Not content with allowing more than one dozen homeless individuals freeze to death on New York City’s sidewalks, Mayor Zohran Mamdani now thinks it’s just fine to let people be mowed down by electric bikes. Turns out, wokeness in the hands of a child-mayor can be deadly.
A new report from NYU Langone Health researchers citing a rise in brain and spine injuries from e-bike accidents reminds us of the dangerous paths Mamdani is traveling. Is the problem getting worse? One tally shows E-bike crashes surging by 21.5% between 2024 and 2025; but you don’t need studies – just ask any New Yorker.
In a sop to the illegal immigrant community, Mamdani announced earlier this year that starting March 27, the NYPD would no longer issue criminal summonses to riders of e-bikes or regular bicycles for breaking traffic laws. People running red lights or going the wrong way on sidewalks, endangering pedestrians, will now receive merely a slap on the wrist.
Why the pivot from the previous practice of handing out criminal summonses for e-bikers and cyclists guilty of moving violations? Because cyclists caught for breaking the law actually had to show up in court to face the charges and if they failed to do so, cops could issue warrants for their arrest. An arrest warrant could risk getting illegals snatched up by ICE. That, in our misguided sanctuary city, is a no-no, pedestrian safety be damned.
Heaven forbid we actually deport lawbreakers who are in our country illegally; better to let these e-bikers off the hook, even as pedestrian injuries and deaths rise.
Apologists note that only a handful of pedestrian injuries each year result from e-bikes; cars and trucks do far more damage. They wail that drivers of those vehicles can pay traffic tickets online or by mail and are not required to show up in court. That is true, but a great many illegal immigrants who work as e-bikers delivering food around the city do not have a mailing address; their vehicles often have no registration or license plate and they frequently have no drivers’ licenses. How to police a crew that is effectively off the grid?
As NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch wrote in an op-ed defending the prior policy, “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.”
A writer on StreetsBlog NYC, who supports the mayor’s move, writes that he visited an NYC court in February and “observed Criminal Court Judge John Walsh dismiss or issue mere warnings for most of the roughly three-dozen summonses he heard due to insufficient details or errors in the NYPD-issued tickets.” His conclusion? That the criminalization of cyclist moving violations was not effective, since the judge dismissed them, and unfair to boot.
This Mamdani-apologist fails to consider that requiring these drivers to show up in court is a penalty of itself, taking time out of their workday. That may be the point.
He also questions just how many people have been hurt by the e-bikes, and charges that concern about the change of policy is “right-wing” misinformation. He says there is not sufficient data to justify a crackdown on e-bikes.
I wonder if he lives in New York. Those of us who walk the city’s sidewalks are routinely threatened by e-bikers breaking the law. They are a menace, charging the wrong way down one-way streets, driving on sidewalks and blasting through stop signs. I don’t know anyone who has not been hit by a bike or been terrorized by a close call.
Tisch told a city council group last year: “This is not a war on e-bikes, this is a response to very real concerns that are widely held across virtually every borough, every New Yorker in this city.” She is completely correct.
But then these are just normal citizens, people who are walking to work or taking their kids to school. It has long since been obvious to most of us that we are not Mamdani’s top concern. Criminals, illegal aliens and others who threaten our way of life come first.
That’s reality in Mamdani’s New York.
