The ex-UberEats delivery man who illegally biked through the Lincoln Tunnel says he’s a New York newbie — and only realized he was in trouble midway through the tube when he was surrounded by cars.
“I’m new in New York. I don’t know nothing about the tunnel,” Hicham Oulhint, 26, a Morocco native who moved to Jersey City just seven months ago, told The Post Thursday.“I didn’t know what’s going on … of course I’m gonna be scared.”
The hapless courier was in his first week of working for Uber’s on-demand food delivery service — and also his first week stepping foot in the Big Apple — when he took the tunnel on Tuesday and ultimately lost his job.
Oulhint said he was using Uber’s GPS app to deliver grub from Fresh Direct’s FoodKick division on West 52nd Street in Hell’s Kitchen to a West 22nd address in Chelsea when he wound up pedaling through the tunnel with a bus on his tail at around 7:10 p.m.
“I thought there has to be something wrong. I just see a line of cars. I don’t see no bikes,” he said.
He made it safely to the New Jersey side of 1.5-mile tunnel — where he was stopped by Port Authority Police and slapped with a summons for defiant trespassing.
After police released Oulhint, he hopped on a PATH train with his bike all the way back to FoodKick — where he picked up the order to finish the delivery.
“I wanted to finish the job,” he said. “The delivery should go to someone. I didn’t want to take someone’s food.”
But his diligence didn’t save his job — he learned the next day that he’d been booted from the service when he tried to open the app and was denied access.
Oulhint is now searching for a new gig.
“We learn from mistakes. I should have been paying attention,” he said.