The New York Times attacks e-bikes while ignoring the real danger all around us
electrek.co
electrek.co
We have a huge population of delivery drivers on ebikes (and also elec/gas scooters). They ride on sidewalks, against traffic and constantly run stop signs and red lights. They're not just a danger to pedestrians, but also creating an awful risk for themselves (I just saw one hit by a car next to Barclays in BK this weekend).
I'm an avid biker and have slow rolled my way thru many stop signs, but I've never put myself or other pedestrians at risk in the manner as many ebikes riders do.
The NYPD has ignored this problem, as they do most quality of life issues in the city. I'm not sure how we resolve it but there does need to be dialog among everyone to fix this issue. This is not just an issue of car vs. bike, its an issue of pedestrian safety too.
When I was a bike commuter, I’d on rare occasion take a stretch of sidewalk, slowly, to avoid road construction and hazards I just didn’t feel safe traversing. I would not bother a single pedestrian and was probably coasting at the speed of a jogger/runner. None the less I’d still get yelled at by cops to get on the road. Meanwhile cops do nothing when, at least in Downtown LA, cyclists are running red lights.
I’m not an anti-car/bikes-only person but we do need better awareness for all of the rules of the road for cycles and add protected bike lanes. The situation now with a lack of knowledge, blatant violation of stop signs and lights by bicyclists and motorists, and in some cases conflicting and incompatible stop light rules, is complete madness.
Yes, and once you realize that 99.9% of the US lacks any kind of safety infrastructure for bikes, you begin to understand how utterly insane and hostile it is to anything but cars.
Putting 15mph bikes next to 45mph 2-ton cars and then slapping a sign like "bikes may use full lane" is a giant middle finger to current and future bike users.
After getting sort of 'stranded' out in the open going uphill in the travel lanes surrounded by rush hour traffic when a metro bus pulled out and blocked my access to get back over to the right, I started utilizing the sidewalk when the road was a bit too chaotic for my fitness levels.
We just need speed limits and start issuing some fines. I don't ride fast on sidewalks and at parks. But a lot of the with throttle ebikers are absolutely insane.
As someone who is trying to commute more with a traditional bicycle and less than a car, I would say that bicycles have no business being on motorways. In all but the quietest neighborhood streets, cars and bicycles just behave so differently. They move at very different speeds, and neither the motorists nor the bicyclist is ever happy when they need to negotiate on the road with one another.
Cities and states need to build up much more dedicated bicycle infrastructure, where bikes are separated from cars.
20-25 MPH is really fast for a human-powered bike. A reasonably fit person can hit those speeds, but generally only in short bursts and/or favorable terrain. I ride into work everyday through mildly uphill paths, and I only average 13 MPH on a good day (closer to 12 on most). The practical difference is that a throttle-equipped e-bike allows someone to sustain high speeds, regardless of fitness level or terrain. An e-bike rider can (and do) mindlessly go at max speed when human-powered bikes naturally can't.
And I don’t get it: you say e-bike drivers “constantly run stop signs”, but then a paragraph later you say that you also often run stop signs! What should I take away from this? That we should selectively enforce traffic laws against e-bikes but not against you?
Also, cars aren't creating the risk. Drivers are.
At this point, to be honest, I'd be tempted to let Darwin do his thing, if it weren't for the fact that they traumatise pedestrians and drivers.
Whether the poster has previously slow rolled through a stop sign or cars are dangerous to bikes are separate points.
I would say e-bikes are not the root problem. They are fine. It is the drivers not following any rules is the primary problem.
No, they aren’t, in most US jurisdictions, which have specific rules for motorized bicycles (and often distinct rules for electric one.)
> If you have a motor on your vehicle it’s a motorized vehicle and needs to be registered and plated, driven on the road, given tickets like any other vehicle.
The fact that you don’t like the specific rules for e-bikes doesn’t make them a “gray area”.
My understanding is that the rules in NYC governing e-bikes and electric mopeds were very fuzzy until around 2020, but there is still some uncertainty.
Before 2020 most of the delivery "e-bikes" ridden in NYC were technically illegal and were subject to occasional/erratic police enforcement such as stings and seizures despite being about as ubiquitous as taxi cabs. This was controversial when I lived there.
I no longer live in NYC but since then my understanding is that the city and state governments have worked with delivery riders to clarify the legal status of their vehicles but there is still a bit of "gray area" in practice.
