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This weird oversized e-bike is sparking a controversy in New York City.

	New York City wants to invite a new breed of delivery vehicle onto its streets — or rather, into its bike lanes.
	
A proposal by the city’s transportation department would enable larger, electric, pedal-assist cargo bicycles to deliver packages. By allowing a wider variety of commercial bicycles to operate, the city hopes to shift more deliveries by major carriers like Amazon and UPS out of trucks and onto bikes in order to cut pollution, reduce carbon emissions, and improve public safety.
There’s a surprisingly broad array of conveyances that are all, nominally, electric cargo bikes. You may have seen neighbors piloting these 2-wheeled consumer models back from the grocery store, which come with a small, built-in trailer or wagon. In dense cities, many companies are now making deliveries with e-bikes carting long, 3-wheeled trailers stacked with boxes behind them. But in New York, there are currently legal limits on how wide these bikes can be and how many wheels they can have. Some of the models that are growing popular with delivery companies like Amazon and DHL in London and Berlin either have bigger, pallet-sized storage containers attached to them, or more closely resemble golf carts or slim trucks than bikes.
Take this “skinny legend” recently piloted by UPS, which is similar to the model that Amazon is rolling out in London. It may not look like a bike, but there’s no steering wheel or acceleration pedal. It has handlebars and won't budge until the driver begins cycling away — at which point an electric motor kicks in and it can reach speeds of up to 15.5 miles per hour.
It’s also frankly, adorable. Maybe it’s just the innate human attraction to miniaturized things, but I mean, just look at this thing:
The New York City Department of Transportation estimates that heavy-duty vehicles account for roughly half of tailpipe emissions, despite making up a small fraction of vehicle activity, and freight traffic is growing rapidly. Pre-pandemic projections estimated that regional freight traffic would grow 67% between 2012 and 2045, but since January of 2020, the DOT estimates it’s already increased by more than 50%. Cargo bikes are part of the city’s vision for sustainable freight, as a way to make the “last mile” of delivery more efficient.
It’s already working. A NYC pilot program found that in 2022, cargo bikes made more than 130,000 trips delivering over 5 million packages, resulting in the reduction of over 650,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions. The Department of Transportation has determined that there is even more unmet demand that could be addressed if larger cargo bikes are allowed.
But the proposal to allow larger e-bikes on the road has had a rocky start. It’s not surprising — the idea of one of these things bounding down the city’s crowded, narrow bike lanes is a little unnerving. The city’s bike infrastructure has improved a lot in recent years, with more routes and more protected lanes. But many protected lanes still require cyclists to exercise sharp reflexes to dodge idling trucks, parked cop cars, oblivious pedestrians, and zippy mopeds. Without a more comprehensive approach to the e-bike revolution, the city risks creating a more dangerous environment and inviting public backlash.
“We think they really are an opportunity to transition away from trucks to more sustainable and safer modes of transit,” Alexa Sledge, associate director of communications at the nonprofit Transportation Alternatives, told me. “But at the same time, the way our streets are built right now is so often prioritizing trucks and cars, and we really need more space for bikes if we are going to transition to using more cargo bikes.”
During a recent comment period and public hearing on the proposal, many New Yorkers turned out to express their concerns that these vehicles pose a danger to pedestrians and other bikers. The city has already faced growing backlash from residents over e-bikes and mopeds riding on the sidewalks as food delivery has become more popular, and many commenters worried this would only make the situation worse. Others accused the bikes of being “mini trucks,” but not in a cute way.
“I am strongly against this,” read a comment by Fawn Sullivan. “The sidewalks and bike lanes are already chaotic and dangerous due to e-bikes/mopeds. We need more regulations for e-vehicles, not less.”
“If they use the same bike lanes as your everyday commuter, it’s going to be an absolute nightmare and clog up the lanes, pushing cyclists into the streets or sidewalks to get around deliveries,” read another by Michelle G. “I can see this being a total mess.”
There were also many supportive commenters who echoed Sledge’s caveat about ensuring the right infrastructure was in place. One commenter named Bill Bruno called the switch from trucks to cargo e-bikes “long overdue,” but wanted to see “wider bike lanes and many more drop-off zones.” Sara Lind, of Open Plans, a grassroots group advocating for “people-first street culture,” wrote, “Functional infrastructure will be critical to make this important program work.”
The proposal follows a program that DOT launched at the end of 2019 to track the use of cargo bikes by commercial shipping carriers. By coincidence, the data collection effort started just as package delivery was exploding due to the pandemic. After just a year, the city found that companies were rapidly increasing the use of electric cargo bikes. Between May 2020 and January 2021, the number of cargo bike deliveries increased 109%.
But existing laws restrict carriers to using bikes that are 3-feet wide and have three wheels. (Although UPS, a participant in the pilot program, seemed to have gotten around the restriction with a four-wheeled model it rolled out last year. Neither the company nor the Department of Transportation responded to my request for clarification.)
In any case, the city’s proposal would officially allow the use of models that are up to 4-feet wide, and have four wheels, like those I described earlier.
