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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now, another segment comparing the candidates in the New York City mayoral primary on a key issue of interest to many of you this time, transportation, including good, affordable, and safe mass transit, congestion pricing, and the chaos on the city streets involving cars, pedestrians, and various kinds of two-wheelers. A few things in this regard are getting most noticed or standing out from the pack as subjects of debate and discussion so far. One is the proposal by Assembly Member from Queens, Zohran Mamdani, to make all New York City buses free. Here's Mamdani in a video he posted on Instagram.

Zohran Mamdani: As a state legislator, I won $15 million to fund a first of its kind fare free bus pilot that led to a 30% increase in weekday ridership and a 38.9% decrease in assaults on bus drivers. Now I'm running on a plan to make every bus fast and free.

Brian Lehrer: Zohran Mamdani advocating free buses. Not everyone likes that plan, including the head of the MTA, Janno Lieber. Here's Lieber when I asked him about the idea on the show a few weeks ago.

Janno Lieber: Mamdani is a supporter of transit, and we love having a supporter of transit in elected office. We tried his idea of free bus on different lines. It actually-- most of the additional ridership was identified cannibalized other lines. You're taking people who are paying on other lines, and they were just getting a free ride, which isn't evil. My basic principle is I want to target our subsidy to people who need it, which is why we support the Fair Fares program so strongly.

It's the program that gives people of low income a half-price ride, like as if you were a senior. We have pushed the expansion of that. We've pushed for making the eligibility at a higher income level. We're signing people up like crazy. Even though it's not our program, it's the city's program. We're the ones signing people up at our customer service centers because we want people to become eligible who are at the low-income level.

Frankly, I don't want to subsidize middle-class and upper-middle-class New Yorkers who are using the system, who can pay, and who get the advantage of the fact that the transit costs like 15% of the cost of owning a car. I don't want to subsidize those people at the cost of not being able to do other stuff. Honestly, that's my view of the Mamdani free bus agenda. I love the support for transit, but that's my view.

Brian Lehrer: Never mind that he said the assembly member's name wrong. MTA Chair and CEO Janno Lieber. There are competing views on the idea of free buses. Then there are a few people making news who probably all the candidates in the Democratic primary-- Remember, there's no Republican primary for mayor. Curtis Sliwa will have that more or less unopposed. There are a few people making news who probably all the candidates in the Democratic primary would agree to oppose. One is Mayor Adams. We'll get to him.

Another President Trump's Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, who recently questioned whether the federal government should cut funding to mass transit in New York. He blamed Governor Hochul for subway crime with an expletive that's deleted here.

Sean Duffy: Don't make it a [beep] hole, which is what she's done. She can fix it in hours, not days, not weeks, not months, but hours. She could fix it, and she chooses not to.

Brian Lehrer: Federal Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy may be the first government official ever to say law enforcement is simple. Of course, each of the mayoral candidates has their own plan to address subway crime. We'll discuss. Again, there's a lot of talk about when we discuss transportation, including good, affordable, and safe mass transit and congestion pricing, about the chaos on the city streets involving cars, pedestrians, and various kinds of two-wheelers.

Let's compare and contrast with two guests very involved in the subject. Nicole Gelinas, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute think tank, a contributing editor of their publication City Journal. She has a new op-ed in City Journal just out as part of their Mayoral Issues series. She's a columnist at the New York Post as well and author of the recent book Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car. Some of you may remember Nicole did one of our 100 Years of 100 Things segments built around the content of her book.

Dave Colon, reporter for the publication whose title tells you what it's about. Streetsblog. Dave, for example, wrote about a mayoral candidates forum on transit in December, which was hosted by the Writers Alliance. Dave Colon, welcome. Nicole Gelinas, welcome back to WNYC. Hello.

Dave Colon: Hey, Brian.

Nicole Gelinas: Good morning.

Brian Lehrer: Can we take the free buses issue first? Because that's popped out of the haze of a million transit proposals to be something that people are becoming aware of. You heard the sound bites from Mamdani and then the head of the MTA being skeptical. Dave, you've written an article about Mamdani's plan, and maybe with Streetsblog's activist bent, you're for this, but you tell us, or how would you analyze the pros and cons?

Dave Colon: With our activist bent, I'm actually a little agnostic on free buses. I think that there tends to be a debate around the idea. It's do you want them to be fast? Do you want them to be free? There can be, according to Zohran Mamdani, you can get both, especially if the buses are free. The question mostly comes down to, I think, if you really sat Janno down and gave him a truth serum, it would just be, is the city going to fund it like Zohran has said they would?