But the crux of the issue is that delivery ebike are riding recklessly. Any the majority reason for this is because they are paid by the number of deliveries they complete. This creates an incentive for them to take risks which a normal rider would not do. If the didn't have that incentive, they would probably operate in a much safer manner.
Legally there may be no difference between slowing to 2 mph (while yielding to traffic) and blowing through a stop sign at 20 mph. But I think you're smart enough to know what was meant by the person you're replying to--as a matter of physics and safety, those two things are completely different.
- Cars can be dangerous for cyclists, even when those cyclists follow all the rules, as the article makes clear
- E-bikes can also be dangerous for other road (or sidewalk) users, especially when they disregard the rules (riding on sidewalks etc).
And these can _definitely_ be true in wildly different environments! Manhattan streets and an arterial road in Encinitas are very different.
What BS. It is their choice to do things dangerous to themselves and others. If the road is too unsafe, then don't use an ebike. Period. Putting pedestrians at risk is disgusting. When the scooter craze started, I watched in horror, during my 1 hour commute by walking, as they moved to the sidewalk. Whipping in and out of pedestrian traffic, I was bumped a few times, but had no collisions. Those collisions could have been fatal, btw, as the scooters were going 15-20 mph. I definitely read about local pedestrian/scooter collisions, some people being seriously hurt. It is illegal to ride them on the sidewalk where I am.
Who do you think is making the road unsafe? What type of vehicle do you think results in the vast majority of pedestrian injuries and deaths?
> Who do you think is making the road unsafe?
The person riding against traffic is making it unsafe.
If you really want to pull in that comment of mine from elsewhere in the thread, I’ll expand on it. My point there was that designing our streets for cars has made them dangerous for bikes.
I never said "alongside" because that is BS. Sidewalks should be for the exclusive use of pedestrians and wheelchairs.
I just want to add that the food delivery bikers don't ride on the sidewalks solely because they can't go fast on the poorly maintained NYC sidewalks. If they could they would go at 30 miles/hour on sidewalks.
EDIT: I am working in an office at Time Square right now. I just looked down the window and counted 2 delivery bikers going at ~15miles/h on the sidewalk (The buildings are new and their developers fixed the sidewalk.)
If non-permit holding cars were banned from the city center and bikes given an equal share of space, the landscape would quickly change.
There is nothing new about this. NYC bike messengers have been doing this for decades. The 2001 documentary Pedal:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyitrLKUUJI
* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0380622/
And from (another?) documentary there were "The Klingons":
> Dubbed the “X-Men” — and wearing hockey helmets, full pads and a mix of motorcross gear and BMX gear — this crew of couriers rode like no one else in Manhattan. Pedaling was fine, but more often than not bikes were just a way to catch up to cars and trucks. “We’re also known as the Klingons, because that’s what we do: cling on to fast-moving vehicles,” says one member in a short documentary on the crew.
> As you can see, the crew wasn’t opposed to riding on the Henry Hudson Parkway, a freeway. As if going 50mph+ hanging on to a moving vehicle wasn’t crazy enough, this was in the pre-Giuliani years where New York was littered with deep potholes and mountain bike technology was still in a pre-suspension, pre-linear brake.
* https://gearjunkie.com/biking/1990s-new-york-city-bike-messe...
I don't have a study proving it, but it seems plausible personal mobility device riders would be less likely to ride on sidewalks etc if they could safely ride on the street.
Everywhere you see a cyclist on a sidewalk, that's a sign that the road isn't safe enough. If the road were safe, don't you think they'd prefer not worrying about pedestrians?
Even the most protected bike lines everywhere wouldn't fix the above.
But now on sidewalks e-bikes will zoom past me from behind at fast speeds startling me. I fucking hate it. I can no longer walk in peace in the city anymore.
Of course, I get some frustration when I'm stuck behind a bike, but I try to restrain it be safe. Meanwhile cyclists act like they rule the road. I've had them yell at me. They run pedestrians off the sidewalk.
Cyclists aren't exactly "the good guys" much of the time.
I think the main reason is that ethics in cycling has never really caught on as an ideology. So there's this sense of simultaneous anarchy and entitlement the permeates cycling culture.