But another issue that came up in the comments was that the proposal would backtrack slightly, banning many of the models that carriers were already using on NYC streets. It caps the length of a cargo bike to 10 feet, despite many current cargo bikes measuring out to 14 feet — mostly those that are toting trailers. “We cannot risk alienating the users who have already adopted this sustainable delivery mode,” wrote Lind.
The city is still parsing public comments and has not said when it plans to finalize the rules. The DOT did not respond to a question I sent them about whether it plans to do anything in conjunction with this rule change to address bike lane safety.
This is also just one piece of New York’s broader plans to reduce truck traffic in the city. The DOT is planning to pilot “microhubs,” locations where online orders can be dropped off and then distributed locally by smaller vehicles. Plus, the decades-long battle to establish a congestion pricing scheme may finally be coming to a head, with plans to begin charging vehicles to enter downtown Manhattan sometime next year. When I spoke with Sledge, she said that’s likely to put more pressure on delivery companies to switch to e-bikes, raising the urgency of the need to re-design the city’s streets for a micro-mobility future.
“We can’t continue to have the same sort of street design we’ve had for years if we're going to ask these bike lanes to do so much more,” she said. “It will be even more important to take space away from cars and give it to people riding bikes if they’re going to be such a large number of our road users.”
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The state formerly led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum does not have a history of rejecting wind farms – which makes some recent difficulties especially noteworthy.
A wind farm in North Dakota – the former home of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum – is becoming a bellwether for the future of the sector in one of the most popular states for wind development.
At issue is Allete’s Longspur project, which would see 45 turbines span hundreds of acres in Morton County, west of Bismarck, the rural state’s most populous city.
Sited amid two already operating wind farms, the project will feed power not only to North Dakotans but also to Minnesotans, who, in the view of Allete, lack the style of open plains perfect for wind farms found in the Dakotas. Allete subsidiary Minnesota Power announced Longspur in August and is aiming to build and operate it by 2027, in time to qualify for clean electricity tax benefits under a hastened phase-out of the Inflation Reduction Act.
On paper, this sounds achievable. North Dakota is one of the nation’s largest producers of wind-generated power and not uncoincidentally boasts some of cheapest electricity in the country at a time when energy prices have become a potent political issue. Wind project rejections have happened, but they’ve been rare.
Yet last week, zoning officials in Morton County bucked the state’s wind-friendly reputation and voted to reject Longspur after more than an hour of testimony from rural residents who said they’d had enough wind development – and that officials should finish the job Donald Trump and Doug Burgum started.
Across the board, people who spoke were neighbors of existing wind projects and, if built, Longspur. It wasn’t that they didn’t want any wind turbines – or “windmills,” as they called them, echoing Trump’s nomenclature. But they didn’t want more of them. After hearing from the residents, zoning commission chair Jesse Kist came out against the project and suggested the county may have had enough wind development for now.
“I look at the area on this map and it is plum full of wind turbines, at this point,” Kist said, referencing a map where the project would be situated. “And we have a room full of people and we heard only from landowners, homeowners in opposition. Nobody in favor.”
This was a first for the county, zoning staff said, as public comment periods weren’t previously even considered necessary for a wind project. Opposition had never shown up like this before. This wasn’t lost on Andy Zachmeier, a county commissioner who also sits on the zoning panel, who confessed during the hearing that the county was approaching the point of overcrowding. “Sooner or later, when is too many enough?” he asked.
Zachmeier was ultimately one of the two officials on the commission to vote against rejecting Longspur. He told me he was looking to Burgum for a signal.
“The Green New Deal – I don’t have to like it but it’s there,” he said. “Governor Burgum is now our interior secretary. There’s been no press conferences by him telling the president to change the Green New Deal.” Zachmeier said it was not the county’s place to stop the project, but rather that it was up to the state government, a body Burgum once led. “That’s probably going to have to be a legislative question. There’s been nothing brought forward where the county can say, We’ve been inundated and we’ve had enough,” he told me.
The county commission oversees the zoning body, and on Wednesday, Zachmeier and his colleagues voted to deny Longspur’s rejection and requested that zoning officials reconsider whether the denial was a good idea, or even legally possible. Unlike at the hearing last week, landowners whose property includes the wind project area called for it to proceed, pointing to the monetary benefits its construction would provide them.
“We appreciate the strong support demonstrated by landowners at the recent Commission meeting,” Allete’s corporate communications director Amy Rutledge told me in an email. “This region of North Dakota combines exceptional wind resources, reliable electric transmission infrastructure, and a strong tradition of coexisting seamlessly with farming and ranching activities.”
I personally doubt that will be the end of Longspur’s problems before the zoning board, and I suspect this county will eventually restrict or even ban future wind projects. Morton County’s profile for renewables development is difficult, to say the least; Heatmap Pro’s modeling gives the county an opposition risk score of 92 because it’s a relatively affluent agricultural community with a proclivity for cultural conservatism – precisely the kind of bent that can be easily swayed by rhetoric from Trump and his appointees.
Morton County also has a proclivity for targeting advanced tech-focused industrial development. Not only have county officials instituted a moratorium on direct air capture facilities, they’ve also banned future data center and cryptocurrency mining projects.
