NEW YORK — The coronavirus pandemic has upended many of the familiar routines that make up everyday urban life, bringing tectonic shifts in office culture, classroom learning and online shopping.
Now it is transforming the way people move around the nation’s largest city. A boom in electric-powered mobile devices is bringing what is likely to be a lasting change and a new safety challenge to New York’s vast and crowded street grid.
The devices have sprouted up all over. Office workers on electric scooters glide past Manhattan towers. Parents take electric bikes to drop off their children at school. Young people have turned to electric skateboards, technically illegal on city streets, to whiz through the far corners of New York.
Although many of these riders initially gave up their subway and bus trips because of the lower virus risk of traveling outdoors, some say they are sticking with their e-mobility devices even as the city begins to move beyond the pandemic.
“I use the scooter for everything — it’s really convenient,” said Shareese King, 41, a Bronx resident who deleted the Uber app from her phone after she started running her errands on an electric scooter.
Electric bikes, scooters and other devices are, in many cases, made for urban life because they are affordable, better for the environment, take up little, if any, street space for parking and are just fun to use, said Sarah Kaufman, associate director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University.
“In cities, many people understand there is a right-size vehicle for getting around — and that’s human size — you don’t need to put out an SUV’s worth of carbon emissions just to go to work,” she said.
Across the nation, cities have increasingly embraced electric bikes and scooters as a way to get more people out of cars and fill the gap in urban transportation systems for trips that are too far to walk but too close for the subway or bus, according to transportation officials and experts.
Credit: NYT
Credit: NYT
Even before the pandemic, electric scooter share programs had spread to more than 100 cities, including Atlanta, Los Angeles and Washington, since 2017, according to the National Association of City Transportation Officials. Total rides surged 130% to 88.5 million in 2019 from 38.5 million the year before.
Many cities saw scooter ridership soar during the pandemic. Seattle’s scooter-share program has grown to 1.4 million rides since beginning just over a year ago. In Portland, Oregon, rides nearly doubled to 762,812 this year through September from 385,422 rides for the same period in 2020.
Still, the e-mobility boom has brought significant safety challenges to New York’s already-congested streets. At least 17 people have been killed while riding electric mobility vehicles this year, according to city officials. Revel, which operates an electric moped share program in the city, voluntarily shut it down for a month last year after three riders were killed.
E-mobility crashes have also killed three pedestrians this year, including actress Lisa Banes, who was knocked down by a hit-and-run scooter rider on the Upper West Side.
“In cities, many people understand there is a right-size vehicle for getting around — and that's human size — you don't need to put out an SUV's worth of carbon emissions just to go to work."
Other kinds of e-mobility devices are illegal, including skateboards, unicycles, hoverboards and Segways.
“I know there is a concern and a perception about the safety of new forms of e-mobility devices,” said Hank Gutman, the city transportation commissioner. “That is an issue we are looking at.”
City officials said they have installed more protected bike lanes; launched a public education campaign about which e-mobility devices are legal; set strict safety guidelines; and closely monitored the city’s first e-scooter share pilot program in the Bronx.
The city speed limit is up to 25 mph for e-bikes and 15 mph for e-scooters. Riders are required to stay off sidewalks and are allowed to travel in bike lanes and on those streets that have a top speed of up to 30 mph. They must stop at red lights, go in the same direction as traffic and yield to pedestrians.
Although the overall numbers of electric bikes and scooters in New York are not tracked, many companies and stores have reported increasing sales. Unagi, a high-end electric scooter company, has seen a tenfold increase in its New York City sales and subscription plans, which provide personal scooters for $49 a month.
Chartior, in SoHo, has sold thousands of its premium electric scooters and gets about 60 calls a day for new orders, owner Ben Hen said.
Samuel Schwartz, a former city traffic commissioner, said the city needed a comprehensive plan to address the e-mobility boom. “The streets were not made for the e-mobility vehicles,” he said. “We have to look at this systematically and not just single out e-bikes and e-scooters. We have to redefine our streets.”
City officials are testing the electric scooters in the northeast Bronx by providing up to 3,000 stand-up and sit-down e-scooters, unlocked through phone apps. Each scooter starts at $1 and costs between 30 and 39 cents per minute, with discounts for low-income residents. Scooters are parked in designated corrals or on sidewalks.
The city requires program users to be at least 18 years old, and to complete safety training and pass a safety quiz on the app.
Some residents complain that people ride on sidewalks, fight over the scooters and leave them everywhere. “I think they bring more problems to the community,” said Awilda Torres, 76, a retired hospital worker.
But others count on the scooters.
Tyasia Washington, 29, rides one from her home to the closest subway station, where she boards a train to her marketing job in Manhattan. “It’s a long walk,” she said.
