An e-bike operator crashed into a pedestrian and inflicted serious injuries near Copley Square on Wednesday afternoon.
According to an incident report that Boston Police provided to StreetsblogMASS, officers responded to the crash at 11:18 a.m. on Wednesday.
Police say that a man riding a Velotric class 2 electric bicycle – a bike that's also equipped with a throttle to allow the rider to operate the bike at speeds up to 20 mph without pedaling – struck a pedestrian in the intersection of Huntington Avenue and Dartmouth Street, next to Copley Square and the Boston Public Library.
According to the incident report, the victim was found unresponsive and bleeding from a head injury. The suspected perpetrator remained on the scene, and police impounded his bicycle as evidence.
EMTs transported the victim to a local hospital, and a Boston Police spokesperson told StreetsblogMASS that they were still in critical condition on Thursday morning, and that the department has not made any arrests in the case.
"This remains an active and ongoing investigation being handled by our Fatal Collision Investigation Team, so I am unable to provide further details until their work is complete," the spokesperson said.
Crash site is a complex intersection with heavy traffic
Photos of the crash scene from various local news outlets suggest that the crash occurred next to the triangular island that divides the main junction of Huntington Avenue, Dartmouth Street, and St. James Street from a wide left-turn slip lane that funnels traffic from Dartmouth Street to Huntington Avenue (see Google Street View photo above).
The same intersection feeds into a nearby on-ramp for Interstate 90 in the middle of Huntington Avenue, and also accommodates heavy pedestrian traffic from the nearby Back Bay train station.
Boston EMS data indicates that there have been four other injury-causing crashes at this intersection since 2018: two crashes in which a driver injured a person riding a bike, one crash where a driver injured a pedestrian, and one crash that injured a person in a motor vehicle.
Footage of the scene shows the perpetrator's bike, which has a large insulated delivery bag mounted on its rear rack.
Boston Police did not respond to our questions about whether the suspect was working for an app-based delivery company at the time of the crash, but the bag bears the logo of Fly Wing e-bikes, a New York City-based company that markets extensively to delivery workers.
Fly E-Bikes, an affiliated company whose SEC filings list Fly Wing as a "principal vendor," opened its first sales outlet in Boston near Downtown Crossing last month.
As reported by our colleagues at StreetsblogNYC, Fly E-Bikes has racked up a considerable record of safety complaints and violations in New York, including a lawsuit from UL Solutions, the company that certifies safety for electronic appliances.
This story was corrected on Monday August 11 to correct an editor's error in the seventh paragraph. The original version of the story stated incorrectly that the intersection featured a "right-turn" slip lane; in fact, the slip lane is for left-turning traffic from Dartmouth to Huntington.
