Hoboken Pol: E-Bike Registration Not Working

Take a test, wear a vest?

A Hoboken politician says the city’s commercial e-bike registration program isn’t working — and maintains that safe street redesigns remain the key to reducing crashes and rule-breaking by delivery workers.

At a panel discussion on Wednesday, City Council Member Emily Jabbour disputed the effectiveness of the city’s “take a test, wear a vest” approach to regulating commercial delivery workers, a controversial e-bike registration ordinance that went into effect this June. 

“This ‘take a test wear a vest’ idea is proving to be not super effective at the moment,” Jabbour said at the first day of the Transportation Alternatives “Vision Zero Cities” conference.

“Doing ongoing education outreach, informing folks on the local laws, and trying to put more infrastructure in, and continuing to encourage people to use those safe spaces and creating bike lanes is kind of the only way to really continue to move the needle on [safety],” added Jabbour, who is also chair of the Hoboken Council’s Parking and Transportation Committee.

The ordinance was part of a set of laws that require commercial delivery workers who use e-bikes or mopeds to register with the city, obtain a license from the Hoboken Parking Utility, pass a safety quiz, and pay a $5 registration fee. Afterwards, the registered workers are required to wear yellow safety vests with a unique registration number on the back.

The idea of registering e-bikes was controversial from the start. The mayor even penned an open letter to the City Council which said the law would be a burden on the city’s resources, force police interactions with vulnerable and sometimes undocumented communities, and that it didn’t do enough to force app delivery companies, who are the ones profiting, to take control of their workforce, according to coverage by TAP Into Hoboken. 

But the sponsoring Council members Paul Presinzano, Ruben Ramos and Michael Russo cited safety concerns as their motivation to pass the law. But are these e-bikes really unsafe? 

Hoboken is a Vision Zero success story, with zero fatalities since Mayor Ravi Bhalla announced the initiative in 2019.

“Sometimes people like to give blanket statements like, ‘It’s so much less safe now with all these e-bikes everywhere,’ but the data doesn’t lie: we haven’t had a traffic fatality in seven years in Hoboken, and actually crashes involving pedestrians and bicyclists are down 67 percent,” said Jabbour.

City residents’ growing use of food delivery apps, like Uber Eats and GrubHub, has led to more delivery workers on e-bikes riding on the streets to do their jobs. Anti-e-bike groups often leave out the fact that the workers are performing an in-demand service, hoping the workers will simply stop using public infrastructure. 

“Residents rely on those deliveries, but then they get frustrated about how it looks on our streetscape,” said Jabbour.

Another of the panel’s speakers said the growing focus on e-bike registration, and banning e-bikes from certain areas, distracts from real street-safety improvements. 

“Unsafe situations arise because of a lack of safe infrastructure for people to ride,” said Christy Kwan, a livable communities policy adviser for AARP. “I would encourage pushing back on municipalities who are trying to do bans, because it’s really that our built environment is created and de-prioritizes people. It is important to advocate for those design changes for good curbside management practices.”

The Vision Zero Cities conference continues this week at New York University. Click here for info.