Cycling Advocate Offers His Spin On the E-bike Dilemma
The Village Sun
July 25th, 2024
By Otto Fritton
https://thevillagesun.com/cycling-advocate-offers-his-spin-on-the-e-bike-dilemma
Four years ago, electric bikes were riding high in New York City. They allowed food delivery drivers — often hailed as heroes of the pandemic — to rapidly deliver our highly-anticipated takeout orders.
Fast-forward to today, though, with the pandemic in the rear-view mirror, and popular opinion on electric vehicles has shifted dramatically, with many people now considering them dangerous. With the streets once again full of pedestrians, electric micro-mobility vehicles — often e-bikes ridden by delivery workers — are often seen whisking through red lights, motoring along sidewalks and going the wrong way on streets and in bike lanes.
However, according to longtime bicycling advocate Bill Di Paola, the current situation is similar to that of 20 years ago.
“I always look at stuff on a positive scale,” Di Paola said “There are a lot of complaints about these electric bikes. However, there were a lot of complaints about bicycling years ago, too.”
An environmental strategist as well as a biking booster, Di Paola has worked to improve public opinion on cycling. When the biking movement burgeoned in New York, public reception was not fully positive, sometimes even hostile.
As the founder of the environmental organization Time’s Up!— which does educational outreach and direct action to promote a more sustainable, less toxic city — Di Paola was a key figure in the creation of Critical Mass, basically “street takeover rides” meant to alter public opinion about urban cycling.
“This change to biking in the city was not accepted too well by the city,” Di Paola recalled. “We had to get people biking, so we began creating group bike rides. What happens in a group ride is people are gaining confidence to ride a bike. Every month, we were gaining about 1 percent more bikes. By a certain time, we had this thing called the Critical Mass.”
Thirty-one years ago, the first Critical Mass ride, led by Time’s Up!, took place between Washington Square Park and the Astor Place “Cube.” Less than one year after the start of the San Francisco Critical Mass — the country’s first — the idea had arrived in New York. According to the Times Up! Web site, the event was “formed with the premise that the best way for cyclists in the city to promote cycling visibility and safety was to ride together in a group.”
The number of cyclists at local Critical Mass rides swelled in 2004 when George W. Bush and the Republican National Convention came to town and for a few years afterward, as the monthly event morphed into more of a freewheeling protest. It became a game of cat and mouse with police. But with the city’s eventual rollout of more bike lanes, the street-occupying ride became more low key.
Returning to today, Di Paola agrees regulations on e-bikes must be tightened to ensure pedestrian safety, yet feels it isn’t right or even feasible to remove electric vehicles outright from the streets. Although delivery e-bikers’ reputation as “heroes” may have dimmed, the majority of them are struggling — with many of them immigrants — to obtain a better life.
As a positive example, Di Paola cited an e-bike company, JOCO, with which he has had good experiences. Founded in New York City three years ago, JOCO provides e-bikes, mainly catering to delivery drivers, at more than 50 locations around the city. One of JOCO’s bases is in the East Village. The city has sued the company, arguing that Citi Bike has an exclusive contract for bike-sharing here; but JOCO countered that its bikes operate from privately owned locations.
“It allows them to make a living wage,” Di Paola said of the delivery workers. “And, you know, they support them, and they have events for them, and they try to teach them.”
The veteran activist noted he orders food from the delivery apps and, as a result, often talks with the busy “deliveristas” about their jobs and the challenges they face.
“You know, any kind of new technology, it’s going to come, we can’t stop it,” Di Paola reflected. “It’s just we have to figure out how it can be safer and work together with the existing situation.”