I was picking my wife up from a hair appointment at 17th and Sansom when I watched a delivery rider on an e-bike thread between two moving cars, blow the red at the corner, and keep going. He was not the only one. A few weeks later, walking to meet a friend, one of them nearly took me out on the sidewalk. He did not flinch or turn around. No "sorry," no "excuse me." I stood there with my heart pounding.
So I did what I always do when something in this city makes me angry. I went and read the law.
I run a site that tracks every bill introduced in Philadelphia City Council since 2000. I assumed I would find the city had never bothered to write the rules. What I found was stranger, and it changed what I think the problem is.
Five bills, zero votes
Here is every bill since 2000 that would have added a new duty, penalty, registration requirement or forfeiture for people riding bicycles.
- 2006, bill 060897 (DiCicco). Would have barred pedalcycles seating more than two passengers from roadways.
- 2009, bill 090845 (DiCicco). Would have required registration of every bicycle ridden on a public right of way.
- 2009, bills 090829 and 090828 (Kenney). Would have raised the fines in the city's bicycle chapter. The second would also have let the city seize bikes without working brakes.
- 2015, bill 150617 (Oh). Would have required cyclists to ride in a bike lane wherever one exists.
For all five, the vote record is empty at every stage. They were introduced, sent to committee, and left there until the term ran out.
That is not unusual, and the real number is worse. Of the 8,465 bills introduced from 2000 through 2025, 1,624, about one in five, lapsed without a single recorded vote. Nobody conspired to bury the cyclist rules. They went into the same drawer as sixteen hundred other bills, which is its own indictment.
So no member of Council has ever had to go on the record about new penalties for cyclists. If that makes you angry, there is nobody to vote out over it, because nobody ever voted.
What I want, up front
Three behaviors enforced: riding the wrong way up a one-way, riding on the sidewalk, and running red lights. A number on commercial delivery bikes that can be read off the bike, so a rider who does those things repeatedly can lose the right to do them for money. Nothing for the commuter, the kid or the weekend rider. And all of it paired with something that costs drivers, because that is the only kind of cyclist rule this city has ever passed.
I am not asking for a crackdown on cyclists. By the end I will have argued against several things I believed when I started, including that one.
What Council will vote on
Five bike bills did pass, all unanimously: sidewalk riding designations in 2009, 16 to 0; Complete Streets in 2012, 17 to 0; removing abandoned bicycles in 2015, 15 to 0; licensing bike share in 2018, 17 to 0; and no stopping or parking in a bike lane in 2024, 17 to 0.
Look at who each one binds: drivers, bike share companies, abandoned frames, and one that permits sidewalk riding rather than restricting it. Only Complete Streets sets rules for how cyclists ride, and it came bundled with new obligations on drivers. Not one imposes a standalone new penalty on a rider.
The clearest case is Oh's 2015 bill. It would have required cyclists to use bike lanes and raised penalties on drivers who block them. It lapsed. Nine years later Council passed the driver half on its own, 17 to 0. The cyclist half never came back. Records show outcomes, not motives, so I cannot tell you anyone split that bill on purpose. But the half aimed at drivers is law, and the half aimed at riders is not.
The rules exist. The consequences don't.
That is the part I had wrong. Pennsylvania law gives a person on a bicycle "all of the duties applicable to the driver of a vehicle." Red lights and stop signs bind a rider exactly as they bind me in my car, and riders must go with traffic. Philadelphia goes further: its code allows sidewalk riding only for children under 12, and not even for them in a business district. The man who nearly ran me down was not in a gray area.
A legal e-bike, meaning under 100 pounds, with working pedals, a motor of 750 watts or less and a top assisted speed of 20 miles per hour, counts as a bicycle: no plate, no registration, no insurance. Anything beyond that is an unregistered motor vehicle, and the registration rules people assume do not exist have applied all along.
Pennsylvania even used to require cyclists to use a bike lane where one was available. The legislature dropped that in 1998. Oh's bill would have restored it for Philadelphia.
What is missing is a consequence. Breaking the city's bicycle rules carries a fine of up to $75, and collecting it takes an officer who sees the violation, stops the rider and writes the ticket. A driver 11 miles an hour over on Roosevelt Boulevard gets a $100 ticket generated by a camera and mailed home. Philadelphia automated enforcement against drivers and left the cyclist rules to a traffic stop that essentially never happens. It runs the other way too: state law requires drivers to give cyclists four feet when passing, and you can ask anyone who rides how often that is enforced.
The number nobody collects
If delivery riders are as dangerous as they feel, that should show up somewhere. It doesn't, because of one line of state law. Pennsylvania's crash database counts a crash only if at least one motor vehicle in transport was involved, and a bicycle does not count as one.
So an e-bike hit by a car is in the data. An e-bike that hits a pedestrian is not. In Philadelphia in 2025, according to PennDOT data reported by the Inquirer, e-bikes and e-scooters were involved in 197 crashes, with four riders killed and 193 injured, up about 40 percent from 2024. Every one of those crashes involved a motor vehicle; that is what got them counted. Had the rider on the sidewalk actually hit me, the collision would not have entered the state's crash database at all.
