Two men, one riding a bicycle, the other on an electric scooter, were killed Thursday when they collided head-on in the Ed Koch Queensborough Bridge bike lane, police said.
The 39-year-old man on the stand-up motorized scooter was traveling toward Manhattan when he collided with the 35-year-old man on the non-electric bike heading in the opposite direction about 8:20 a.m., cops said.
The Ed Koch Queensborough Bridge takes commuters from the East Side of Midtown Manhattan over Roosevelt Island into Long Island City, Queens.
First responders performed CPR on the bridge, then rushed both men to New York-Presbyterian Hospital Queens where they both died. Their names were not immediately released.
The Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge. (Barry Williams/ New York Daily News)
The scooter involved in the crash was a Teverun Blade GT II, a source with knowledge of the incident told the Daily News, with an advertised top speed of 53 mph.
City law restricts stand-up e-scooters to a speed of 15 mph, the same speed limit applied to e-bikes. Under state law, any scooter capable of speeds above 20 mph is not legal for street use, regardless of whether its rider stays below the speed limit.
It was not immediately clear how fast either the cyclist or the scooter rider were traveling at the time of the crash.
A view of the bike/pedestrian path on the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge on May 2, 2020 in New York City. (Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty Images)
“We’re horrified to learn that two New Yorkers lost their lives today,” Ben Furnas, the executive director of advocacy group Transportation Alternatives said. “Crashes like these are entirely preventable. Scooters that travel this quickly have no place in our bike lanes.
“The City Council must move forward with the ‘Ride Safe, Ride Right’ bill to prevent the sale of the most dangerous micromobility devices,” he added. “Twenty mph is plenty for anything on New York City neighborhood streets, and certainly in our bike lanes. The data is clear: anything faster than 20 mph is especially deadly.”
The crash took place on the bridge’s northern outer roadway, which has been designated exclusively for bikes along with e-bikes and mopeds since May of last year. Before then, pedestrians shared that roadway with riders, a situation that raised safety concerns for walkers as the use of two-wheeled devices grew. Pedestrians now have exclusive use of the bridge’s southern outer roadway.
“This terrible tragedy is a grim reminder that illegal, high-speed micromobility devices, like the stand-up e-scooter involved in this incident, are dangerous and have no place on our roadways or bike paths,” Jeremy Edwards, a spokesman for Mayor Mamdani, said. “The Mamdani administration will continue to work remove these illegal devices from our streets and bring accountability to micromobility use.”