The Excerpt podcast: E-bikes are everywhere. Can we navigate with them safely?

On a special episode of The Excerpt podcast: E-bikes are faster, heavier and more dangerous than ever. But can we share the road with them safely? As micromobility devices continue to multiply, especially in urban areas, we look at ways to accommodate them that will keep all of us safer. Stefanie Seskin, Director of Policy and Practice at the National Association of City Transportation Officials, joins The Excerpt to talk about how we can get this right.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

Hello and welcome to The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, January 3rd, 2024, and this is a special episode of The Excerpt.

The pandemic supercharged a lot in the way of tech adaptation, most notably in delivery tech greatly expanding that workforce. And with that came the proliferation of e-bikes. These electric vehicles are now everywhere in urban areas. They're on the roads and they're on the sidewalks, and they're faster, heavier, and more dangerous than ever. How do we harness the convenience that comes with e-bikes while avoiding the risks? Here to help me dig into that question, I'm joined now by Stephanie Seskin, director of policy and practice at the National Association of City Transportation Officials. Stephanie, thanks for joining me.

Stephanie Seskin:

Thanks for having me.

Dana Taylor:

So let's start by talking about some stats, specifically accidents and deaths. E-bike riders are not only the cause of some collisions, they're oftentimes the victims too. Do cities like New York City have the infrastructure to accommodate an increasing number of these micromobility devices that are now sharing the road with other motorized vehicles, pedal bikes, and pedestrians?

Stephanie Seskin:

So I think on the whole cities know what they need to do to get there, but do they have that infrastructure now? The answer is probably no. In New York City, the Department of Transportation has taken steps to widen bike lanes where possible and otherwise add space and visibility to these spaces where we expect people to be using slightly faster bikes, e-bikes and e-scooters and other types of sort of small things with wheels, as we call them at [inaudible 00:01:51]. But it takes years sometimes to get a project from start to finish, and that process can take even longer when you start thinking about community engagement and other types of trade-offs. So I think cities are really... They know what they need to do, but getting there is a little challenging right now.

Dana Taylor:

This past September, after more than 10 years of operating in New York City, an electric city bike, a popular bicycle sharing program was involved in an accident which led to the first death of a pedestrian with that service. How safe are e-bikes?

Stephanie Seskin:

I think that on the whole, while that was certainly a tragic incident, and I know our hearts are with the family who suffered it as well as the bicyclist who was part of that, the majority of crashes are happening with motor vehicles, which are much heavier and move much faster than an e-bike does today. And when you think about the physics of mass and volume and speed, certainly we want to take more precautions so that the faster e-bikes are accommodated in the infrastructure. But the overwhelming problem today, especially for pedestrians, are people driving cars.

Dana Taylor:

But is it the speed of e-bikes, typically 20 miles per hour, that creates potentially dangerous situations where they're too fast for sidewalks and too slow to keep up with the flow of traffic on roads?

Stephanie Seskin:

So on local roads, especially in cities like New York, 20 is a totally reasonable speed limit for safety. So I think when we're talking about speeds and the potential for crash, we need to also be a little bit more mode neutral. It's not just e-bikes that are going fast, it's also cars or other vehicles like mopeds or motorcycles, all of which can go faster than a human being just on your own power can go. And so again, making sure that infrastructure is there to improve visibility, to add more space to allow for that reaction time between someone who is on a bike going 20 or is driving a car going 20 and being able to see a pedestrian ahead of them to move slowly through an intersection when they're turning and to use our traffic signals wisely so that we're not creating conflicts between users that could otherwise be separated.

Dana Taylor:

Well, e-bikes also use lithium ion batteries, which can pose a fire hazard. Who's responsible for making sure that the safest and highest quality batteries are used and for the general upkeep of community use e-bikes?

Stephanie Seskin:

So for shared systems like city bike, there is an operator who is contractually obligated to manage the batteries and any potential hazards from them. I think certainly in the early boom of free floating or dockless bikes where a lot of them had some battery problems, those have mostly been resolved in the more higher end and expensive bikes. When we see problems with battery fires relating to an e-bike, a lot of times that comes from a poorly produced battery, and those also tend to be cheaper. And so when you have users who are price constrained and can't get a safe battery option, that then becomes sort of their responsibility to take care of that battery, which is not necessarily appropriate. And where cities like New York have actually been doing quite a lot of work to support delivery workers, for example, who do use e-bikes and setting up infrastructure for safe battery charging and discounts on better e-bikes and batteries.

Dana Taylor:

Well, Stephanie, you brought up deliveries. In most major urban centers, there's been a proliferation of food delivery services that's often been blamed for posing a danger to both pedestrians and pedal bike riders. I'm thinking of Uber Eats, DoorDash, GrubHub, some of these services have incentivized risky riding by making it a fireable offense if orders aren't delivered within a very tight window. Are these delivery companies part of the conversation here? Who's liable when someone is injured by a food delivery driver?

Stephanie Seskin:

So liability is a tricky question to answer because the landscape is so varied. I think in a lot of places what has happened is those drivers are not treated as employees, and so therefore they are taking on more risk than the company is taking on. That said, I do think that there is a role for those operators, Uber Eats, GrubHub, et cetera, to be working with cities and legislators on proactive and appropriate regulations to ensure safety for everyone. As a consumer, you also have a role to play in choosing how you're getting things sometimes. And so you do have a bit of a shared responsibility in thinking through is it a place that maybe I could walk to or do I need that delivery from Amazon or someplace else overnight, or can it be something that takes a little bit longer and comes with a bit more safety? These are questions that we need our legislators to solve.

