BY OTTO FRITTON | While electric bicycles are booming in New York City, enforcement of traffic laws against traffic offenders has not kept pace.

Many locals complain about the whizzing electric Citibikes and other electric micromobility vehicles that race headlong through the city’s streets and even sidewalks, sometimes going in the wrong direction.

John Campo is a West Point championship-winning professional cyclist and former coach. He is also known as the “Angel of the Kissena Velodrome” for his efforts to renovate a dilapidated 1963 velodrome in Queens, which the parks department finally completed in 2004.

As a bicycle historian, he has also collected photos of early gasoline-powered scooters dating back more than 100 years. According to Campo, these scooters were initially restricted to use by the disabled and limited to a maximum speed of 24 km/h. However, with the advent of e-bikes, this speed limit was lowered to today’s road level, and e-bikes are now allowed to travel 32 to 40 km/h.

Although Campo is an avid cyclist, he is also a fierce critic of what he sees as a lack of enforcement of e-bikes. He believes police consistently ignore e-vehicle users who disregard the rules of the road, particularly e-citi bikers. He is a member of the NYC E-Vehicle Safety Alliance (EVSA), the city’s leading activist group calling for greater regulation of e-vehicles.

A bill to license and register e-bikes is pending in both the Albany State Legislature and the New York City Council.

“Even if these laws are passed, they won’t be enforced,” Campo scoffed. “They’ll still ride on the sidewalk. They’ll still kill people.”

Campo places equal blame on the police and e-bike riders, as both are failing in their responsibilities and failing to ensure pedestrian safety. He pointed to the tragic death of popular 69-year-old Chinatown preschool teacher Priscilla Loke, who was fatally struck by an e-Citi bike rider at the corner of Chrystie and Grand Street last September. Police initially let the cyclist leave the scene of the accident without taking down his name and contact information. Officers later managed to find him – but as The Village Sun first reported, he was only punished with a slap on the wrist, a ticket for running a red light.

Meanwhile, his wife, Michele Campo, a quality-of-life activist in the Bowery neighborhood, pushed for and won legislation banning idling and honking of motor vehicles, and worked to preserve historic buildings in the area, among other things.

“You know, my wife and I, especially my wife, are community safety advocates and building rescue advocates, and she’s written tickets for idling, which is a $500 fine,” Campo said. “My wife even went up to a cop once and said he’d been idling for half an hour. The guy said, ‘I can’t give him a ticket.’ She said, ‘Why not?’ ‘I don’t know the code,’ he said. So my wife got the code and took it to the station, and the police captain laughed. He said, ‘I really like that’ – but nobody gets a ticket, anyway.”

Campo said coaching the West Point Cadet cycling team to the national championship was a personal highlight for him, but that the team members also exemplified the integrity he believes is lacking on the streets, both among cyclists and police.

“It was just incredible,” he recalled. “I mean, they were just normal kids. They weren’t really superhumans, but they had an integrity that I just fell in love with. When I tell them to do something, they say, ‘Yes, sir.’ That’s integrity. When they say they’re going to do something, they do it.”

As electric bikes continue to gain popularity despite minimal regulation, more and more people – including Campo – are being hit by them. He said he was biking on the West Side Greenway in the 1930s when an e-bike rider hit him from behind, bruising his ribs.

Janet Schroeder, co-founder and steering committee member of NYC-EVSA, stressed that electric bikes are not like regular bikes, but should be classified as mopeds rather than bicycles due to their motors, higher weight and speed. This would require them to have a visible license plate like cars that could be captured by red light and speed cameras to help police identify and catch traffic offenders.

In a personal video statement for NYC-EVSA, Campo invites elected officials to consider the issue from a civilian perspective.

“Everybody in the city government, the state senator, the mayor, just ride my bike and see what’s going on,” he says in the video. “People are making laws that have never ridden a bike. Come out and see what’s happening out here, you know, and I wish that this offer would be taken up before some e-bike kills me, because cycling is my life and I’m never going to stop riding my bike.”