Can New York’s ample waterways take pressure off its street grid? A new tech that allows bikes to transport perishable goods could provide an answer.
On Wednesday, the non-profit Sharing Excess tested out transporting food from the Hunts Point Food Distribution Center in the Bronx to a food pantry in Manhattan via ferry and cargo bikes with battery-powered refrigeration. The goods traveled via ferry to E. 34th Street, where workers off-loaded them onto to Fulpra Quatro pedal-assisted quad e-bikes.
Of course, a demonstration is just a demonstration, and the new tech would need to be significantly scaled up to make a dent in the thousands of trucks that deliver perishable goods to restaurants and other food providers across the city.
Streetsblog Editor-in-Chief Gersh Kuntzman recently test-rode on of the refrigerated bikes. Give it a watch:
On Wednesday morning, the city’s first refrigerated cargo quad will spirit hundreds of pounds of produce from E. 34th St. to a soup kitchen near NYU. I rode it for another edition of Old Man Vertical! @EMPIRECLEAN pic.twitter.com/MJd6GQ3DHI
— Gersh Kuntzman (@GershKuntzman) October 6, 2026
In other news:
MTA officials say their new fare gates are reducing fare evasion, and plan to expand the design to more stations. (NY Times, Gothamist, amNY)
The New Yorker gave the Central Park horse carriage debate the long-read treatment.
Cops arrested the driver who killed Geoffrey Radbill on Riverside Drive last December, or as the Daily News called him, the “man behind the wheel of a car that struck and killed a prominent Manhattan philanthropist.”
Police identified the cyclist killed in a collision with an unleashed dog as 71-year-old Douglas Adams, whom The Post described as an “Upper West Side biking enthusiast.”
The Post also followed our coverage of the NYPD officer who struck a cyclist on Atlantic Avenue on Monday.
Mamdani hasn’t been the police reform mayor some advocates hoped he’d be. (Politico)
Cops arrested a Long Island man who allegedly struck and killed a homeless man then fled the scene. (NY Post)
Advocates want to extend New Jersey’s Hudson-Bergen Light Rail. (PIX11)