Company Prez Bemoans Lawless Bike Renters

By MICHEL PEDROSO

The operators of  Bike and Roll, New York City’s only licensed bike rental company, have reached a boiling point with alleged illegal bike vendors.

“They just stand out,” said the company president Chris Wogas on Tuesday as tourists and passersby filled the crowded plaza,. “If you go up by Columbus Circle, you’ll see them. They’re just all over the corner, and every person that comes through there, they try to rent a bike to them.”

Wogas, who is in his third year as president of the bike rental company, has been on a mission of late to raise awareness of the problem, as the alleged illegal bike vendors have cost his company “significant money.”

Wogas said that some maverick vendors were licensed by the Department of Consumer Affairs to sell horse and carriage and pedicab rides. However, when someone has no interest in getting on one of those things, the illegal bike vendors apparently switch up the conversation, he added, nodding toward a man in a red uniform hawking such rides.

“Then they say, ‘Oh, do you want a bike?’ And if you do, they send you to one of the guys with a bike, and they get a kickback for it.”

As Wogas explained, the illegal vendors chain up several bikes to one pole throughout the area and, for the most part, dupe immigrants and/or people “who don’t know any better.”

The vendors take ID from tourists as collateral.

Wogas also appeared to be unsatisfied with the job the New York Police Department is doing to eradicate the violators from his premises, saying that the police “need to be here more often and more focused.”

But can’t Wogas and Bike and Roll just sue these illegal bike vendors for stealing his trade?

“We’ve looked at it before,” he said,  “but it’s hard because you don’t know who they are. It’s not like a business you can sue.”