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Comment by n0us | Hacker News Reader

Here is my controversial opinion: The bikers are the worst people in NYC, they are constantly running through crosswalks while they don't have the light, going the wrong way down the street, riding on the sidewalks, etc. They never stop for anyone or for any reason and if they hit you they'll likely blame you also. You are far more likely to get hit by a bike than a car. I actually hate the bikes and bike lanes and would be overjoyed to see them banned or at least heavily ticketed for bad behavior. In my years of living here I have never once seen a bicycle stop at a stop light. ("Idaho stops" don't count, that's just stopping and then running the light)

Furthermore the electric "bicycles" are actually just electric motorcycles with auxiliary pedals and as such should require a license to drive.

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> You are far more likely to get hit by a bike than a car

99% of pedestrian deaths result from collisions with cars, not bikes [1].

> electric "bicycles" are actually just electric motorcycles with auxiliary pedals and as such should require a license to drive

99.9% of “motor vehicle collisions that resulted in injuries [in 2018] were caused by e-bikes” [2]. A link is provided to the data; I doubt they’ve materially increased.

I share your frustration with bikers ignoring traffic rules. But dangerous bikers, even e-bikers, pale in consequence to cars.

[1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nycdot-pedestrian...

[2] https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/04/18/damn-lies-and-statist...

Those numbers should be normalised for a fair comparison.

what-about-ism doesn't persuade me at all, just because cars are dangerous and obnoxious doesn't justify the poor behaviors and culture around bicycles in the city.

An "e-bike" that is going 25mph and running red lights without anyone doing any pedaling at all is a motorcycle end of story and they should be banned or require a license.

> just because cars are dangerous and obnoxious doesn't justify the poor behaviors and culture around bicycles in the city

Not whataboutism to compare the substitute folks would turn to if we banned bike lanes as you suggest, but whatever. Two pedestrians died due to bike collisions in 2021. How many emissions did New York City bikers collectively save us that year?

> An "e-bike" that is going 25mph and running red lights without anyone doing any pedaling at all is a motorcycle end of story

We don’t ticket motorcycles for running red lights either! You’re upset about traffic enforcement. Not any particular mode. If anything, that you’re noticing the bikes while remaining alive says something about their relative safety.

As a Chicago-based cyclist who finds all of the behaviors you describe incredibly frustrating and often infuriating, two things to consider:

1) The cyclists that tend to get noticed are the cyclists who behave like assholes.

2) Cars often don’t see us, usually because the driver just isn’t paying attention, and this leads to aggressively defensive behavior in traffic. Basically, if you don’t notice me, there’s a much higher chance that I’ll die, so I’ll do things to get noticed.

For me, that means wearing visible gear, positioning myself strategically at intersections, etc.

For the cyclists you describe, it means doing stupidly dangerous stuff.

The behavior should not be excused, but the solution isn’t as simple as more fines. The problem is a product of the poor bicycle infrastructure in most places and the ever-increasing hostility between drivers and “problem” cyclists.

Obvious disclaimer that I realize the specific factors of NYC vs. Chicago make my cycling experience only partially relevant, but as someone who has spent quite a bit of time chatting with various cycling communities, the problems mostly transcend geography, with degrees of seriousness depending on how well a particular city handles bike traffic.

Bad drivers kill people constantly. The same is not true of bikes or e-bikes. End of story

Agree that bad drivers kill people constantly, but I’d argue this isn’t the end of the story.

As a cyclist, I’ve had plenty of close calls with bad drivers. I’ve also witnessed insane behavior by cyclists that obviously led to the subsequent vehicular entanglement [0].

On balance, cars cause more issues for bikes than the other way around. But a subgroup of cyclists are not innocent here, and plenty are directly at fault for their own injuries or for forcing cars into dangerous situations.

All of this to say: this isn’t a bikes vs. cars problem, it’s a city planning and transportation infrastructure problem.

- [0] Like the cyclist that turned the wrong way around a traffic circle to go the wrong way down a one way street and was surprised to land on the hood of my car as I made my way the correct way (and only legal route) around the circle. I was equally surprised because the center of the circle was filled with tall plants. If he’d been going faster, things could have been much worse for him. It would have counted as a vehicular accident but the cops and insurance folks were 100% in agreement that the cyclist did the dumb thing here. The point of this anecdote: if that cyclist died, it’d be “another cyclist killed by a car”, but that’s hardly the whole story. Encounters with cars have a high risk of being fatal. That does not mean that drivers are always the issue.

The OP was advocating for banning bikes and bike lanes because they’re dangerous. Cars kill people. Bikes do not. Nothing you’ve said changes that. There will always be shitty, unnecessarily risk-taking people in the world. They exist on bikes, they exist in cars. I don’t think the proportion is significantly different among one population vs another. I’d rather have them on bikes.

> Cars kill people. Bikes do not. Nothing you’ve said changes that.

The point I’m trying to make here is that countering an argument against bikes with “cars kill people, bikes don’t” is oversimplifying the problem much like “ban all the bikes” is oversimplifying the problem.

Neither of these positions moves the conversation forward and both of these positions discard a wide spectrum of complexity.

If we are to take this issue seriously, it involves infrastructure improvements to make cyclists safer, citations against cyclists who are obviously endangering others, and hopefully movement away from the need for cars to begin with.

Focusing on the binary version of this gets us nowhere.

In 2022 there were 118 pedestrian fatalities in NYC. What proportion do you suppose was caused by cyclists?

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