A Crash That Should Make Long Island Pay Attention
On the evening of June 12, 2026, just after 7:00 p.m., emergency crews closed Daly Avenue at the Minsi Trail Bridge near Wind Creek Casino in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. According to Northampton County dispatchers and reporting by WFMZ-69 News, the collision involved two motorcycles and one e-bike. Two motorcyclists were killed. The e-bike rider was transported to the hospital. Accident-reconstruction crews were, as of this writing, still working to establish exactly how the three machines came together, and no cause has been assigned.
Bethlehem is eighty miles from Nassau County, and the cause of that specific crash is not yet known. So why lead a Long Island traffic analysis with it?
Because it is a clean illustration of the single fact reshaping road safety across every American metro right now: a vehicle capable of 20 to 28 miles per hour, weighing 50 to 80 pounds, carrying a rider with no crash structure, is now sharing the same asphalt as motorcycles, box trucks, and 4,000-pound SUVs — and almost none of the accountability framework that governs those other vehicles applies to it. That is true on Daly Avenue in Bethlehem. It is equally true on Sunrise Highway, on Hempstead Turnpike, and on the Long Beach boardwalk.
This is the analysis nobody on Long Island has connected end to end. Here it is.
Data note: Figures below reflect cited public datasets and the Long Island Traffic events database as of June 13, 2026. Statutory details summarize current New York State law; local ordinances vary by town and village and change frequently. This article is reporting and analysis, not legal advice — see the FAQ and our Know Your Rights guides.
The Pendulum: From “Legalize Everything” to “Slow It All Down”
The micromobility story of the last six years is a textbook regulatory pendulum, and we are watching it reverse in real time.
The upswing (2020–2023). In April 2020, New York State legalized electric bicycles and standing electric scooters statewide — a deliberate embrace of cheap, clean, car-free transportation, accelerated by a pandemic that made delivery work and open-air mobility essential. Devices flooded in. Delivery riders, commuters, teenagers, and tourists adopted them faster than any new road user in a generation. Crucially, the law asked for no license, no registration, and no insurance.
The top of the arc (2023–2024). Two problems arrived together. First, fires. Cheap, uncertified lithium-ion batteries began igniting in apartments and stairwells. The FDNY identified lithium-ion battery failures — overwhelmingly from e-bikes and e-scooters — as a leading cause of fatal fires, prompting New York City’s Local Law 39 of 2023, which banned the sale and assembly of powered mobility devices and batteries not certified to recognized UL safety standards. Second, crashes. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, tracking “micromobility” products (e-scooters, e-bikes, hoverboards), reported emergency-room-treated injuries climbing year over year into the hundreds of thousands, with a rising death toll — the curve of a product category outrunning its safety norms.
The downswing (2025–2026). Now the regulation arrives. New York City has moved to lower the enforceable e-bike speed limit to 15 mph, down from 25, and the NYPD has ramped up seizures of illegal mopeds, dirt bikes, and modified throttle machines. Other cities are revisiting licensing, registration, and geofenced speed caps. The Cohen & Jaffe explainer quoted below captures the legal whiplash precisely.
The shape of the pendulum matters because Long Island sits one beat behind New York City on almost every transportation-policy swing. What the five boroughs regulate this year, Nassau and Suffolk towns tend to take up next. The crackdown is coming here; the only open questions are its form and its timing.
What a Long Island Injury Firm Was Already Telling Riders
The clearest evidence that the legal ground is moving comes from the people who litigate the aftermath. The Law Office of Cohen & Jaffe, LLP — a personal-injury firm headquartered at 2001 Marcus Avenue in New Hyde Park, Nassau County, with a second office in Jackson Heights, Queens — published a rider-facing explainer on e-scooter risk. We transcribed it in full. The relevant passage:
“Because they’re small and difficult to see, scooter riders face risks similar to bicyclists and pedestrians when it comes to being struck by careless, distracted, and negligent motorists… riders have little to protect them against serious injuries or death when involved in car accidents. Given the novelty of these devices and the rapid infiltration into cities nationwide, local governments and lawmakers are struggling to address the new issues and legal challenges they’re creating, especially in terms of accidents and liability.”
— Law Office of Cohen & Jaffe, LLP, e-scooter safety explainer (transcribed)
The explainer goes on to state that operating e-scooters on public streets is “currently illegal” in New York, with legislation pending that “may soon make these devices legal citywide.” That description is now out of date — New York legalized standing e-scooters in 2020. And that is exactly the point. A practicing law firm’s own published guidance has already aged into a historical artifact in a handful of years. No road-safety domain is moving faster than this one. When the statute under a firm’s explainer video becomes obsolete before the video does, riders are operating in a genuinely unsettled legal environment — which is its own hazard.
