42 cease-and-desist orders prove government speed exists and has been declining to use itself
NEW YORK — Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s crackdown on illegal e-bikes, launched with 42 cease-and-desist orders against online vendors, has produced a historic first: the fastest-moving objects in New York are now also its fastest-regulated, achieving in one week a level of governmental attention that the city’s slowest-moving objects, including the BQE, the Penn Station renovation, and the concept of affordable housing, have failed to attract in a generation.
The enforcement blitz, reported by Gothamist, targets retailers selling devices banned in the five boroughs for excessive speed and weight, and unfolds amid a broader regulatory rivalry between the mayor and Comptroller Julie Menin over who will shape the city’s micromobility future, per additional coverage, a contest political observers describe as “two Democrats racing to regulate a vehicle that is, at this moment, passing both of them on the sidewalk.”
The Physics Community Weighs In
“What we are witnessing violates everything we know about municipal velocity,” said Dr. Casimir Oyelaran-Voss of the Center for Governmental Motion Studies. “The standing model holds that the speed of a New York regulation is inversely proportional to the speed of the thing being regulated. Scaffolding, which does not move at all, has remained unregulated in place since the Dinkins administration. There is scaffolding in this city with grandchildren. Meanwhile the e-moto, which moves at 40 miles per hour, drew 42 enforcement actions in a single announcement. The model is broken. Either the equations are wrong, or, and this is the frightening possibility, the government can move fast and has simply been choosing not to.”
Oyelaran-Voss’s team calculates that if City Hall applied e-bike-crackdown energy to its slower files, the BQE would be repaired “by Thanksgiving, of this year, with a ribbon.”
The Riders Adjust
Among the delivery workforce, whose members pilot the affected devices through what one rider called “the only economy that pays by the red light,” the crackdown has been received with a shrug refined by years of shifting rules. “First the apps demanded speed, then the city banned the speed, and the apps kept the demand,” said deliverista Wilfredo Ancheta-Gomez, 29, charging a battery outside a Sunset Park bodega. “So I am required to be fast and forbidden from being fast, simultaneously, which in this city is called having a job. You know what I want? The rule, one rule, written down, that stays the rule for a whole year. I have had four different legal speeds since 2022. My bike has been legal, illegal, legal with a helmet, and now illegal again but only from certain websites. My bike has a more complicated immigration status than my uncle.”
Ancheta-Gomez noted that the crackdown targets vendors rather than riders, which he appreciates, while predicting its ultimate effect with the certainty of a man who has watched every previous crackdown: “The website changes its name. The bike gets a sticker. The sticker says compliant. We all ride on. This is not enforcement. This is weather.”
His colleague, arriving with a delivery bag the size of a filing cabinet, offered a competing forecast. “They will regulate us until the restaurants complain,” he said. “Then they will regulate the complaint. The complaint will get a sticker. The sticker will say compliant. Everything in this city eventually gets the sticker except the rent.”
The Rivalry Deepens
Inside city government, the Mamdani-Menin contest over e-bike policy has become the political class’s favorite spectator event, featuring dueling frameworks, competing press conferences, and what one insider described as “the most aggressive agreement in city history,” as both officials seek to lead a crackdown whose necessity neither disputes. Analysts note the dynamic could genuinely produce a national model for micromobility regulation, or, per precedent, a task force.
“Two ambitious Democrats have discovered the same issue at the same time,” said political strategist Renata Boguslawski-Cheng. “This is like two people reaching for the last seat on the subway. Someone will get it, someone will pretend they were stretching, and the seat, in this metaphor, is a 60-pound bike doing 40 in a bike lane built for a Citi Bike doing 12. The good news for the public is that rivalry is the only force in government faster than an e-moto. Nothing gets regulated like something two people want credit for.”
Broader Reaction
The satirical desk at Bohiney Magazine has proposed harnessing the phenomenon by assigning a political rival to every stalled city project, calculating that the Second Avenue subway would reach the Bronx “within one election cycle of someone else wanting it,” while Britain’s The London Prat reported that London solved its e-bike crisis by letting the rental bikes fall into the Thames at a natural rate, “a policy we call the tide, and it is our most effective regulator.”
The Road Ahead
At press time, the 42 cease-and-desist orders were in effect, the rivalry was accelerating, and on Ninth Avenue an e-moto passed a stopped M11, a Citi Bike, two mopeds, and a parks department vehicle that has been parked in the bike lane since spring, untouched by any of the city’s 42 recent enforcement actions, protected by the oldest rule in New York, which every rider knows and no crackdown has ever reached: it depends whose it is.
“That truck will outlive us all,” said Ancheta-Gomez, pulling around it. “That truck is the real mayor.”
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com