Thursday’s Headlines: Tisch Comes Clean Edition

After nearly two weeks of silence, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch finally came clean on Wednesday about her department’s crackdown on cyclists — in an op-ed in the New York Post.

Tisch took to the Tabloid of Record to essentially lie about the extent of the crackdown — claiming NYPD had brought down the gauntlet only on electric bikes and only for six serious violations. Streetsblog’s reporting puts the lie to both claims: Plenty of people riding non-electric bikes have have gotten caught in the sweep, and face criminal charges for violations as small as wearing headphones or stopping ahead of the painted stop line at an intersection.

Tisch, who has not commented otherwise on the crackdown, did sort of address Streetsblog’s coverage — dismissing us as “critics” who “have suggested that this new e-bike safety enforcement policy represents an overly punitive dragnet.”

“This crackdown is specifically focused on e-bikes,” she wrote — but that’s not true, as people biking on city streets since the crackdown have told us.

Unsurprisingly, Tisch neglected to include any data to back up her narrow focus on e-bike. While she cited “11,245 moving summonses for cars compared to 654 for e-bikes” as evidence of the crackdown’s “balance,” she failed to specify how many, if any, of those summonses to car drivers came with the same criminal charges that the cyclists have been receiving.

In reality, e-bikes accounted for 0.4 percent of pedestrian injuries in 2024, according to the NYPD’s own data. So far this year they account for just 0.04 percent.

Like all previous police commissioners, Jessica Tisch is a hammer. And a hammer is always looking for a nail. But this time, she’s pounding the wrong one. There were 28,400 total reported crashes on New York City roadways in the first 130 days this year, or 218 every single day. Those crashes have injured 15,737 people, virtually all of them by the drivers of cars and trucks.

That’s a good nail to pound, commissioner.

In other news:

• NY1 continued its excellent coverage of the NYPD’s bike crackdown, but so did we with two more stories.
• Bikes are back on the Rockaway Beach boardwalk. (NY Post)
• Uber is bringing private buses to New York and other cities. (TechCrunch)
• New Jersey commuters are making preparations for the looming NJ Transit strike. (News 12 New Jersey)
• And finally, if people talked about driving like they talk about the subway: