Project MOVER launches in Croton with the usual fanfare, but safety concerns remain.
Trustee Maria Slippen maintains village government has not adequately prepared village cyclists, drivers, and pedestrians about the possible dangers of a sudden influx of E-bikes in Croton.
With all the pomp and circumstance that Croton-on-Hudson has become accustomed to, a group of luminaries and villagers gathered in Dobbs Park this morning (July 9) to inaugurate our village’s sector of Project MOVER, the E-bike sharing program now available in four Westchester rivertown communities. Among the public figures present were State Senator Pete Harckham, Cortlandt town supervisor Dr. Richard Becker, county legislator Emiljana Ulaj, and of course Croton Mayor Brian Pugh and Deputy Mayor Len Simon.
(Simon served as emcee for the event; his Guest Editorial all about Project MOVER was published in the Chronicle last week.)
The media were out in force, including News12 Westchester, The Gazette, and of course, the Chronicle. To open the ceremonies, Pastor Justin Johnson of Croton’s Our Saviour Lutheran Church—himself a bike rider—recited the “blessing of the bikes,” which the gathered crowd took in with bowed heads.
“Today is a breakthrough moment for Croton,” Simon told the crowd, relating the story of how four years ago Village Manager Bryan Healy asked him if he wanted to attend a planning meeting for the project being held in Ossining. Mayor Pugh recalled his childhood days growing up in Croton and riding his bike. “Every car trip that’s avoided because of Project MOVER means cleaner air and safer streets” in Croton, he said. And Senator Harckham, saying he was here to cheerlead the project, remarked that “Croton punches above its weight.”
When all of Project MOVER is completed, people in Croton will be able to rent a bike here and return it all the way down in Dobbs Ferry, since one of the advantages of bikeshare programs is that you don’t have to return the bike to the same station.
But despite the enthusiastic inauguration of Project MOVER in Croton, some have raised concerns about safety issues, especially given the late and limited publicity and public education campaign associated with the project. Chief among them is Croton trustee Maria Slippen, who spoke up at the June 25 Board of Trustees meeting to express her fears. Her remarks came during a discussion of a resolution to authorize the Village Manager to execute a master site license agreement with the company Drop Mobility, which is co-managing MOVER.
“I feel very excited about this project but I’m very conflicted about the way we let our community know about what is happening,” Slippen said at the meeting. “The people riding the bikes are obviously a target community for the communications but so is the community at large. The onus is really on us. I’m very concerned about the safety of the roads.”
The conversation among the trustees got testy at times. Village Manager Bryan Healy chimed in to say that his office did not have a full-time communications person, while Ossining—whose bikeshare program Croton is a satellite of—did have such a staff position.
In more detailed email comments she provided to the Chronicle, Slippen wrote “I stand by what I said at the meeting, and yes, I am frustrated. Since we started talking about this, I have been asking for an outreach campaign, not just to those who might rent, but to everyone who might encounter an electric bike on the road.”
Slippen added that other communities adopting Project MOVER have “employed a variety of communication strategies that we could have borrowed including months of social media campaigns, stand alone mailers and emails, and road signage… Why didn’t we install ‘share the road’ signage months before the launch date as other communities did?”
The discussion of E-bike safety issues has accompanied the dramatic rise in use of E-bikes and E-scooters across the nation and the world. A number of studies have monitored a dramatic increase in bicycle related accidents and deaths since E-bikes first came online, replacing the use of old-fashioned non-electric bikes in many cities. The New York Times, in a March 2024 article entitled “Why Bicycle Deaths in New York City Are at a 24-year High,” cited statistics showing that of the 30 cyclists who died on the city’s streets in 2023, 23 were riding E-bikes. (That same year, E-bikes made up 46% of bikeshare rides in the city.)
The safety problems have raised alarm among physicians, who are called upon to treat the injuries suffered by bicyclists who get into accidents. Last year, the American College of Surgeons published an article in its bulletin entitled “Electric Bikes Are Emerging as Public Health Hazard,” which provided a worldwide survey of E-bike use and the rise in serious injuries as a result. The authors identified key factors in avoiding or surviving such accidents, including wearing helmets, limiting the speed of the bicycles, and dedicated bike lanes that separate cars and bikes on the road.
(The New York Bicycle Coalition has issued a guidance on E-bike safety which goes over a number of these factors.)
Another recent study, in the journal Surgery Open Science, concluded that E-bikes are “an increasingly common pediatric public health problem,” especially because many children do not wear helmets while riding them.
The Project MOVER program addresses some of these issues by requiring that riders be 18 years or older, by limiting the maximum speed of the bikes to just under 15 miles per hour, and by requiring all riders to wear helmets. While Croton does not have a law requiring adults to wear bike helmets, they are strongly advised for all bike riders in the village.
(Last month, New York City mayor Eric Adams also announced a limit of 15 mph for all E-bikes and E-scooters on the city’s streets.)
But while experts have identified dedicated bike lanes as an important factor in protecting bike riders (and drivers) from collisions and other accidents, in Croton we only have a very limited number of them. The one villagers are probably most familiar with is a narrow bike lane that runs along Croton Point Avenue and would theoretically allow safer bicycle traffic to and from the train station and into the Harmon area.
According to Matt Arnold, chair of Croton’s Bicycle Pedestrian Committee, the only other bike lane in the village is a painted route that runs along a portion of South Riverside from Oneida to Hudson Street; Elliott Way is a designated shared stretch for both cars and bikes.
In a statement he provided to the Chronicle, Arnold stressed that bike lanes are only part of the safety solution:
“As an official village advisory committee, the Bicycle-Pedestrian Committee has encouraged the village to make its streets safer through infrastructure improvements and policies, many of which have been adopted, such as the 25 mph speed limit on village roads.
“Bike lanes are one part of the solution, though given the narrow width of many of Croton’s roads, they are not always practical. Therefore, we urge all bicyclists to wear helmets and signal with their arms when they turn; and we ask all motorists to obey speed limits and pass bicyclists at a safe distance, as required by New York State law.”
“Many committee members ride their bikes in the village every day, and while we know some locations need to be improved, we believe that through mutual respect and observance of traffic rules, bikes and cars can share the road.”
One important question may be why Croton has opted for E-bikes rather than non-motorized bikes for its bikeshare program. The answer, according to Deputy Mayor Len Simon, the main mover on the Board of Trustees for the project, is that Croton is actually piggybacking on the Ossining program—so the decisions about what kinds of bikes to offer had already been made.
As Simon told us:
My recollection from the early days of discussion about the program is that it was always e-bikes. Croton was a satellite community, with no formal involvement in the program unless Ossining received the grant. They kindly included us in early meetings but we were not deeply involved in the grants process except for expressing our willingness to participate if Ossining was selected. But I believe e-bikes was what NYSERDA [New York State Energy Research and Development Authority] was looking for from the start. In fact, the grant program from which the funds for Project MOVER are derived is actually “The New York Clean Transportation Prizes Program’s Electric Mobility Challenge”.
As for safety issues, Simon is urging everyone thinking about using Croton’s E-bikes to attend a bicycle skills class which will be held this coming Saturday at the municipal building. (See flyer below.)
Meanwhile, Croton trustee Maria Slippen is continuing to ask questions. Among them is how commuters “from outside of Croton who don’t get our newsletters or follow our social media” will “know to expect an influx of electric bicycle traffic as they rush to and from the train station?”
“There are a lot of questions that could have been answered before we launched in the middle of summer,” Slippen adds. “Our narrow little streets have huge cars parked on either side and vehicular traffic is already struggling.”
Nevertheless, Slippen told the Chronicle, “I’m grateful for the work that the bicycle pedestrian committee has put into it and I truly hope it’s a success for Croton.”
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The crux of this article is this statement: ‘Bike lanes are one part of the solution, though given the narrow width of many of Croton’s roads, they are not always practical.’ As with many things I see in Croton, my immediate thought is that I applaud the idea but do not like the execution of it. In the end, when all the politicians go home, all that matters is how it is managed.
I’m a huge fan of the outdoors and have a regular bike that I ride, but I’m not a fan of the safety or how successful this will be in Croton. It reeks of yet another project that no one asked for, yet the politicians are doing it to make themselves look good or to make Croton fit into a niche.
To me, this is one of those Camelot ideas which is nice in thought but not great in practice. I would have a slightly different opinion if electric bikes weren’t the mode of transportation with the project.
I feel the majority of our roads aren’t made with the space needed for electric bikes and the roads which do have the space have cars going much faster than the posted 25 MPH. So it just seems dangerous to me.