Dana Taylor:

Well, should cities that allow e-bikes have ongoing safety campaigns for riders as well as for anyone else on the roads and pedestrians on sidewalks?

Stephanie Seskin:

So certainly education around all of these new types of devices is necessary for anyone. And I think we'll find if we scratch a little bit below the surface of driver's education, for example, I haven't taken a driving test in a very long time and things that have changed, I wouldn't necessarily have a way of knowing if I weren't in this field. So there's definitely a role for everyone in keeping up to date with what is happening on streets and how to best move around in those types of spaces. And there are lots of cities that have really great educational campaigns targeted at different road users. But that said, education only goes so far when you're in these constraints of needing to deliver something quickly or feeling like you are getting off of work and you just want to get home and you're just angry at your boss, those are other situations that education doesn't address, but that infrastructure can.

And so really investing in design of our streets and thinking about that in a more holistic way, inclusive of all of these different ways that people are getting around now is really important and fundamental to set up our city in a way that everyone can just be out and kind of understand where they should be. And if they don't know that they're going so slow that if they make a mistake, it doesn't become a fatal mistake.

Dana Taylor:

Now you don't need a license to ride an e-bike. Do the same traffic rules apply to e-bike users as gas powered vehicles because of their speed capabilities?

Stephanie Seskin:

So that's a question that is sort of determined state by state, oddly enough, in terms of how e-bikes are classified. In most states, with few exceptions, people riding a pedal bike or an e-bike are held to the same rules of the road as other vehicles including trucks and cars and other things. So in the case of there's a red light, should you stop? In most states the answer is yes, no matter what vehicle you're in, biked car, you're stopping, same for stop signs and yield signs and other things like that.

Dana Taylor:

So does that mean for e-bike users who don't obey traffic laws going the wrong way, riding on sidewalks, that there are penalties in place?

Stephanie Seskin:

Yes. That they are going against the law. I would say also that in a lot of cases, the people who are not using the infrastructure in the way that it was designed in the ways that the examples that you gave are doing it for two reasons. One, because the infrastructure wasn't designed with them in mind. And so there are safe opportunities for movement that are not allowed. And so users are just taking advantage of them in the same way that drivers when they come to a stop sign are sometimes treat it as a yield rather than a full stop. So do cyclists. I would say on the other side though is there are a lot of people who are, especially in the delivery environment in New York City who are coming from other countries. They're not necessarily native English speakers. And some of the traffic laws are different from country to country. And so maybe importing things that are okay back at home that are not okay in America, and they don't yet know that. And so the importance of thinking through multilingual education and design is really important.

Dana Taylor:

Okay. So in your opinion, is there a place where things are just a mess and in need of stricter regulations?

Stephanie Seskin:

Yeah, we definitely need to be more holistic in how we're doing our regulations to make up for the fact that there is a lot of things that are happening on our street, but in some ways there's also a regulation that maybe we take a step back from and reexamine. And a weird example of this is actually some studies that have been done that show at complicated intersections, sometimes removing all of the traffic markings and all of the signage and just letting people navigate the space is safer than what we do here most often, which is put in traffic signals and crosswalks and lots of pavement markings to help people know where to go. So there are some places where maybe a step back is the right step, but we just need to spend some time figuring out where exactly that is and finding that sweet spot within this new environment of different vehicle devices out there.

Dana Taylor:

Well, then I'm also wondering, are there cities outside of the US that have safely integrated the use of e-bikes and other micromobility vehicles? Is there a good example of a city getting it right?

Stephanie Seskin:

So I think there definitely are, and we can look at specific places like in Paris for example. E-biking is hugely popular, widely used as part of their version of city bike and has really changed how people get around Paris. And part of that is also the fact that Mayor Hildalgo has also invested a lot in bike facilities and pedestrian spaces, and honestly taking some space away from vehicles, cars, so that there is more space and opportunity to use the smaller devices that we're talking about. But even when you go to a place that a lot of folks in the transportation world point to, so like Amsterdam, they still have problems with mopeds like using the bike lanes and what to do with them. So it's definitely an evolving conversation and no one has it right just yet. And that doesn't mean that America is so far behind either, which is good.

Dana Taylor:

Okay. And then finally, what needs to happen to make e-bikes safe going forward? Do the feds need to step in to help regulate them? What's the solution here?

Stephanie Seskin:

I think on e-bike safety, there are model legislations that most states have adopted to date that classify the vehicles into three different categories based on how much power and how much pedaling are involved. Not every state has done that yet, and that's definitely a state's right to do so. I do think that there is still an ongoing conversation that needs to be had about speed limits in our cities and where exactly different vehicles should be operating and making sure that more people are aware of what is happening and how they can participate sort of positively towards changing their streets to be safer for everyone regardless of what mode they have.

Dana Taylor:

Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us on The Excerpt.

Stephanie Seskin:

Thank you for having me.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks to our senior producer, Shannon Ray Green, for production assistance. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty. Let us know what you think of this episode by sending a note to [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with another episode of The Excerpt.