Neighboring counties have also restricted some forms of wind energy infrastructure. McClean County to the north, for example, has instituted a mandatory wind turbine setback from the Missouri River, and Stark County to the west has a 2,000-foot property setback from homes and public buildings.
In other words, so goes Burgum, may go North Dakota? I suppose we’ll find out.
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Staten Island, New York – New York’s largest battery project, Swiftsure, is dead after fervent opposition from locals in what would’ve been its host community, Staten Island.
2. Barren County, Kentucky – Do you remember Wood Duck, the solar farm being fought by the National Park Service? Geenex, the solar developer, claims the Park Service has actually given it the all-clear.
3. Near Moss Landing, California – Two different communities near the now-infamous Moss Landing battery site are pressing for more restrictions on storage projects.
4. Navajo County, Arizona – If good news is what you’re seeking, this Arizona county just approved a large solar project, indicating this state still has sunny prospects for utility-scale development depending on where you go.
5. Gillespie County, Texas – Meanwhile out in Texas, this county is getting aggressive in its attempts to kill a battery storage project.
6. Clinton County, Iowa – This county just extended its moratorium on wind development until at least the end of the year as it drafts a restrictive ordinance.
A chat with with Johanna Bozuwa of the Climate and Community Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Johanna Bozuwa, executive director of the Climate and Community Institute, a progressive think tank that handles energy issues. This week, the Institute released a report calling for a “public option” to solve the offshore wind industry’s woes – literally. As in, the group believes an ombudsman agency akin to the Tennessee Valley Authority that takes equity stakes or at least partial ownership of offshore wind projects would mitigate investment risk, should a future Democratic president open the oceans back up for wind farms.
While I certainly found the idea novel and interesting, I had some questions about how a public office standing up wind farms would function, and how to get federal support for such an effort post-Trump. So I phoned up Johanna, who cowrote the document, to talk about it.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
How did we get here? What’s the impetus for this specific idea – an authority to handle building out offshore wind?
As you have covered very closely, [the Trump administration is] stymying huge manufacturing opportunities for union workers, and obviously putting [decarbonization] way off course. Even though it’s an odd time to talk about a federally-focused offshore wind agenda, I think because the administration is scaring off investment in this sector, increasingly our only option in a more amenable administration may be to just do it ourselves.
From my perspective, we can’t just abdicate this critical decarb sector. It’s so close to coastal population centers, so close to where people live in high-density urban areas that need electricity. So we need to be preparing for how we make up for this massive amount of lost time. We’re also trying to break through some of the longer term coordination problems the offshore wind sector has run into.
Your report outlines past examples of authorities like the Tennessee Valley Authority – help me understand what this would look like for offshore wind.
There are definitely examples of what we’re discussing here, and we evoke the moonshot as one of these examples where the government got behind a major technological jump and used industrial policy to make that happen — doing some of the planning, investing in companies directly via equity stakes, developing its own public enterprises or departments within the government to drive towards a common goal.
Then, of course, there was the rural electrification administration and the TVA development. The federal government has used more of its planning muscle to drive toward a critical goal, and from our perspective, a critical goal is decarbonizing the electricity sector. Yet at the same time, we’re seeing massive electricity cost spikes, so we’re trying to ponder how an authority like this could actually do that.
There are three areas where we’d imagine this authority to be involved. The first is actual development of offshore wind projects – a stable baseline for offshore wind by always being the bidder of last resort, actively bidding on projects along the coast. This also creates a baseline for the supply chain generally.
We also see an opportunity here in offshore transmission grids, because I’m sure you’re well aware how mired those grids have become. There are opportunities for increased planning around the grid to ensure a higher level of coordination. And by having a federal authority, it will lower the cost to other offshore wind developers.
The third piece is the supply chain manufacturing — more so a coordination role, sure, but also an opportunity for the federal government to leverage its large-scale procurement power. It would help provide security for a lot of the components in this moment of uncertainty.
On one hand, the benefit of the public option is a birch rod for the private sector. If the public entity is providing things at lower cost and with potentially higher commitments to higher wages, with more people wanting to work for the public entity, it can bring the entirety of the industry up because they’d have to compete with the agency.
On the other hand, I think there’s pieces of this that actually draw down costs, like the transmission and supply chain pieces.
What do you say to the percentage of the public that is opposed to offshore wind development?
I think there has been a very effective disinformation campaign. We also see a benefit in planning because we can limit overbuild and be strategic about where it’s deployed to limit permitting snags and other turmoil.
Okay, but the big question hovering over this is how it gets done. You’re going to need to convince the public to create this authority. And this is such an ambitious idea. How do you reckon with that?
Because so much has been lost during this administration, in terms of public planning and the DOGE cuts, there will be this need on a grand scale to supercharge and re-double efforts in a wide range of areas. My feeling is that we have to build toward a political appetite.
We have to think about big, ambitious solutions like this. Is this actually an opportunity to lower costs, not just decarb? Are there ways to think about that to build an enduring political coalition?
We’re seeing the Trump administration use some of these policy levers much more stridently than former Democratic presidents have used — like with equity stakes. We could do that kind of thing, too.
The truth is we have three years to build the political opportunities and coalition to do this.