The Physics: Why “Just an E-Bike” Is the Wrong Frame
The instinct to treat an e-bike as a slightly faster bicycle is the central analytical error. Kinetic energy — the energy that has to be absorbed by a body in a crash — scales with the square of speed (energy = ½ × mass × speed²). A rider who pushes a pedal bike to 12 mph and a throttle e-bike that holds 24 mph differ by a factor of two in speed but a factor of four in energy. That is not a marginal change in risk; it is the difference between a survivable spill and a catastrophic one. And the e-bike adds mass — a motor, a battery, a heavier frame — on top of the speed, pushing the energy figure higher still.
| Machine (rider + vehicle ≈ 200 lb) | Typical speed | Relative kinetic energy |
|---|---|---|
| Pedal bicycle, casual | 10 mph | 1.0× (baseline) |
| Pedal bicycle, fast | 15 mph | 2.3× |
| Class 1/2 e-bike (legal cap) | 20 mph | 4.0× |
| Class 3 e-bike (legal cap) | 25 mph | 6.3× |
| Modified / imported throttle bike | 30 mph | 9.0× |
The fatality consequences of that energy are among the best-quantified relationships in traffic safety. The AAA Foundation’s landmark analysis (Tefft, 2013) puts a struck person’s average risk of death at roughly 7% at 25 mph, 25% at 32 mph, 50% at 42 mph, and 75% at 48 mph. Those numbers describe a pedestrian struck by a car, but the lesson transfers directly: the e-bike rider in a collision with a car or motorcycle is the unprotected body on the wrong side of that curve, and the speeds in the table above land squarely in its steepest, most lethal section.
This is the same physics that drives Long Island’s pedestrian and cyclist toll, which we examined in detail in Pedestrian and Bicyclist Crashes on Long Island: The 91-Record Warning. The e-bike does not create a new kind of danger. It takes the existing vulnerable-road-user problem and moves more bodies into the high-energy band, faster, in greater numbers.
Why Long Island Is Uniquely Exposed
Long Island’s road network amplifies micromobility risk for reasons of geometry that long predate e-bikes:
- Wide, fast arterials with local activity. Sunrise Highway, Hempstead Turnpike, Jericho Turnpike, Route 110, Merrick Road, and Northern Boulevard combine 40-plus mph traffic with driveways, bus stops, and storefronts. An e-bike doing 20 mph in that mix is in conflict with cars doing twice that.
- Incomplete bike infrastructure. Painted lanes that start and stop, and long stretches with no separation at all, force riders into traffic lanes precisely where speeds are highest.
- A large delivery and service economy. Food-delivery and errand riders — the heaviest e-bike users — work the densest commercial corridors during exactly the dusk and night hours when visibility is worst.
- Recreational and youth riding. Beach communities and village downtowns from Long Beach to Patchogue have seen a surge in teen e-bike use, prompting some municipalities to weigh boardwalk and business-district restrictions.
Add the missing accountability layer — no license, no registration, no insurance — and Long Island has assembled the full set of inputs that the national data says produces rising injuries: high-energy machines, fast mixed-use roads, vulnerable riders, and limited oversight.
What the Bethlehem Crash Signals
We do not yet know how the Bethlehem collision happened, and we will not speculate. What it demonstrates — and what the data behind it confirms — is that e-bikes are now routinely present in high-speed roadway environments alongside motorcycles and cars, environments that punish any error with the full force of the speed-squared curve. A crash that two cars might have walked away from becomes fatal the moment an unprotected rider enters the equation.
For Long Island, three things follow:
- Regulation is coming, and it will likely mirror New York City. Expect proposals around speed caps, battery certification enforcement, and possibly registration or insurance for the fastest classes. Riders and small businesses that depend on these machines should track local ordinances now, not after they pass.
- The infrastructure gap is the real fix. Speed limits on the device do little if the road forces a 20 mph rider into 45 mph traffic. Protected lanes, lighting, and shorter crossings move riders off the lethal section of the curve — the same interventions that protect pedestrians and cyclists.
- The liability questions are genuinely unsettled. Because e-bikes fall outside standard auto no-fault coverage, an injured rider’s path to recovery is more complicated than after a car crash. That is not a reason to avoid the question; it is a reason to ask it early and get sound advice.
The micromobility pendulum took six years to swing from “legalize everything” to “slow it all down.” Long Island is standing directly in its path. The communities that read the data now — and build for the riders who are already here — will be the ones that avoid writing the Bethlehem headline themselves.
Dr. Dao Yuan Han is Long Island Traffic’s Data Editor and Lead Analyst. This analysis combines public crash reporting, federal injury datasets, New York State statute, and the Long Island Traffic events database. For New York-specific rider rights and post-crash steps, see our Know Your Rights guides; for the roads where vulnerable-road-user risk concentrates, see our road profiles.