As Bike Traffic Soars, So Do Pedestrian Injuries—But Who’s Counting?

As any pedestrian can attest, the number of bikes on New York City streets has soared since the pandemic. And a combination of environmental consciousness and the delivery-app revolution has made New York something it had never been: a biking city.

Delivery bikes, e-bikes, Citi Bikes: Pedal bikes are seemingly everywhere—soaring along bike lanes, speeding through crosswalks, and weaving around pedestrians on sidewalks. An increasing number of e-scooters, skateboards, mopeds, and even unicycles add to the hazards.

Ruth Oistenau, 77, and her husband, Valery, 81, can attest to these new dangers. They were holding hands on the sidewalk as they waited for a walk light in front of their East Village home. A bicyclist “came right at us,” Ruth recalls. Both were knocked down. Ruth hit her head. Valery’s chest was hurt.

At the emergency room, they were told their injuries did not require hospitalization. The hospital told the couple it was filing a report of the accident, but when Ruth followed up with a call to the police precinct, they “brushed it off,” she said.

The Oistenaus say they were traumatized by the incident and now are more afraid to stroll around the city. There are easily hundreds of such stories. Or perhaps thousands. The incident illustrates the point that officials simply don’t know how many pedestrians are being hurt in encounters with bikes or other micro-mobility vehicles. Or, for that matter, which kinds of bikes are causing incidents, an important issue as the focus of most policymaking has been on the proliferation of e-bikes used for delivery services.

Asked about it at a recent press briefing, Mayor Eric Adams said, “Bikes must follow the same laws that vehicles follow. A lot of people don’t realize that bikes must follow those same laws. And a police officer should take a report if someone is a victim of a bike crash; you know, it’s not only vehicle crashes, but bike crashes. You should also take a report—and scooters as well.”

But therein lies a big part of the problem.

The city’s Department of Transportation tracks reported collisions of all sorts, between motor vehicles and bikes, motor vehicles and pedestrians, and between bikes and pedestrians.

But the department acknowledges it only tracks collisions reported to the police. Many, possibly most, incidents between bikes of all sorts and pedestrians are not reported. Due to a change in reporting requirements quietly adopted by the NYPD in 2020, the department no longer takes reports unless a victim dies or suffers a grave injury such as the loss of a limb.

“We need public-health reporting of injuries to know the scope of the problem,” said Jonathan Kirschner, a physiatrist at the Hospital for Special Surgery.

Based on the procession of injuries he sees at work, Dr. Kirschner says he believes the incidence of injuries from encounters between pedestrians and bikes is on the rise. In addition to pedestrians hit by bikes, Dr. Kirschner says he sees many patients injured when trying to avoid being hit by bikes. They fall against curbs or trip while dodging bikes or various e-motorized conveyances. “And there also are all the people on scooters and skateboards.”

Liability

The policy focus has been on e-bikes. Mayor Adams just announced an effort to impose a 15-mile-per-hour speed limit on e-bikes, although human-powered bikes can go just as fast—or even faster downhill. And the issues of responsibility and liability apply to any situation where a pedestrian is injured in an encounter with any kind of bike.

“We have one of those cases,” reported New York personal injury lawyer Marea Wachsman, founding partner of Schreier and Wachsman. “The problem is that the bike riders cause severe injuries and have no insurance or money to pay damages to the victims. The Citi Bikes and rental e-bikes and mopeds, etcetera, are a real menace.”

The Oistenaus’ case is typical of the gap between incidents and those that get reported. The hospital sometimes files a report, but often that information doesn’t make its way into the NYPD statistics. The Oistenaus certainly suffered serious emotional injury and pain and discomfort after the accident, though not life-altering physical injury.

But an Upper East Side pedestrian surely did.

While walking her dog at lunchtime on a spring morning, one Upper East Side resident, age 72, was hit from behind by a bike that swerved around the corner and hit her in the back, knocking her down. Witnesses came to her aid, including three Lenox Hill doctors on their lunch break. They helped her into an ambulance, and a witness rode with her to the hospital. A neighbor took her dog home.

The victim, whose name we are not using for medical privacy reasons, was hospitalized for three days with what she described as “terrible” vertigo. Surgeons had to clamp her skull in three places where it had been fractured. Her recovery took months. Five years later, she still suffers recurrences of the vertigo. “I’m extremely careful with any kind of movement of my head now,” she says. She tried to report the episode but found her police precinct “only concerned with assaults.” The Mayor’s office never returned her call.

The city Transportation Department, which has put tremendous investment into bike lanes and other infrastructure to make biking safer for cyclists, emphasizes that most fatal accidents in the city involved motor vehicles hitting one another, cyclists, or pedestrians.

That is likely true. But because of inadequate recordkeeping, officials don’t really know. Based on the data as it exists, about 8 percent of all injuries to pedestrians are caused by encounters with bikes.

No data, of course, addresses the palpable and growing sense on the sidewalks that cyclists have become a danger for New York pedestrians. Like many accident victims, the UES victim says her experience has made her “more cautious, less adventurous”—a feeling she shares with many other victims.

Gap in reporting

The gap in reporting already has become an issue in the NYPD’s crackdown on reckless bike riding. Initially, the department said the crackdown was guided by a close look at the data, a puzzling claim since there isn’t much.

But pressed by Streetsblog, a news website that covers the competition for access to city streets, the department acknowledged that its crackdown was prompted not by any numbers but rather by “an outpouring” at community meetings of complaints about e-bikes.

Whatever its genesis, the NYPD crackdown, which involves giving criminal summonses to cyclists breaking traffic rules, has been derided by progressive legislators as needlessly criminalizing delivery riders, who are heavily immigrants.

But the department says previous efforts to give traffic tickets were ineffective, because cyclists are unlicensed and therefore, unlike motorists, don’t risk losing their licenses and can’t be tracked to pay fines.

A case in point was a 2022 public-awareness campaign by the Adams administration dubbed, “Stop, Let Them Cross.”

The new rule required cyclists to fully stop at unregulated intersections if a pedestrian was present and allow the pedestrian to complete crossing the intersection. The campaign appeared in social media and in community and ethnic media, the city said at the time.

“The message also underscores the importance of slowing down and being aware of pedestrians while driving in New York City,” the announcement from the Department of Transportation said.

If the campaign had a material effect on the conduct of cyclists, it was hard to notice at Manhattan intersections monitored by Straus News in recent weeks.

Beginning in 2011 the City Council required the Department of Transportation to report and keep track of collisions between pedestrians and bikes. Amid Covid, they required the department to separate e-bikes from pedal bikes.

The department shares this data once a year.

Even though incomplete, the data does appear to capture a steady increase in pedestrians injured by traditional pedal bicycles.

In 2021 there were 142 pedestrians reported injured by bikes in Manhattan. That rose to 168 in 2022 and 206 in 2023. In all three years Manhattan pedestrians suffered more accidents than any other borough.

The report for 2024 is due this month.

At a press conference with Mayor Adams on Tuesday, June 10, a Streetsblog reporter repeated that about 96 percent of accidents involving pedestrians involve motor vehicles, not bikes. Adams responded that even that was too high.

Have you been hit by a pedal bike or e-bike in NYC? If so, please fill out the form below to help with this developing story.