NEW YORK (NYTIMES) - The Covid-19 pandemic has upended many of the familiar routines that make up everyday urban life, bringing tectonic shifts in office culture, classroom learning and online shopping.

       Now it is transforming the way people move around New York, the United States' largest city.

       A boom in electric-powered mobility devices is bringing what is likely to be a lasting change and a new safety challenge to New York's vast and crowded street grid.

       The devices have sprouted up all over.

       Office workers on electric scooters glide past Manhattan towers. Parents take electric bikes to drop off their children at school. Young people have turned to electric skateboards, technically illegal on city streets, to whiz through the far corners of New York.

       Although many of these riders initially gave up their subway and bus trips because of the lower virus risk of travelling outdoors, some say they are sticking with their e-mobility devices even as the city begins to move beyond the pandemic.

       "I use the scooter for everything - it's really convenient," said Ms Shareese King, 41, a Bronx resident who deleted the Uber app from her phone after she started running her errands on an electric scooter.

       Electric bikes, scooters and other devices are, in many cases, made for urban life because they are affordable, better for the environment, take up little, if any, street space for parking and are just fun to use, said Ms Sarah Kaufman, associate director of the Rudin Centre for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University.

       "In cities, many people understand there is a right-size vehicle for getting around - and that's human size - you don't need to put out an SUV's worth of carbon emissions just to go to work," she said.

       Across the nation, cities have increasingly embraced electric bikes and scooters as a way to get more people out of cars and fill the gap in urban transportation systems for trips that are too far to walk but too close for the subway or bus, according to transportation officials and experts.

       Even before the pandemic, electric scooter share programmes had spread to more than 100 cities, including Los Angeles, Washington and Atlanta, since 2017, according to the National Association of City Transportation Officials.

       Total rides surged 130 per cent to 88.5 million in 2019 from 38.5 million the year before.

       Many cities saw scooter ridership soar during the pandemic.

       Seattle's scooter-share programme has grown to 1.4 million rides since beginning just over a year ago.

       In Portland, Oregon, rides nearly doubled to 762,812 this year through September from 385,422 rides for the same period in 2020.

       Riders, pedestrians killed

       A person riding a scooter in Long Beach, California, on Aug 11, 2021. PHOTO: AFP

       Still, the e-mobility boom has brought significant safety challenges to New York's already congested streets.

       At least 17 people have been killed while riding electric mobility vehicles this year, according to city officials. Revel, which operates an electric moped share programme in the city, voluntarily shut it down for a month last year after three riders were killed. E-mobility crashes have also killed three pedestrians this year, including actress Lisa Banes, who was knocked down by a hit-and-run scooter rider on the Upper West Side.

       Many pedestrians and cyclists complain about e-bike and e-scooter riders who speed, ride on sidewalks, run red lights and go the wrong way on streets.

       "The e-bikes, they don't mind which way they have to go, how they go, where they go, even if they go on the sidewalk or the opposite way on a street," said Ms Jacqueline Aybar, 53, who recently had a near miss with an e-bike in a Queens crosswalk. "Now when you're crossing the street, it's not just looking for a car, you have to look to see if any bike is coming."

       City and state officials have scrambled to keep up with the rapid e-mobility expansion. Most e-bikes and e-scooters became legal on city streets only last year, although delivery workers have long ridden them.

       Unlike cars, they are not registered or licensed or required to have insurance or cited by automatic speeding cameras.

       Other kinds of e-mobility devices are illegal, including skateboards, unicycles, hoverboards and Segways.

       "I know there is a concern and a perception about the safety of new forms of e-mobility devices," said Mr Hank Gutman, the city transportation commissioner. "That is an issue we are looking at."

       City officials said they have installed more protected bike lanes; launched a public-education campaign about which e-mobility devices are legal; set strict safety guidelines; and closely monitored the city's first e-scooter share pilot programme in the Bronx.

       At Bicycles NYC on the Upper East Side, some customers saved up money during the pandemic they would have spent on Metro Cards to buy an electric bike, said Mr Sajari Hume, a sales manager.

       The store sells up to 10 electric bikes a month. In the Bronx, George Diaz bought a $550 (S$745) electric scooter last year to avoid being exposed to the virus on a crowded bus commute.

       Now he takes it whenever he can. "It saves me money," said Mr Diaz, 28. "I'm not around so many people."

       Mr Samuel Schwartz, a former city traffic commissioner, said the city needed a comprehensive plan to address the e-mobility boom.

       "The streets were not made for the e-mobility vehicles," he said. "We have to look at this systematically and not just single out e-bikes and e-scooters. We have to redefine our streets."

       City officials are testing the electric scooters in the northeast Bronx by providing up to 3,000 stand-up and sit-down e-scooters, unlocked through phone apps. Each scooter starts at US$1 (S$1.35) and costs between 30 and 39 US cents per minute, with discounts for low-income residents.

       Scooters are parked in designated corrals or on sidewalks. The city requires users to be at least 18 years old, and to complete safety training and pass a safety quiz on the app.

       Some residents complain that people ride on sidewalks, fight over the scooters and leave them everywhere.

       "I think they bring more problems to the community," said Ms Awilda Torres, 76, a retired hospital worker.

       But others count on the scooters.

       Ms Tyasia Washington, 29, rides one from her home to the closest subway station, where she boards a train to her marketing job in Manhattan. "It's a long walk," she said.

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