New York pedestrians completely ignore the traffic laws and would be outraged to hear that someone had gotten a ticket for anything they did in the street on foot, no matter how crazy or dangerous. If you haven’t ridden a bike in the city, you have no idea what it’s like. When you’re on a bike and have the right of way, at each intersection you have to figure out how to safely get around the hordes of idiots standing in the bike lane looking alternately at their iphone and for a break in between the cars to shoot out into. Often they think bikes don’t count, so will walk right in front of you (when the bike has the right of way). Also in no danger from the cops are people leaving their parked cars, who open their doors right in the paths of bikers, often killing them.
Many people bike safely in New York, by being very careful and attentive to both cars and pedestrians. Those who aren’t don’t last long before they end up in the ER. If an intersection is clear, whether or not it has a red light, it’s exactly as safe to bike through it at reasonable speed as to walk through it, except the bikers are paying a lot more attention to what they are doing.
Police have always been free to ticket dangerous bicycling and have always done so. What’s new now is a campaign to go after safe bicyclists, ticketing them for safely going through empty intersections or for pointless technical violations. Even bicycling in Central Park is a target, with people getting ticketed for going down a hill at 15mph. Not just regular traffic cops are being told to do this, the undercover force is out on the anti-bike campaign too. This is an organized campaign of harassment coming from the top levels of the NYPD. I’m interested to hear that delivery people are just given warnings, that’s good, but those like myself who use a bike to get to work or ride in the Park are being forced to stop doing this. That seems to be one goal of the campaign, with the NYPD police chief deciding to go after two things he hates: bicyclists and the Transportation commissioner. Bicycling in the city is going to be very effectively suppressed, with lots of shiny new bike lanes empty. Pedestrians may cheer this along, but just wait, you may be next…
— comment posted in response to Cops Also Ticketing Cyclists For Ignoring Stop Signs At Empty Intersections
The riders would probably realize [the driver] is no criminal, no murderer. The drivers would certainly learn that [the rider] was no jerk.”
Imagine that you get hit by a car when you’re trying to cross a busy road in a place where you can’t even see the nearest crosswalk. You’re airlifted to a hospital for treatment of your injuries.
And before you leave, you get a traffic ticket.
Yes, that really happened.
You can hear people talk about how our built environment discriminates against pedestrians, and how engineers are trained to build for cars rather than people. You can read about how law enforcement is biased in favor of people who drive over people who walk.
But nothing has quite as much impact as actually seeing the things you’re talking about. In this video, photographer Jay Mallin shows us the place in Virginia where not one but two men were struck by drivers when trying to cross a four-lane road, a couple of hours apart on the same day. In both cases, the injured pedestrians were charged by the police with the offense of “careless interference with traffic.”
Mallin’s video does a great job of illustrating just how bleak the landscape is for pedestrians, and just how absurd our current priorities are. Watch.
(First seen on TBD.com.)
via grist
Last week more than 80 people jammed into the Orange County Wheelmen’s monthly meeting. Most were cyclists. But many were not. And what was especially encouraging – and appreciated – was that each person took time for what promised to be a pretty somber evening.
The title of my topic? “Why cyclists are killing one another, and how we can stop.”
Considering anyone at all showed up speaks not only to the commitment to safety, it speaks to the dire situation.
…
A lot more cyclists need to clean up their act before we can really focus on non-cyclists.
They need to stop breaking traffic laws, ride safely and ride with courtesy. It’s the least each and every cycling organization in Orange County – mountain and road, official and unofficial – can do to help reduce the number of deaths.
