One sticky afternoon in the summer of 2019, I experienced a form of joy so powerful it felt like a neurological event. The air in New York City had reached the level of humidity where sweat congeals into a semipermanent slime, and my train was delayed. As the wait dragged on I decided to walk home. Blinking the sun from my eyes as I exited the station, I saw another option parked by the curb: a cerulean-blue moped from Revel, gleaming and irresistible, and available to rent.
Minutes later I was zipping down side streets in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with a cool breeze at my back and a big, dumb grin on my face. I turned onto a block where neighbors were hanging out on lawn chairs, blasting music from a speaker. Kids ran around an open fire hydrant in flip-flops and soaked T-shirts. I slowed down to size up the water spewing across my path, then steered the moped through the spray. Bystanders cheered. Birds chirped. I was invincible in a perfect city.
In the three years since Revel first hit the streets, the electric-moped-sharing startup has racked up more than 600,000 riders in six US cities. It’s the flashy younger sibling of micro-mobility companies like Citi Bike, Lime, and Bird: faster than a bicycle, cooler than a scooter, and more dangerous by far.
Last summer, mid-lockdown, Revel’s ridership spiked, but its newfound popularity spurred a crisis. Many people didn’t wear helmets. Crashes surged. Riders died. When I told friends I was writing about Revel, they relayed their wildest stories—about a grisly wipeout over a pothole or two people having sex on a moving moped. On YouTube, videos show riders gunning Revels around like dirt bikes and careening down ramps and stairs.
Another round of disasters could kill the company, and safety-minded critics will say good riddance. I wouldn’t be so pleased. To a nonrider, it might seem reckless to let a novice hop on a machine the size of a Great Dane and start vrooming around at 30 miles per hour alongside erratic drivers and delivery trucks. But as any die-hard urban cyclist can tell you, that framing gets it backwards. Revel owes its customers a responsible product, but cities also owe their residents reasonable streets. In New York, reckless behavior already defines the roads, leading to traffic-related deaths in the hundreds every year. And dismissing outright a low-emissions alternative to cars is reckless too.
Most New Yorkers would generally agree that New York needs a transit overhaul. The question is whether Revel—or any company like it—can spur a transformation.
New York City’s transportation system is so vast and timeworn that it can seem like an extension of the region’s topography, as ancient as the Hudson River’s basalt bluffs. But it was humans, with their own priorities in tow, who gave it its configuration. The subways were primarily designed to carry workers in and out of Manhattan, not to allow outer-borough residents to visit each others’ neighborhoods. The highways ringing Manhattan and slashing through Brooklyn and Queens are the legacy of Robert Moses, New York’s master planner, who believed drivers deserved the best views in the boroughs and lower-income neighborhoods could go to hell. The largest change to New York transit in recent history has been the rise of Uber and Lyft, which radically destabilized the taxi industry—a stronghold of working-class employment—while making hailing a cab marginally more convenient. These services shifted where the money goes when people hire a ride, while entrenching car culture even further.
Revel won’t cure any city’s ailing transit system on its own, but it does offer a fast-acting remedy for commuting blues: an affordable, fun mode of getting around, provided you’re not toting children or groceries, and that you are physically able to ride a moped. If the subway is New York’s transit meat and potatoes, rental mopeds are its sorbet. Not necessarily a staple, but a treat, especially in warm weather.
Frank Reig, Revel’s 35-year-old chief executive, got hooked on mopeds as an undergrad in 2007. While visiting a Croatian island, he rented one and marveled at how easily he could zip around. After college he worked as a line cook at Manhattan’s swank Gramercy Tavern, saving his money for backpacking trips (and more moped riding) around Europe. In 2015, finished with the restaurant world, he took a job at a consulting firm in midtown.