I think that if it's funded, then the MTA is they don't care. They will run whatever transit that they have money to run. The aspect of free buses that can be very helpful is, according to Charles Komanoff, who maybe some of your listeners are familiar with, he is a transportation economist. He was really big in getting congestion pricing on the ground. Is that if the buses are not waiting for people to pay to get on-- we call this dwell time, where the buses are sitting at the stops. The buses can move a lot faster because they are just spending less time sitting at stops waiting for people to put in their Metro card, waiting for people to tap their Omni. People can use all the doors.

He found that that would cut enormous amounts of time off of bus trips around the city. In that sense, Mamdani's plan for fast and free could be effective.

Brian Lehrer: Nicole, we can get your take on this in general. Mamdani goes beyond just free buses to argue he would put more focus on the buses generally to enable them to run faster, maybe, for example, in the way that Dave was just describing, and on dedicated bus lanes and more frequently, as we heard in the clip, he and Scott Stringer in that December forum from the Writers Alliance praise Bogota, Colombia for moving 40,000 people an hour on their bus rapid transit system. What's your take on free buses or anything else from his plan? To the extent that you've inspected it.

Nicole Gelinas: Thank you, Brian. I'm an atheist on free buses. It's good to have more attention to buses. Buses are very important. There's no real global example of a successful free bus system. You look at London, for example, the bus fare is cheaper. The bus fare is a £1.75, around $2.50. It's about half of the average tube fare. There's lots of ways to play around here. There'd be nothing wrong with a bus fare that is cheaper than the subway fare, accounting for the fact that bus riders tend to be poorer and the bus rides are less efficient than the subway rides.

What people want out of bus service is reliable, frequent, and fast bus service. You don't really get that through free buses. You can speed up the boarding as we're doing with the all-door boarding with the tap to board. Plenty of ways to get people on the bus faster, which we also see in London and Paris, and other cities. A free bus is just going to result in less predictable funding. The MTA is not going to think of it as very important because if something is free, you get what you pay for.

If you think of other people who ran on free buses, Michelle Wu in Boston, she ran on her free the T platform four years ago. She was very pragmatic about it in governing. She kept three free bus lines, a tiny minority of Boston's bus lines. Those have stayed free. She has not made the general bus system or the T system free. This is likely to end up in some compromise. I just want to point out, too, a free bus system is something that has to be done by the state legislature. One question for Mamdani is why has he not convinced his colleagues in the legislature and the governor to enact a full free bus program?

Brian Lehrer: Dave, to your knowledge, has Mamdani addressed the cost of free buses and how to pay for them, or the specific argument in the general Lieber clip that the Fair Fares reduced fare program is there for low-income people? Lieber doesn't "want to subsidize middle class and upper middle class New Yorkers who are using the system, who can pay." I see as an alternative, at the candidates forum the other month, State Senator and also candidate Jessica Ramos who is also endorsed by the Working Families Party like Mamdani is, though he's ranked number one. She proposed automatic registration for Fair Fares discounts for low-income riders. My question is, has Mamdani addressed the cost of doing this and how they would pay for it, where that extra money would come from?

Dave Colon: He has, in the sense that he has a larger tax plan that he would hope to get through the state legislature, which, as Nicole pointed out, a lot of these things do have to go through Albany. He does feel that he could marshal public opinion and marshal what would be, I guess, his former colleagues, if he's the mayor, to pass a number of these initiatives that he wants in terms of Fair Fares. You know what, Jessica has, and a lot of the other candidates have also said that they are in favor of Fair Fares, that they're in favor of bumping it up from, I think right now it's at 120% of the federal poverty level to 200% of the federal poverty level.

Mamdani would argue that these things don't always reach the people who need it. Obviously, Jessica Ramos's automatic enrollment would do some of that. Right now, the Fair Fares program is not reaching everybody who needs it. The view, I guess, of the socialist public good idea is just spread this to everybody as opposed to means testing it and limiting it to people who may not even know that they're eligible for it.

Brian Lehrer: Do either of you know-- Dave, I'll go to you first. If or how Ramos would implement automatic registration in Fair Fares, would it be based on the MTA having everybody's tax return from the previous year if they're below a certain income threshold, or is it clear to you how that would work?

Dave Colon: Because it's a city program, actually, I think Janno mentioned it, that he seemed annoyed that the MTA is enrolling people. This is a city-run and city-paid for program, which is one of the reasons that Janno would be happy with making sure that it gets expanded eligibility.

Brian Lehrer: Because it's coming out of the city tax coffers, not the MTA's budget.

Dave Colon: Yes. It could be for people who live in NYCHA housing, people who qualify for other certain threshold programs that deal with poverty, anything that the city could do when people are enrolled in SNAP and other programs like that, you would just automatically be enrolled in Fair Fares.

Brian Lehrer: Nicole, Dave's answer there suggests a larger frame for this whole topic. For the mayoral candidates, which is mass transit is mostly a state function, even within the city, the MTA is a state agency. How much power does a mayor have? What can a mayor really propose and actually do with respect to improving transit service? Before we get to subway crime, for example, where they can deploy the NYPD or do other things, but in terms of actually improving mass transit service, how much of a mayoral issue is it as opposed to a mayoral grandstanding issue?

Nicole Gelinas: The biggest power the mayor has is speeding up the buses through more room on the streets for bus lanes. The city controls the surface of the streets, except for congestion pricing, and the state controls the actual buses that run in the bus lane. You need them to cooperate, which they've done since the Bloomberg era--

Brian Lehrer: Which, by the way, is another proposal from Mamdani, where he is arguing that he would be the most aggressive in establishing clearly and exclusively those bus lanes for buses. Right?

Nicole Gelinas: Yes. Although I would also-- Cuomo tends to be a little bit demonized by the transit community. You see these X posts that he defunded transit. Cuomo has many problems, but there's no case to be made that he defunded transit. I mean, the MTA's budget, including the dedicated tax for that budget, consistently went up during his tenure. He did start the program of automated bus lane enforcement. It's something that the current governor has vastly expanded.

Cuomo wasn't as terrible on bus lanes and transit in general as the caricature is, but certainly one thing we should all be focused on is what are they going to do to build out more bus lanes. This actually has not gotten as much attention as the free buses and some of the other issues in the race.

Brian Lehrer: Dave Colon, any different take on Cuomo? It took us till this long in the segment for his name to come up. Dave, you want to go there globally, to Cuomo and mass transit service, per se?

Dave Colon: One thing that you can say about Andrew Cuomo is that he has not put out a transportation plan short of fainting towards free buses and going, we'll study it maybe, and maybe we'll bring some of them back. Beyond that, he has not said anything about how he would reprioritize the buses on the city streets. You could argue that while, what was it, the MTA killed Select Bus Service when he was the governor as a cost-saving measure.

Select Bus Service is our version of Bus Rapid Transit. It hasn't come back since. That is something that at least Brad Lander has talked about bringing back as the mayor. I don't want to pontificate into a void here, but we just haven't heard what Andrew Cuomo would do about the streets master plan, about bus lanes, about any of this.

Brian Lehrer: Anything else that you would say regarding Cuomo, Nicole, and anything that he is proposing with respect to transit service that would be new if he's elected mayor?

Nicole Gelinas: One of the things that would be new, and this is part of the contradictory enigma of Andrew Cuomo, because you could say the same thing I said about Mamdani, if this is such a good idea, why didn't you do it when you had power in the state governments is move more of the enforcement of the fare evasion on the subways to a civilian force of enforcement agents, which they already do on the bus. How would you do this? Much like they do in European cities.

For the average fare evader who doesn't seem to be posing a threat to the public, a team of civilians goes up to that person, says, "Just prove that you paid your fare. Tap your card on our little handheld machine here. If you didn't, you have to pay your fine. If you did, you go on your way." This person is backed by police officers who are somewhere off in the distance. The first interaction is not police. This is not a bad idea. Again, other global cities do it, leaves the police to do more important undercover work, including undercover fare evasion work targeting people who may be carrying weapons or have warrants out, or so forth.

Again, this is the mishmash of what we have to pick out of Cuomo's somewhat contradictory plans. This is part of a plan that has good elements and bad elements. The big question, as on many, many issues beyond transit with Cuomo, is if this was a good idea, why didn't you do it when you had this power as governor?

Brian Lehrer: Before we move on more explicitly to subway safety, Dave Colon from Streetsblog-- and my guests are Dave Colon from Streetsblog and Nicole Gelinas from the City Journal, Manhattan Institute, New York Post. She has a new piece on subway safety in the City Journal as part of their series on issues facing the mayoral candidates. Dave, there's a whole host of mayoral hopefuls, including just those in the Democratic primary, who haven't touched on. It's always a challenge when there are seven who have qualified for the televised debate that I'll be one of the moderators in next week, and there are even more than that on the ballot to give everybody a fair shake.

We know who's leading in the polls, and maybe they unfairly get more of the press. We've been talking a lot about Mamdani and Cuomo, but anybody else whose plan for mass transit service improvements you would want to spotlight?

Dave Colon: Brad Lander as comptroller put out a very large report about bus service in the city over the last few years and there were policy proposals in it, like I said, including bringing back a select bus service, running some of those routes between boroughs, which is not something that really happens at all these days. Zellnor Myrie, State Senator Zellnor Myrie, has really emphasized transit signal priority in his plan.

A transit signal priority is a way to ensure that if a bus is approaching a light, the bus where the light will stay green for a longer time to get the bus to the intersection, or it will change from red to green faster for the bus. It's a useful tool. It does need to be calibrated in order to make sure that things work. Just anybody who's going to be focusing on that, it's a good thing to have in your pocket and a good thing to really tweak. Those two really stood out for us. Streetsblog did a candidate questionnaire, and Zohran, Brad, and Zellnor each got pretty high marks from our team of anonymous experts who graded the answers.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Thor in Croton, who wants to articulate something that he says Cuomo really did do to hurt mass transit when he was governor. Thor, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Thor: Thanks for taking a minute. Yes, there was a long process of over a decade and well documented online. When Como was governor, a lot of those files disappeared from the Internet, and so did the bus planning that bipartisan efforts had supported. I just wanted to point out that Cuomo doesn't have a transportation plan, and I'd love to know more about it.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much, Nicole. Did he kill bipartisan support for bus rapid transit on the Tappan Zee on the Mario Cuomo [unintelligible 00:21:12] Tappan Zee Bridge?

Nicole Gelinas: Yes. That's been not building the bridge with a dedicated rail line and a transit line is, is something the transit advocacy community has been upset about for now going back 15 years. That's certainly fair enough. The record is mixed, but it is not an entirely negative record. Again, this gets into the contradictions that are Cuomo, but Cuomo is the governor who signed congestion pricing into law. Now, he then later went back and said this is not the time to do it, but it is highly unlikely that any other governor would have been able to sign it into law.

Brian Lehrer: We will continue in a minute with Dave and Nicole and more of your calls and texts on transportation as an issue for the New York City mayoral primary candidates. We're going to get to subway safety, per se. We're also going to get to the chaos on the streets, as I've been calling it, among pedestrians and cars, and various two-wheelers. Stay with us. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. As we continue to talk about transportation as an issue for the Democratic primary mayoral hopefuls in New York City. Remember, there is no Republican primary. We'll get to Curtis Sliwa's positions on all these during the general election campaign.

We did childcare as an issue Friday. We're doing transportation as an issue today. More to come as primary season goes on. It has already begun in both New York and New Jersey, with mail-in ballots in New York City being out there, early voting begins in Jersey tomorrow. On we go into June primary season on both sides of the Hudson. Next transit and transportation issue, subway safety. Nicole, we played the Sean Duffy clip. As I mentioned, your new article about subway safety and the candidates is just out in City Journal. We'll get into some details.

Do you want to respond in any way-- because the Trump administration is a factor now, to the Sean Duffy clip saying safety in the subways is simple. Just flood it with cops and get the homeless people and the drugs out of there. It's easy. Agree or disagree in whole or in part?

Nicole Gelinas: New Yorkers started worrying about subway crime long before Sean Duffy came on scene. In fact, one can argue this is partly why Trump increased his share of the vote in New York State and Hochul almost lost to Lee Zeldin three and a half years ago over the subway safety issue. I mean, we had four subway homicides in the space of a few weeks in the fall of '22, just before her reelection campaign.

Having said that, Duffy, his solution is simplistic, and this is what gets us into the mayoral campaign. We've seen over and over and over since subway crime skyrocketed in early 2020, we've had 44 homicides on the subway in a little more than five years. That's a fivefold increase in the level of homicides. Over and over, the mayor and the governor respond to this by flooding the system with police officers. The officers are on overtime, and once things start to get a little bit better and it recedes in the public mind, they quietly pull back on these overtime shifts until we have another few horrific murders, and then they put the overtime shifts back.

This is not working. It hasn't been working for five years. What is the longer-term solution? We need a bigger transit police force. It's a fraction of the size that it was in the early 1990s. We need to make sure that the rest of the criminal justice and the mental health systems are working. There's only two choices. You are severely mentally ill. You're not responsible for your own actions, and you need some long-term continuum of mental health care, or you are responsible for your own actions and the crimes that you're committing over and over and over in the subway. There should be some criminal justice deterrent for that.

Adam's ran on this. He hasn't really gotten it right. Then we've got candidates with various plans on this. Cuomo would depend more on the police than Mamdani. Cuomo is the only candidate who has said we need a larger transit police force. Which if people want to know the secret to how do you get to be in first place in this race, saying a common-sense thing that, of course, comes with a lot of questions and issues. This is a hurdle that the other candidates haven't yet met.

Brian Lehrer: Dave, there are many candidates who would disagree with what Nicole just said and disagree with Cuomo's plan, who Nicole describes in her article as the only candidate to propose bringing the transit police force to 4,000 officers. I see at the candidates forum on transportation that you wrote up, Brad Lander took what you call a housing-first approach. This is in Nicole's article, too. He was talking about it as far back as December when this forum took place. A housing-first approach to subway homelessness and safety. Want to describe it?

Dave Colon: Sure. It's making sure that people who have severe mental health and homelessness issues have somewhere to actually live and focusing on that as opposed to shelters and focusing on supportive housing, deeply affordable housing, things along those lines. He would call it a housing first issue. I was just quoting him.

Brian Lehrer: Anyone else, Dave, who you would cite as distinguishing themselves from the pack, or is there a pack? There's Cuomo and everybody else in the more progressive list of the five who the Working Families Party endorses.

Dave Colon: Scott Stringer has said that he wants to put a police officer on every train. A lot of the candidates have actually said that they want to at least get the full force back up to 35,000 officers. Jessica Ramos is not super into that idea, and Zohran Mamdani is not into that idea. He has a larger continuum of care idea, the Department of Public Safety, I think he called it, or community care. That would be a larger umbrella department that deals with mental health and crime, and things along those lines, but that don't rely a lot on police.

Zellnor Myrie wants to work to build up the-- I think that he calls it pact. The MTA has the SCOUT teams, and then there's the PATH teams that the city has tried. These are combination NYPD mental health teams that go on the subway and try to help people with mental health issues. No, no one outside of Andrew Cuomo has had 4,000 transit bureau officers. Adrienne Adams, city council speaker, has said that she would want to get 2,700 transit bureau officers in there, which I think is their budgeted headcount.

Brian Lehrer: Going back to free buses for a minute, listener writes, "Fare evaders don't exist in a non-cost-prohibitive transit system." Dave, how do you think any of the candidates would respond to that? That even the Fair Fares program, which cuts it in half for those who qualify, doesn't really take care of everybody who needs to ride the subway, especially if they have to commute every day, two times a day, et cetera?

Dave Colon: That's simply the argument for free transit, not just on buses, but across the system. I think that the people who are in favor of raising the Fair Fares threshold to 200% at the federal poverty level would say that that gets you basically everybody who can't afford it at all. There would be half-price fares for people making up to $35,000 per year.

Brian Lehrer: Only two half fare, which I think the listener is arguing is still going to be cost-prohibitive for people who are really poor.

Dave Colon: Sure, if you're-- and that is, again, the argument for free transit for everyone. The argument against it is basically, if we're giving half fares to everybody who makes under $35,000 a year, we're giving half price fares to quite a lot of people.

Brian Lehrer: Let's go on to one more mayoral candidate's transportation topic, and I'll let a reader to our newsletter set this up. We invited questioners on any topic for the mayoral debate next Thursday night that I'll be a moderator in on the station and on New York 1. We got this one that said, "Mopeds, e-bikes, and scooters are out of control and pose a danger, but what specifically can be done to get them to obey traffic laws?" My question, Nicole, I'll start with you. Is any candidate centering this as an issue or the larger Vision Zero campaign that certainly also includes the dangers of cars, which kills and injures many more pedestrians than various kinds of bikes and mopeds begun by Mayor de Blasio?

Nicole Gelinas: Yes. This is another case where it's Cuomo who is responding to the public's very justified concern about e-bikes, mopeds, and scooters. E-bikes are not bikes. These are motorized vehicles. For 50 years, the bicycle advocacy community told us, anybody can ride a bike. Bike is a form of transportation. Anybody can do this. Now the argument has turned to, everybody needs to be on an e-bike, and there should be no responsibility for the extra power and extra force that come from being on an e-bike.

