It happened too quickly for Carrie Michaels to process.
She was riding along one of the Central Park Drives on her carbon-fiber road bike, enjoying a pleasant spring afternoon in 2023. Suddenly, she was airborne. Then she was on the pavement, bleeding. Someone told her not to move.
A delivery worker on an e-bike had hit her, she later recalled. She spent six hours in the hospital and several months recovering. She has mostly withdrawn from biking on the park’s chaotic loop.
“It’s hazardous beyond description,” said Ms. Michaels, a member of the NYC E-Vehicle Safety Alliance, a group that advocates banning e-bikes from city parks.
Since Ms. Michaels’s crash, the situation on the drives has — by many accounts — worsened, as e-bikes have grown in popularity and riders have identified the park as an efficient, and scenic, cut-through from one side of Manhattan to the other.
At the busiest hours, pedestrians, cyclists and horse-drawn carriages compete for space with e-bikes, e-scooters, skateboards, unicycles and pedicabs on the three-lane corridor. (Cars have been banned since 2018.)
Now officials are struggling to solve what has become a vexing problem: Too many people moving at too many different speeds in too many directions.
There are spandex-clad cyclists on road bikes who treat the loop like the Tour de France. There are fun-seeking teens testing how fast they can go on electric Citi Bikes. There are delivery workers pressing to fill orders.
Some cyclists go the wrong direction. Some weave recklessly through the chaos.
It is hardly the scene Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux could have envisioned when they designed the drives for leisurely rides in horse-drawn carriages, incorporating sharp curves to encourage low speeds.
A series of headline-grabbing episodes in recent months have underscored the challenge.
In March, an 18-year-old riding an e-bike collided with a 34-year-old bicyclist near the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the East Drive, sending both to the hospital, according to the police. In June, a 40-year-old man on an electric unicycle was hospitalized in critical condition after colliding with a bicyclist on the West Drive near 60th Street. The same month, Salvador Nico-Garcia, 43, of the Bronx, died after his e-bike hit a pedestrian, who sustained minor injuries, on the East Drive near 97th Street.
City officials have begun to redesign the six miles of roadways under a plan that is meant improve safety but that has drawn criticism from some quarters.
To accommodate the e-bikes, the city’s Transportation Department has moved to make the lanes more uniform while increasing space for pedestrians, adding signs directing e-bikes to the far-right lane and replacing traffic lights with symbols alerting cyclists that they must yield to pedestrians.
Red and green street signals on the drives are being exchanged for flashing yellow signals — a development panned by some park users who object to pedestrians having to cross in front of bikers without the protection of a walk signal.
City Councilwoman Gale Brewer, a Democrat who represents the Upper West Side, describes the change as an improvement.
“It’s better than the red lights,” she said. “Because then everyone thought: ‘Oh, I’m safe.’ But you’re not.”
Now, she added, “everybody has to look.”
Still, the redesign remains a work in progress.
E-bike riders who move to the far-right lane can find themselves tangling with horse carriages, which move slowly and take up most of the lane. (Mayor Eric Adams and the Central Park Conservancy, the nonprofit group that oversees the park, have recently called for the carriages to be banned from the park.)
A Transportation Department spokesman said the impact of the redesign would be assessed after the work was complete and noted that officials had not seen an increase in pedestrian injury reports since it began in March.
The parks department said that parks were often the most pleasant routes for cyclists, and that it was committed to finding ways to safely accommodate e-bikes. Riders have appreciated the sentiment.
Charlie Todd, who lives in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, said that being able to ride an e-bike on the loop had “opened up the entire park” for him and his sons, who are 7 and 11.
“If I have a 7-year-old on my bike, it’s practically very helpful to have a motor on it,” he said.
Betsy Smith, the conservancy’s president, said in a statement that the group was focused on ensuring that the loop would be “well-understood and responsibly shared.”
Still, last month, critics of the new design packed a community meeting in the park to express their frustration.
“The meeting was extraordinarily hectic,” recalled Bonnie Gerard, who works in city government and said she had joined the E-Vehicle Safety Alliance after being hit by a man delivering a cake by e-bike on the Upper East Side, outside the park.
Janet Schroeder, the alliance’s director, questioned the logic of the conservancy seeking the removal of horse carriages but not e-bikes.
David Saltonstall, a conservancy spokesman, said in an interview that enforcing an e-bike ban in Central Park would be impractical.
“We totally understand the concern around e-bikes going fast,” he said. “And we would love for there to be a way to slow them down.”
But he said, “The genie is a little bit out of the bottle on e-bikes. I don’t know how you put it back.”
State Senator Liz Krueger, an Upper East Side Democrat, rejects that argument.
“Of course it can be put back,” she said, noting that there are relatively few entrances to the loop for cyclists. She proposed posting police officers at those spots on a rotating basis.
The genie was uncorked through a series of measures over the past several years that have helped many New Yorkers get around the city more easily.
In 2018, officials lifted a ban on e-bikes on city streets. The same year, Citi Bike, the popular bike share system, added e-bikes to its fleet. Over time, those bikes have gotten faster.
Two years ago, the city authorized a pilot program allowing e-bikes in parks, where they had previously been banned. This year, officials unveiled plans to make the rule permanent.
City officials have also taken steps to crack down on dangerous riding.
They have started issuing criminal summonses to e-bike riders who run red lights. And a new 15 m.p.h. speed limit will take effect for all e-bikes later this month. Citi Bike has already restricted the speeds on its devices in anticipation.
But a substantial group of City Council members wants to go further.
A bill sponsored by Councilwoman Vickie Paladino, a Queens Republican, would revive the ban on e-bikes in parks. It has 19 co-sponsors, including Ms. Brewer.
State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a Democrat whose Manhattan district includes a swath of Central Park, suggested he was more comfortable with electric Citi Bikes there than the more powerful e-bikes that some delivery drivers use.
But, he said, making more room for bikes on city streets would alleviate pressure on Central Park. Mr. Hoylman-Sigal pointed specifically to Fifth Avenue, which runs southbound along the east side of the park and lacks a bike lane.
Last Saturday evening, two longtime New Yorkers, Karen Cooper, 67, and Maria Donadio, 71, watched the bike traffic on the West Drive and said the situation had gotten out of hand.
“Look at this guy,” Ms. Cooper said, pointing at a cyclist biking north — the wrong way — through a crosswalk. “Nuts! It’s nuts.”
Ms. Cooper said cyclists in the park had developed a “certain entitlement.”
That morning, the loop had been “awful” — too chaotic, said Ms. Donadio, a real estate agent who lives on the Upper West Side. Crossing the drive, she had overheard one aggressive cyclist cursing out pedestrians.
“It’s just not good,” Ms. Donadio said, sounding resigned. “But the bikes, I don’t think they’re going anywhere.”
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