A Staten Island native, Reig looks like the charming older brother on a ’90s teen drama, with a ready smile, thick hair, and a slightly slick affect. He’s a good pitch man. During an after-work happy hour at an Irish pub in midtown, he used his persuasive talents on his colleague Paul Suhey, a fresh-faced former ExxonMobil engineer. Reig was still an avid traveler, and on a recent trip to Buenos Aires, he'd watched the city’s stylish residents zip around on mopeds and wondered, why couldn’t New York be like that? Reig sold an idea to Suhey from the barstool: Bring that suave moped culture to America. Suhey had had his own formative moped experiences; years earlier, his older brother had shown him New York by Vespa. By the time the bar was closing, Reig and Suhey were still scheming.
The next day, they ducked into an unused conference room at their office to hash out a vision. Not every early idea made it out of that room (they originally considered calling the company “VaMoto”). But from the start, they knew what not to do. When companies such as Lime and Bird rolled out their services, they aggravated pedestrians, who weren’t crazy about the hundreds of kick scooters cluttering up their sidewalks. (People have hurled these scooters into rivers and lit them on fire in displays of animosity.) And ride-hailing giant Uber had notoriously rolled its services out without asking cities first. Revel’s founders vowed to play by city rules, agreeing to introduce their vehicles only after securing permission from the local government, even if that meant waiting. “If they don’t want the option we’re bringing, why bring it?” Reig says. They also swore that every single one of their workers would become an employee; they would have nothing to do with the gig economy that other startups exploited for cheap labor.
The pair didn’t have any direct fundraising experience, so they pitched friends and family, and cobbled together $1.1 million from 57 investors. They started talking to New York City officials and figuring out the logistics of setting up an electric moped fleet. Their collaborative approach worked, and Reig and Suhey quickly got approval for a nine-month pilot program of 68 mopeds. In July 2018, less than six months after they clinked beers at that fateful happy hour, Reig and Suhey launched Revel from a cramped storefront in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
During the pilot, the team was tiny, with just five employees. When their first customers showed up, Reig and Suhey gave them free riding lessons. Reig’s dad, who owned a car service center, helped fix the vehicles, hauling them down and up a wooden ramp they had placed over the creaky stairs that led to their humid basement office. It was a ramshackle setup, but it was working. Riders could go anywhere in Brooklyn and Queens as long as they returned to North Brooklyn to park, a rule that users generally followed. The program attracted more than 4,000 active riders. People liked it.
Buoyed by the program’s success, Reig and Suhey raised more money, including an investment from Tinder founder Justin Mateen. Revel expanded its New York fleet across 20 neighborhoods with 1,000 electric mopeds made by a Chinese company called Niu, and it rolled out smaller fleets in Miami, Austin, Oakland, and Washington, DC. It hired mechanics to perform repairs and workers to go around and swap out depleted batteries on parked mopeds. It rented a millennial-chic corporate office in a converted warehouse in Gowanus, and a 10,000-square-foot actual warehouse in Red Hook. Ridership continued to tick up. The next funding round drew $33.8 million. “Things were firing on all cylinders,” Reig says. “We had just launched in four major markets.” As winter came to an end, Revel prepared for its busiest spring yet.
Instead, the company nearly went broke. As states skidded into lockdown, city streets emptied. People stayed home. Mopeds stayed put. Revenue fell “off a cliff,” as Reig puts it. In panic mode, the company laid off around 100 employees. Reig cut his salary in half. “We started calling landlords across our markets and saying, ‘You need to work with us,’” Reig says. Cooped up in his apartment, he spent days talking on the phone, trying to wheel and deal the company into survival.
Then, in early May, just as Reig was wondering if Revel was doomed, ridership started creeping back up. Public transportation and rideshares were potential Covid petri dishes, but people still needed to get to work and run errands—and there were the mopeds, perfect for socially distanced travel.
Within a few months, 200,000 new riders signed up, more than double the amount during the previous two years combined. Revel started offering free rides to health care workers, and thousands of them took up the offer. The company went on a hiring spree. Reig spent his evenings sweating in the company’s cavernous warehouse, helping the crew with the laborious task of swapping out batteries to keep up with the crush of new customers. That summer, Revel didn’t just stave off bankruptcy, it became temporarily profitable—a rarity in the heavily venture-capital-funded world of micro mobility.
