NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch has justified her criminal crackdown on cycling by saying that complaints about rogue cyclists are the most frequent concerns she hears. Those complaints could be coming from inside the house. Tisch’s mother, Merryl Tisch, has emerged as one of loudest, most prominent, critics of reckless cycling — most recently in a multi-part tirade at a hearing of the Public Design Commission on April 28. Curiously, that was the same day that Commissioner Tisch quietly began a new NYPD policy to issue criminal summonses to cyclists for many offenses that typically resulted in a regular traffic summons.
Merryl Tisch is the Board Chair of the state university system and a billionaire heiress. But is there any connection between Merryl Tisch’s power and outrage over cyclists and the controversial new crackdown unleashed by her daughter?
Both power players denied collusion, but it defies logic to think they haven’t discussed road safety, given both women’s passion for the subject. After all, they talk a lot.
“The mother and daughter still talk all the time, and Merryl is, shall we say, generous with her opinions on ‘everything from trash policy, hairstyle, criminal-justice reform,'” New York Magazine reported earlier this year, quoting Jessica Tisch. “’She [Merryl] has a lot of feedback.’” What might that feedback consist of? Without a wiretap, it’s impossible too say. But Merryl Tisch expressed her concerned about e-bikes almost exactly to the day when her daughter cracked down on them. At the April 28 hearing of the Public Design Commission, on which Merryl Tisch sits as a representative of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the senior scion barely allowed Department of Transportation officials to describe their Broadway Vision plan before interrupting with a complaint about the bike lane portion of the design.
“I see a lot of young people on your team, but all I hear about is that this [bike lanes] isn’t working for average New Yorkers,” she said. “Who is giving you input here?”
The DOT representatives explained that they receive input from all road users, including the disabled, seniors and emergency responders, not just cyclists. But that wasn’t enough for the elder Tisch.
“I just don’t understand where this is all going,” she said about a design for Broadway that has been under discussion for more than 15 years. “I’ve had four friends run over by bikes in the last six weeks. One of them is still in the hospital.” (She did not identify any of the alleged victims.)
“What are you doing to slow the bikes down?” she continued. “What are you doing to cause compliance with law for the bikes?”
The on-again/off-again attack on DOT was spread out over roughly 90 minutes. Tisch alternatively said seniors, the disabled, teachers, kids and “moms with strollers” are afraid to go out into the street because of rogue cyclists. She even said she can’t go “on a nice little bike ride” with her grandchildren — aka the police commissioner’s children — because of the fear of being struck by the rider of an electric bike. (In a subsequent conversation with this reporter, Tisch admitted she never rides a bike with her grandkids, and suggested she was merely exhorting DOT to make sure her grandchildren are safe when they ride their bikes.)
“People are mobilizing about this in a very big way,” Tisch said at the April 28 hearing. “But you are doing this [Broadway plan] without answering the commissioners’ questions about what are you doing to prevent motorized mopeds and e-bikes from using what was not created for them. … People are going to mobilize. I’ll mobilize people so quickly you guys won’t be able to even spell your names!” (The Department of Transportation declined to answer any questions on this topic.)
Influence at NYPD?
It goes without saying that Merryl Tisch is indeed expressing a complaint that others have aired, namely that some pedestrians feel spooked by some fast-moving cyclists. It is certainly a topic that comes up at community board meetings, and, indeed, it was raised by other members of the Design Commission, who have oversight of any permanent change to the city streetscape.
One member of the Commission, Isabel Castilla, even said she gets “run over by bikes every day,” a preposterous claim. Fellow Commission member and former Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, also shared that he sees some chaos on the streets these days, but merely urged the Department of Transportation reps to share with Tisch the facts about e-bike safety, which they failed to do (frustrating him and Tisch).
As Van Bramer suggested, the actual danger from electric bikes is quite small compared to the omnipresent menace of cars and trucks, whose drivers injure virtually all of the pedestrian injured in reported crashes. But Merryl Tisch has the ear of the police commissioner, her daughter. And this exceptionally powerful person — she is an heir to the Loews Corporation fortune and has been a fixture in city life for decades — knows how to use an ear.
“When my refrigerator is broken, I don’t call the service department,” she was quoted by the Times in 2009, when she was first elected chancellor of state Board of Regents. “I call the head of G.E.” Of late, her concerns have left the kitchen and have moved to the street.
