Hacker News Reader

Comment by decafninja | Hacker News Reader

IIRC this was started because of a literal terrorist act where someone took a truck and went on a rampage mowing down people in the Hudson River bike lane. I was nearby when this happened.

The bollards went up shortly after.

View on HN

It's sad and infuriating that in the United States, you can point out blatantly dangerous infrastructure and fight for safety improvements, and it won't make any difference until someone actually goes out and exploits the bad infrastructure to murder cyclists and pedestrians. Then suddenly you can get the bollards, but only in the place where the murderer killed people: NYC still has tons and tons and tons of unprotected bike lanes, but at least no one will ever again be able to murder people with their car in that specific part of the Hudson River Greenway.

The NYC bike lane hardening program is much bigger than that.[1]

[1] https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2022/begins-work-to-hard...

Bike lane hardening is surely good, but this is a press release from almost two years ago that promised to harden half of the city's bike lanes, which still hasn't happened or even come close to happening. One thing you get used to, cycling in NYC, is that it doesn't mean much when the administration tells you about its ambitions: the thing you measure it by is how much it gets done.

The Transportation Alternatives tracker[1] tells you how much they are falling short of their promises.

And of course without bollards, cars can still enter the bike lanes at intersections[2]. I'm happy for progress where we get it, but it's hard to lean into my optimism when you know that every time the city announces it will do something, it will take 3x as long to do 1/3 of what they promised.

[1]https://projects.transalt.org/bikelanes

[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/MicromobilityNYC/comments/yaqfwd/pr...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com