The surge in ridership coincided with summer and a Covid-induced restlessness. Dangerous driving was up all over the country, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration. In New York City, 52 more people died from car and motorcycle crashes in 2020 than in 2019, an increase of 76 percent. The motorcycle fatality rate was its highest in 30 years. And Revel wasn’t exempt from the chaos—at all. “The amount of helmet use that we saw exponentially decreased,” Reig says. (Each Revel includes two helmets in its rear case, along with hair nets.) In addition, some new riders maxed out the mopeds’ speed and ignored traffic laws.
This wave of daredevil riding was hard to miss in New York. In my neighborhood, I’d often see people blasting down the street without helmets, or riding in the bike lane or on the sidewalk. Summer Walker, a tech professional, is an enthusiastic Revel user to this day, but she remembers extraordinarily bad behavior at a Fourth of July block party in Williamsburg. Mopeds carrying up to three young people weaved in and out of the crowd; all of the drivers looked like minors to her. One knocked over her barbecue. “I saw someone driving a Revel up South Third Street while their passenger leaned back, closed his eyes, raised his arms in the air, and shot Roman candles out of his hands, as if he were the angel of fire and patron saint of gunpowder,” she says.
It was a calamitous month. On July 18, a 26-year-old CBS New York reporter named Nina Kapur died after falling off a Revel moped in Brooklyn. On July 25, a 30-year-old Bronx resident named Francis Nunez hit a pole in Upper Manhattan and was taken to the hospital with head trauma; he later died of his injuries. Then, on July 28, a 32-year-old named Jeremy Malave died in the early morning, also after running into a pole. At least two of them appeared to not have been wearing helmets, according to news reports.
Three lives, gone. These devastating losses are permanent and unfixable, mourned deeply by family and friends. They provoked an instant crisis at Revel. “The fatalities that happened, there’s no way to describe those. They were tragedies of epic proportions,” Reig says. “I can’t imagine what those families are going through.” The day of Malave’s death, a shaken Reig called the city’s transportation department to say Revel would pull its mopeds off the streets until further notice. “After we suspended service, we met as a team and threw everything on the table,” Reig says. They looked at an internal safety report they’d received that summer, coauthored by Sarah Kaufman, associate director of the NYU Rudin Center for Transportation. The report recommended the company find a way to ensure that riders wear helmets, perhaps by using a built-in sensor. Revel's staff tested several helmet sensors and found them to be impractical; for one thing, many riders prefer to use their personal helmets. So the company settled on a simpler solution: selfies. Before zipping off, a rider must use Revel’s app to take a photo of their helmeted self. Within 15 minutes, Revel’s software reviews the photo and suspends any bareheaded travelers. (The suspension goes into effect after the ride ends.)
The report also urged Revel to make its virtual safety training mandatory, which the company did. The relatively simple course takes around 20 minutes to complete, putting up a roadblock for would-be impulse joyriders. Revel tightened its suspension policy too. A GPS unit on each moped tracks its location, and riders who venture into off-limits areas such as parks get automatically kicked off the app for a week. Taking a Revel on highways or major bridges gets you booted from the app for good.
Kaufman was pleased with the changes. “They took a lot of my suggestions seriously,” she says. A month later, the bright-blue mopeds returned to the streets of New York.
That fall, city officials argued over Revel at a meeting on how to regulate electric mopeds and ebikes. At a tense city council meeting held over Zoom, the commissioner of the city’s transportation department at the time, Polly Trottenberg, laid out the data. She compared Revel to the city’s bike-share program: Revel had 1.38 fatalities per million rides, while Citi Bike had 0.02, meaning the mopeds were nearly 70 times more deadly than the shared bikes. But after the company shut down and reopened, crashes were down 50 percent, a sign that its new safety measures might be working.
Revel hasn’t yet shaken its violent past. In New York, dozens of lawsuits have been filed against Revel, many of which are active. The complaints are harrowing. A lawsuit filed by Lezer Weiss, who lost control of a moped one evening, describes a vehicle with poorly maintained brakes and tires. “I sustained numerous injuries including multiple facial fractures requiring extensive plastic surgery and a hospital admission for nine nights,” it reads. Many of the suits allege that the company neglected its vehicles. An affidavit from another person who fractured his tibia and fibula calls them “dangerously designed.” (Revel declined to comment on the lawsuits.) Reading through the complaints in one sitting is enough to make even the most ardent rider think twice.
