantees an untold number of future accidents in the city.
I shudder to think of the loss of limb, life and liberty as a result of this outrageous new effort, which is meant to protect delivery drivers at the expense of everyday New Yorkers.
It’s an issue that hits close to home, because it happened to me.
On a gorgeous summer day in 2019, I was mowed down by a speeding food delivery worker — going the wrong direction on a one-way street and on the opposite side from the bike lane — on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, leaving me for dead.
The accident cost me six top teeth and damaged 11 others. It decimated my jaw and left me with an extensive nose fracture and permanent bone loss. I’ve had five surgeries.
For months after the hit-and-run, it was difficult to speak, and the radiating pain was so intense that even modest movement — from laughing to getting dressed to turning on the shower — was wrenching.
I have medical and cosmetic daily reminders of that e-biker violently plowing into me. Some injuries are permanent and will be with me every day for the rest of my life, and I face even more surgeries in my future.
I am so grateful to have survived, but years of painful surgeries and trauma made the city I love feel like a grid of doom.
Nearly seven years later, not a day goes by when I don’t think about the hit-and-run that happened so fast, I wasn’t sure if I was alive or dead.
Former Mayor Adams’ common-sense crackdown helped make New York safer.
The city saw 15,000 recorded e-bike or bicycle collisions in 2024, according to data. By the next year, which kicked off the crackdown, it ended with 7,100 such collisions.
Thanks to the Mamdani administration’s new efforts, bikers will merely be issued toothless civil summonses for street violations.
And that’s a problem, one law enforcement source told me, because “Deterrence is a powerful tool. Imagine the city comes out and says no more DUI enforcement — how many more drunk drivers will feel emboldened?”
Now, the source predicted, bikers will tool around with impunity “big time. They know nothing can happen to them.”
As NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch wrote in a Post op-ed last year, “When vehicle drivers fail to respond to a traffic summons, their licenses can be suspended. But e-bikes do not require any license, so their operators can simply ignore a traffic summons with virtually no meaningful repercussions.”
Her steadfastness came on the heels of the death of Luis Cruz, a 49-year-old Brooklyn man who was struck last March by an e-bike driver and died from head trauma.
Just like Lisa Banes, the “Gone Girl” actress who died from traumatic brain injuries sustained in a 2021 hit-and-run scooter accident in Manhattan.
Just like Theresa Valenti, killed last October after she stepped off a bus near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, on her way to work.
And even just like too many e-bike riders themselves.
With bravery and backbone, Tisch insisted the measure wasn’t a “war on e-bikes,” adding that closing that loophole by issuing c-summonses was “the only real option available under the law to hold reckless e-bike operators accountable.”
Common-sense practices such as criminal summonses are the best way to ensure no New Yorker has to risk life and limb when going about their day.
But our woke City Hall, which prides itself on precious safe spaces, just ensured we have less on our streets and sidewalks.
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