For more than seven years, I have delivered across Queens and the rest of New York City, the first years on a bike and the last four on a scooter. For part of that time I was a leader with Los Deliveristas Unidos, which meant I spent nearly as many evenings talking with other delivery workers as I did working on the street.

Almost every meeting ended the same way, with someone telling the group about a scare they had on the street that week, and in all the years I heard these stories, it was rarely another delivery worker or another bike that caused the problem. It was almost always a distracted driver who turned without looking, ran a red light, or didn’t even bother to stop after hitting someone on a bike or scooter. Or it was a blocked bike lane that forced a rider into streets designed for cars. I heard so many of these stories that I stopped seeing them as something that could happen to us and started seeing them as an inevitable part of life on New York City streets.

What stood out to me was that these scares kept happening in the same places, at big intersections and along wide avenues where cars move fast and turn at all hours, and those are the same blocks with the most orders, so a lot of us pass through them every day. Anyone who rides a bike or scooter in this city already knows which corners to dread and which bike lanes vanish without warning, and knows that in that traffic you are the most vulnerable and the easiest to hit, just like the pedestrian crossing beside you.

Now I’m hearing that the City Council is looking at more than 20 bills on e-bikes, scooters, and delivery work after a series of deadly crashes over the last few months, and I am glad our local leaders are taking this seriously. Some of the proposals will make a real difference, but from everything I heard in those meetings, it seems the Council is focused on protecting people from bikes and scooters, when what they need to do is protect the people who ride them from cars and trucks.

In an environment built for and dominated by cars, vans, and trucks, those of us on two wheels are among the most vulnerable people on the street. Most crashes are the result of streets that practically encourage car drivers to speed and leave us nowhere to go. Writing more tickets for bike riders will not fix a street designed for cars and not people.

I say this from experience. Four years ago I left my bike and moved to a scooter because of the lack of safe bike lanes and the danger of the traffic, and that switch was not cheap, since I had to buy, register, insure, and maintain it, a cost not every delivery worker can take on.

Most delivery workers I know follow the rules of the road. We stop at red lights, we stay off the sidewalks, we yield to pedestrians, and above all, we want to get home safe every night, because our lives and livelihoods depend on it.

If the Council wants to make a real difference, it should start with what matters most, which also happens to be what only the Council controls: it can change traffic patterns so cars have to turn slowly and can see who is beside them, bring car speeds down where it is needed, invest in protected bike lanes that actually connect so nobody is left exposed when a lane suddenly ends, and make sure drivers who flee after a crash or speed face real consequences.

The NYPD can also make drivers who break the law pay their speeding tickets and enforce the rules against parking or stopping in bus and bike lanes. The City can take real steps to lower speed limits, especially in busy areas, and make biking (and walking) easier and safer by redesigning streets to be people-centered.

None of this has to wait, and all of it will protect everyone, from the pedestrian to the child on a bike to the driver who never wants to be in a collision.

Delivery workers are not asking for special treatment, just for leaders to stop blaming us and start building streets that put those on two wheels and pedestrians first, not last. Protect the streets, and you protect everyone, and both I and many of my fellow delivery workers would feel safer going back to a bike.

William Medina is a delivery worker in Queens and a former leader of Los Deliveristas Unidos.

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