Yet the two-wheelers keep coming. In April, Lime, which rents electric scooters and bikes, launched a fleet of 100 mopeds in Washington, DC. It deployed 100 more across Revel’s service areas in New York, with plans to ramp up to 500 by the end of May. Compared to Revel, Lime’s rides are cheaper per mile, and its bright-green vehicles are newer. The economics of Revel’s moped rentals are starting to look shaky, especially given how much it costs to maintain the vehicles, says Kersten Heineke, a McKinsey analyst. “My question is, will you be able, as a provider of mopeds, to survive long-term without having other offerings?” he asks.
Reig seems to recognize that the city of today is not a perfect match for the vehicles. When we first spoke more than a year ago, I asked where he saw the company in five years. “Everything is becoming electric,” he responded. “So when I think of the future of Revel, I think: How can we expand on that?” In February, the company launched a subscription service for ebikes in New York. For $99 a month, Revel drops off a high-end ebike to its customers and performs any necessary upkeep. There’s now a waiting list to join.
Not far from its original storefront, Revel is building another new offering: an electric car charging station, the first in a planned series. With millions in federal funds getting pumped into popularizing electric vehicles, Revel is seeking to park itself at the forefront of the great shift away from gas. And this May, it is launching an all-Tesla ride-hail service. (The drivers are all Revel employees.) It’ll be a modest program, with 150 drivers serving parts of Manhattan. But it’s a clear sign that Revel doesn’t want to be defined by mopeds alone.
I get why Revel is shifting this way. Cars still dominate the roads. The charging stations and the Teslas are hedges against another bad summer for the mopeds. But for many urbanists, the true dream for city centers is one without private cars altogether. Vishaan Chakrabarti is one of them. The founder of the global architecture studio Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, Chakrabarti at one point worked for the city of New York, where he helped develop several projects that altered the streetscape, including the High Line, an elevated park in Manhattan built on top of a former railroad spur. “I think most major cities will not have private cars operating in their downtowns in the next 10 to 20 years,” Chakrabarti says. “Urban growth is happening too fast.” Cars, parking lots, gas stations: All that infrastructure takes up too much precious space. Electric cars are “not a silver bullet for sustainability,” Chakrabarti says. What to replace cars with? Better trains and buses are absolutely necessary. But for shorter trips, ebikes and electric mopeds have transformative potential too.
A smattering of global cities have already banned or limited cars in some areas, most notably Paris. Trying to convince Americans to copy the French may seem like a chasse au dahu—a fool’s errand. But even American cities can change. In New York, nearly 15 years after it was first proposed, officials plan to introduce congestion pricing in Manhattan; drivers motoring below Central Park will have to pay an extra fee, which could help unclog its roads and raise money for mass transit. If a less car-centric future is in the making, Revel’s original vision might be its most forward-looking.
This spring, I took another ride on a Revel moped. Like most riders, I’d sat out the winter sludge. I was still confident in my moped-driving skills—I’ve ridden on and off for a decade—but as I started the engine and slid into traffic, all my conversations with people who’d crashed their rentals gave me a twinge of worry. A diesel truck rumbled behind me for a few blocks, and the worry spiked into fear. The truck was so big, and the moped was so small. The scariest words from all the complaints against Revel bounced around my brain: broken bones, head injuries, defective brakes.
But as I navigated down a leafy side street, I felt a surge of something else: defiance. Moped lovers are an obstinate bunch, insisting on equal rights to the road even if reality isn’t always on our side. As cyclists and ebike couriers with baskets full of delivery boxes wove through traffic alongside me, I started to feel less alone. We were a horde of transit dissidents. Outsiders for now, we knew we belonged here.
Update 05-25-2021, 6:00 pm ET: An earlier version of this story misspelled Francis Nunez's name. The description of Revel's ride-hail service was also clarified.
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