Here's the sign on Manhattan's west side greenway.
It is, of course, completely ignored.
New York City is in kind of a weird state right now. For all practical purposes, we're un-policed. The police department is in full retreat, and officers are rarely seen. You'll see a few in front of the courthouses and places like that, and they're fairly visible in the tourist parts of Times Square, but that's it. You especially won't see them on the subway, and the state of the subways is a whole 'nother story, but anyway, reasons for the NYPD's non-involvement in city life are probably outside the scope of this thread. But it is a fact that the NYPD has decided that it will assume a different role in the city than in the past.
Now, while the police department deciding traffic enforcement is something they don't do anymore may sound like paradise for cyclists, especially given the department's hostility towards cyclists in the past, but it's becoming a real problem for us.
The ebikes and scooters have made the bike paths of the city (including the greenways) completely unsafe. Putting aside the pedal-assist ebikes (even though those too are prohibited on the greenways), they're out of control. The delivery riders are everywhere, and they have a complete disregard for all rules, including rules about which way to travel on the bike paths. I get that for these guys, hustling and scratching to get by (and probably getting screwed by DoorDash and Uber Eats and all the rest), time is very much money, but they're riding fast bikes (those bikes are essentially electric mopeds), often the wrong way. And in the dark. New York City is apparently a city of people who are incapable of feeding themselves, so everyone orders takeout, at all hours. And for some reason, the delivery riders don't like lights. Maybe they think they need to conserve their batteries as much as possible, so they turn off the lights. Maybe the lights burned out a while ago, and they haven't had time to replace the bulbs. Who knows. But an ebike coming at me, fast, in the dark, with no lights, is a startling experience, and it happens to me approximately a dozen times every night on my way home from work (I work until 11:00 pm, so I'm always riding home in the dark).
And then the electric scooters (like the Revel or Lime scooters -- essentially Vespas with electric motors) see the ebikes, and decide they can use the bike paths, too. Why ride in traffic if you don't have to?
And then the riders of internal combustion engine scooters (actual Vespas and the like, some capable of highway-legal speeds) decide that if the electric scooters can use the bike paths, they can too.
And a lot of the riders of vehicles that require registration and insurance don't bother with that anymore, since the police clearly don't care. And so a 250cc Vespa will blow by me on, say, the Williamsburg Bridge bike path with no license plates, honking his horn the whole way, as if the bicyclists are the ones doing something wrong by being in his way. Parenthetically, the Williamsburg Bridge seems to be the absolute worst these days, with actual motorcycles feeling free to use the bike path. The only thing saving us from cars using it is that they can't fit through the posts restricting entrance, fortunately.
It's a problem. And, as I said above, in the end there's going to be a reaction. Almost certainly an over-reaction. And we've just elected (well, not quite, but in NYC, for all practical purposes, the Democratic primary might as well be the general election) an ex-cop as mayor who made law-and-order issues the centerpiece of his campaign. And I fear crackdowns. There will be bad behavior on the part of the NYPD. Bicyclists will be targeted just as much as ebike riders.
It's not a good situation right now.