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E-Scooter Driver Clips De Blasio While Walking In Lower Manhattan
By
Christopher Robbins
Published Sep 29, 2020
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By
Christopher Robbins
Published Sep 29, 2020
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Mayor Bill de Blasio was grazed by an e-scooter driver on Monday morning in Lower Manhattan. According to the NY Post, the mayor was walking at Pearl and Water Streets at around 10:15 a.m. in the course of visiting a school, when a man and his 7-year-old daughter on an electric scooter "ran into his arm."
The mayor was uninjured, but the rider and his daughter fell from the scooter and suffered minor scrapes; de Blasio reportedly "rushed to make sure the man and his daughter were OK and gave them a Kleenex," the Post reported.
De Blasio press secretary Bill Neidhardt told Gothamist, "The Mayor had a walk sign."
Neidhardt added, “City Hall encourages everyone to obey traffic signals and wear a helmet."
Uptown, near Columbus Circle, an 82-year-old woman was reportedly hit by a Revel scooter driver on Tuesday morning as she was crossing the street.
In 2019 there were 165,707 crashes that did not cause injuries in New York City—roughly 450 every single day. There were 45,330 crashes on city streets in 2019 that resulted in injury or death.
At least 170 people have been killed in traffic violence in New York City this year so far, including nine children; 220 were killed in 2019.
New York City's policy on e-bikes and e-scooters has long been plagued by inconsistency and confusion. Meanwhile, motor vehicle traffic continues to clog city streets as New Yorkers avoid public transit during the pandemic, and restaurants are forced to serve patrons in the street to stay afloat. Bicycle traffic measured over the bridges into Manhattan has soared.
For years, Mayor de Blasio directed the NYPD to seize the kind of throttle-based e-bikes popularized by immigrant delivery workers, despite no evidence to prove they were more dangerous than regular bikes, and as companies like Amazon, UPS, and Citi Bike employed essentially the same technology without incident.
Last year, New York State finally legalized e-bikes and e-scooters, with a specific prohibition on e-scooter pilots in Manhattan. (Revel gets around this because they are technically Class B limited use motorcycles, or mopeds). After a series of rider deaths, Revel instituted a handful of new safety policies.) E-bikes are also technically illegal on the Hudson River Greenway, another carve-out .
The City Council passed laws legalizing electric bikes and scooters them this summer, and opened the door for a scooter pilot in March of 2021.
This story has been changed to correctly reflect Revel's state classification.
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Christopher Robbins
Christopher Robbins is a New York City reporter covering transportation, affordable housing, local politics, and criminal justice. His work has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Village Voice and The New York Times. Chris is a graduate of Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Virginia, and enjoys biking to Fort Tilden in the summertime.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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