E-bikes have their place on the streets, and they can be a valuable form of transportation. With more power comes responsibility. These bikes are going more than 20 miles an hour, both legally and illegally. When you have a vehicle on a sidewalk or going the wrong way, that is going with this amount of speed and weight, it creates much more of a danger. We've had seven pedestrian deaths from e-bikes and scooters over the past four years. We used to have zero. Very much like subway homicides, you've gone from something that almost never happened to something that happens on a regular basis.

Yes, of course, cars and trucks cause more pedestrian and other fatalities, but you have added a new source of fatalities that certainly doesn't help you with the old source. Some level of registration and insurance for e-bikes, particularly for the commercial fleets of e-bikes, where even for their own workers, if the delivery worker is injured or killed on the bicycle, you need to have some level of insurance there for those injuries or for the family members. These food delivery apps are getting off here scot free. Cuomo is the one who has a plan for registration and some level of accountability for these e-vehicles.

This is not something that is impossible or unreasonable to do. Have a middle ground where no, they're not cars, but also they're not bikes, so you don't have to have a driver's license. Some level of proving you have commercial insurance or if you're just doing this not as a commercial biker, that you have a rider on your homeowners or your rental insurance that, "Yes, I've taken a lesson on how to use the e-bike and if I should accidentally hurt someone or worse, I am insured for this eventuality." This is not something that is unreasonable, and if you don't want to go through that, go back to riding the old-fashioned bike.

Brian Lehrer: Dave, I know since you're at Streetsblog, you are at least reporting on those in the transportation advocacy community, bicycle advocacy community and so forth, who are fairly defensive of all the micro mobility vehicles, if that's the right term for them, and are concerned also with the likely disparate and disproportional crackdown on them by law enforcement that may already be taking place with respect to immigrant and other low income delivery workers. At the same time, there are these stats that Nicole was just referring to. What about your take or other candidates than Cuomo on the Democratic narrow slate?

Dave Colon: Sure. I have some stats, too. This year, there have been over 3,600 pedestrian injuries from crashes. 14 of them were caused by e-bikes. I think that people are not quite used to e-bikes, and so they still see them as a foreign menace on the streets. As far as what the candidates will do, not too many of them have talked about big, specific plans. I would caution people that if they think that Andrew Cuomo is going to fix this in any way that makes the streets more workable, it just is not super likely.

He's taking a lot of money from DoorDash and Uber for the super PAC that has been supporting him. The reason that those companies are happy to support him is because they don't want to be regulated in any way. The people who are riding these e-bikes and scooters are not riding the wrong way down the street for their health. They're doing it because they're under enormous amounts of pressure to get everybody their treats as quickly as humanly possible, because they don't want to get kicked off of the apps.

There are ways to regulate the apps to the companies. Mayor Adams's office briefly entertained the idea of a department of, I think it was called sustainable delivery, which would have begun actually doing that. That got brought up in February, and then we haven't heard anything about it since then. I caution people to just remember that when we talk about the chaos on the streets, the vast majority of it is still being caused by cars and trucks.

Nicole Gelinas: I agree, but there is a cognitive burden to it's not that people are not used to e-bikes, it's that you are already out on the street, it's getting dark out. Maybe you have a visual impairment or you can't hear very well. You are already looking around for the cars and trucks, and here comes an e-bike going the wrong way out of nowhere on the sidewalk. Constantly having these interactions makes the streets unpleasant. Again, these are additive deaths and injuries. It's not like we're switching out a car death for an e-bike death.

We have seen the number of pedestrian injuries and deaths from e-bikes go from virtually nothing, of course, by definition, when they were not legalized, to being a substantial issue on the street. If you want to have vision zero, you have to look at what is the new problem that we didn't even have a few years ago, and how do we address that so that we can focus on the older problems. Yes, I agree. It's one of the many contradictions of Andrew Cuomo. He is, of course, the governor who set out the framework for legalizing these things without an enforcement regime.

Brian Lehrer: Nicole Gelinas, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor to their publication, City Journal, columnist at the New York Post, and author of the recent book, Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car. Dave Colon, reporter for Streetsblog, thank you so much, both of you, for coming on and talking about the mayoral hopefuls and transportation as an issue in the Democratic primary. We really appreciate it.

Dave Colon: Yes. See you next time, man.

Nicole Gelinas: Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Dave.

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