A police report might exist, or a hospital record. What does not exist is the thing a legislator would need: a steady count of pedestrians hurt by people on bikes. You cannot legislate against a number nobody collects.
The other half, which I am not going to skip
On July 13, 2024, I was riding home from a haircut on Main Street in Manayunk when a car parked at the curb pulled out in front of me. I hit the side of it, went over the bars and landed hard on my right side. I got up, told the driver and a rider who stopped that I was fine, and forgave the driver. Nobody called police. I did not go to a hospital. A car pulling out of a parking space is a motor vehicle in transport, and I was hurt, so that crash should have been reportable. It is in no dataset anywhere. I am one of the holes in the number I was asking for, and what survives into the data is the severe end of it.
Four days later, on July 17, Dr. Barbara Friedes, a 30-year-old pediatric resident at Children's Hospital, was riding in the Spruce Street bike lane at 18th when a drunk driver struck and killed her. That is a few blocks from where I watched the delivery riders. She was wearing a helmet. She was where she was supposed to be. The lane was paint and flexible plastic posts.
The city's answer was to make that lane physical: concrete separators, plus loading zones carved out of residential permit parking so delivery vehicles would have somewhere to stop besides the bike lane. Neighbors sued. Friends of Pine and Spruce incorporated in January 2025 and filed suit that June, arguing the city could not reassign parking without an ordinance from Council. That September the Society Hill Civic Association board voted to give the group $25,000 toward legal costs. A judge paused the work, and in July 2026 the court refused to let it resume. The concrete has not been poured.
I never rode on the sidewalk, and I am not writing this as someone who thinks cyclists are the problem. Thirty-nine people died in Philadelphia traffic in the first half of 2025 alone, in crashes involving motor vehicles. A cyclist running a red light is a hazard. A driver running one is operating two tons of machinery. Cyclists behaving badly is not an argument for leaving cyclists unprotected, and the clearest illustration of that is three blocks from where I was standing.
It is not the fix
When I first read about bill 260525, I assumed it was the fix. It would have Licenses and Inspections issue an E-Bike Delivery License to anyone delivering by e-bike, and its companion, 260526, would make delivery companies keep a registry of their riders. Both are Councilmember Young's, and both are still in committee.
Then I read the text. The license "shall not constitute a vehicle title, vehicle registration, driver's license, license plate, inspection certificate, insurance requirement, or other authorization to operate a pedalcycle with electric assist." No plate, nothing on the bike to read. The registry "shall not require a covered delivery worker to obtain a City license" and changes no traffic rule.
There is one real lever. The city could revoke a license for "repeated violations of this Chapter while performing commercial delivery service," and that chapter is the bicycle rules. But somebody has to write those citations first, and essentially nobody does. And the bill reaches only commercial riders, people paid per delivery, many of them immigrants, represented by nobody. After a quarter century of declining to regulate cyclists, the first serious attempt lands on the riders with the least power to object.
The version I would vote for
I am not against 260525. I am against mistaking it for a solution.
Put a numbered tag on the machine, issued by the city to commercial delivery riders the way a vendor cart or a taxi carries one. Not a PennDOT plate, and nothing for the commuter, the kid or the weekend rider. Tie revocation to the three behaviors that matter: wrong-way riding, sidewalk riding and running reds. Fund someone to enforce it. And pair it, in the same bill, with something that costs drivers, the way the 2012 Complete Streets bill did. I cannot prove bundling is why that one passed while the others died, but it is the only cyclist conduct rule in twenty-six years that made it through.
The details will not be simple: how an officer identifies a repeat offender, how a rider appeals a ticket he did not earn, how to keep it from becoming a pretext for stopping people. A city can work through those, and none of them is a reason to keep doing nothing.
Do that and I think it passes 17 to 0, like everything else here. And if a rule is right, it should be right for the lawyer on a Specialized too.
Leave the bill as written and Council gets to say it addressed e-bikes, the riders get a card in their wallet, the guy who nearly ran me down keeps riding exactly as he did, and in five years somebody writes this same column again.
What to watch
- Bills 260525 and 260526 are still in committee. This is when the scope can change.
- Bill 250649, the bike lane around City Hall, passed Council 17 to 0 on October 15 and is on the mayor's desk.
- Bill 260699, filed in September, would reduce automated speed-camera fines based on how far over the limit a driver was. Keep the cameras, soften the penalty on drivers.
The record is public and searchable. You do not have to take my reading of it. Go look.
Updated October 24, 2026: shortened, and the City Hall bike lane's status brought current.
Sources. Crash reporting rules from 75 Pa.C.S. Chapter 37 and PennDOT's Police Officers Crash Report Manual. Cyclist duties from 75 Pa.C.S. Chapter 35. Philadelphia e-bike and e-scooter crash counts for 2025 from PennDOT, as reported by the Inquirer in July 2026. Fatality counts for the first half of 2025 from the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia. The Pine and Spruce lawsuit from WHYY, the Inquirer's reporting on the Society Hill vote, and the July 2026 ruling. Bill text from Philadelphia Legistar, linked throughout.