“This [Broadway Vision] is all about getting cars out of the city,” she told DOT representatives at the April 28 hearing. “But people are getting run over by bikes all the time.”
E-bikes, she added, will emerge “as a major issue in the mayoral race. People are horrified. … You can’t go forward [with a car-free design for parts of Broadway] until you can assure people that you will fix what is going on.”
On that very same day, her daughter, the police commissioner, unveiled her attempt to “fix” that problem with stepped-up enforcement. Commissioner Tisch declined to comment for this story. In prior interviews, she had said that her agency’s new crackdown on electric bike riders was “data driven,” but the NYPD admitted to Streetsblog that its crackdown is not based on hard data at all — because such data does not exist.
“Complaints about this type of behavior do not typically come in from 311 and 911, since those calls are usually for issues that can be remediated in the moment (a blocked driveway for example), and an encounter with a reckless e-bike is too quick to remediate through a call to 311 or 911,” a police spokesperson, who declined to provide a name, said in a statement to Streetsblog. “New Yorkers are clearly and increasingly raising these fears and concerns in venues like [precinct] Community Council meetings, Town Halls, and other events where we work to better understand how we can best serve the public.”
In an op-ed in the New York Post on Wednesday, Tisch didn’t bother mentioning data, but echoed a lot of what her mother said at the Design Commission hearing: “Every New Yorker understands how frightening it is to jump out of the way as an e-bike drives on the sidewalk, or to pull their kids back as one barrels through a busy crosswalk.”
“New Yorkers have been raising these concerns in NYPD precincts, at Community Council meetings, at town halls and elsewhere,” she added (emphasis Streetsblog’s). “They have told us about their very real fears of serious injury or worse. And now, the NYPD is taking action.”
Merryl Tisch: The Streetsblog interview
In a lengthy interview with Streetsblog, Merryl Tisch denied that she ever spoke to her daughter about the danger of electric bikes. The NYPD press shop also said that Jessica Tisch did not talk to her mother about what she repeatedly says is a pressing issue.
“Believe me, dear,” Merryl Tisch told this reporter in a frankly delightful phone call, “I don’t talk to my daughter about bikes!”
She said she was entirely unaware of the NYPD’s new policy towards cyclists or that it started on the same day as her public opposition to electric bikes at the Design Commission.
“That’s funny,” she said. “The coincidence is funny.”
Coincidence or not, it is clear that the topic is front of mind in her social circle.
“I’ve had friends hit by electric bikes,” she told Streetsblog. “Everyone does! Everyone has a story to tell of how they opened the door and hit a guy on a bike.” [Editor’s note: A driver is subject to a traffic summons for opening a door into traffic, though this deadly infraction is rarely enforced.]
Nonetheless, she claims she is not an opponent of electric bikes.
“I am not against bikes at all,” she said. “My question was a simple one: there are things that have come up about speed and directionality and obeying traffic laws so is there anything you can build in to these plazas for safety? And you know what they said to me — I almost plotzed — the pedestrians and bikes will work it out.”
She admitted that she has not been on a bike in 15 years, and gets around the city in a car, on the subway or on foot. She declined to speculate what the biggest threat to pedestrians is these days.
“I don’t know, darling. I’m not an expert.”
In other words, Merryl Tisch did not have facts at her fingertips. But her daughter does: according to the NYPD’s own statistics, in 2024, 37 pedestrians were injured in 179 reported e-bike collisions. In that year, 9,610 pedestrians were injured overall, so e-bike riders caused just 0.4 percent of pedestrian injuries.
That pattern continued in the first three months of this year, with one pedestrian injured by an e-bike rider, according to the NYPD. Over the same period, 2,271 were injured overall, so e-bike riders caused less than 0.04 percent of the reported pedestrian injuries.
But this isn’t about facts or statistics, Tisch said, this is about what she hears from her friends, presumably those in the upper strata of New York society, on high floors well above the workaday lives of delivery cyclists or commuters who choose to get around bikes to save on chauffeur costs.
“I was just telling them [the DOT] that if you’re creating pedestrian malls and you’re putting in bike lanes, what have you learned from the bike lanes that exist that would enable you to maybe change something about these bike lanes so that they become safer in the public view,” she said. “That was it, nothing more. It’s three or four friends who have mentioned to me that they’ve had an issue with a bike. … And I was just relating that as something to think about.”