This leads them to thinking they have no responsibility to share the road with drivers, riding as slowly as possible, and not leaving room to pass. Then they go on mixed trails and suddenly the rules are different. Pedestrians must get out of the way, and they don't have to yield traffic laws. They're the ones that will be yelling threats!
I really have to push back on this "criticizing bicycling is like racism" concept you introduced. First of all, people do generalize about cars being assholes. We talk all the time about it. Most of the violence is actually car on car... we just notice more the car vs. pedestrian matchups, as they can get pretty brutal.
I say this because I'm walking on paths far away from vehicles. We don't really tend to care the background of people who do bad things. If someone is treating you like garbage, you should be more respectful to others, not stoop to their level, and take it out on someone completely unrelated to the person you're mad at.
There is an intersection directly in front of my house (also in NYC) that features a flexible barrier and signs telling people "No left turn". All day long, hundreds of times per hour, drivers roll right over the barrier (or swerve around it into the bike lane), turning left illegally, rather than going around the block as they are supposed to do. Should we cast moral blame on these drivers? Or are they simply average human beings? They are taking a dangerous shortcut because the intersection is poorly designed, because our culture encourages them to prioritize their own momentary convenience over pedestrian safety, and the enforcement is non-existent.
If everyone is doing the same wrong thing, then something structural needs to change.
I'm rarely ever stuck behind a bike for longer than 30 seconds. I don't get frustrated and I don't need to restrain myself in order to be safe.
> I've had them yell at me.
I've never had a cyclist yell at me.
You might be doing something wrong.
Now they're the ones shouting threats. I've been fucked with multiple times while walking too. I don't really mind waiting for cyclists, even on main roads, which is an unheard of ideology where I'm from.
I'm just saying you can get a little impatient. It seems odd to me that you're bragging about not getting a little frustrated having to drive 5 mph for a long time.
Most bicyclists can also easily maintain more than 5mph, that's a pretty slow jog.
Solutions cant be talked about until the morons in city hall start giving a shit and doing something about the useless cops.
But we otherwise have all of these same issues from ordinary people riding these things. It's really turned my attitude about e-bikes. At first, I thought they were a great idea. Now, however, they've proven to be a very serious hazard to others. I'd love to see them classified, licensed, and regulated as scooters are.
The trouble seems to be that people are trying to maintain a biker's traditional laissez-faire attitude toward traffic laws on a vehicle that can do 30+ mph and accelerate with electric torque.
Of course EVs are a better solution than ICE cars but to address a lot of problems in society we don’t need better versions of existing things but entirely new solutions altogether (sidewalks, bike lanes, better density and zoning).
As the author of this article mentioned and I agree, it’s disappointing to see other articles come out that do in fact blame bike riders for problems caused by reckless car drivers [2] and overall infrastructure mismanagement that can be placed solely at the feet of city leaders, state departments of transportation, and federal agencies. This car-only infrastructure is beyond stupid, and the drivers themselves (a leading cause of unnecessary death and injury in America) are themselves victims.
[1] They actually grow the GDP in less direct ways like increasing amounts of entrepreneurial activities, less obesity, less deaths and injuries (more capable workers), and instead of money going to department of highways budgets, oil and gas, tires, the vehicles themselves, and parking lots families can instead invest or spend on other much needed items - this particularly affects the poor.
[2] I’m reminded of an article I saw previously and don’t have on hand where I believe a child or perhaps a few people were killed by someone who was drinking and driving and had 38 fucking speeding tickets and was still allowed to drive.
Maybe GDP is a bad metric. In any other field, a metric this naïve would be laughed out the door.
If GDP is trying to capture net effective productivity, then let's stop using a metric that's 2 degrees of aggregated abstraction away from this metric of interest.
Cars are middlemen. They allow labor to reach a location that performs a productive activity. They produce no productivity of their own. IE. Cars are network IO. Whichever transport method maximizes throughput and minimizes latency for the least cost is ideal.
Any decent engineer knows that the key to better network IO is to:
* improve locality - (keep things near each other)
* batch things together - (buses and trains)
* reduce size of individual packets - (cycles instead of huge cars)
* no lossy transmission - (maintain worker productivity, stave off obesity)
* avoid waits as much as possible, let actions happen async (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQSwQLDIK8)
Look no further than car dealers lobbying for laws that all sales must go through dealers, for example. Or car companies lobbying for laws that incentivize people to own private cars by making alternatives infeasible and unsafe.
Yes, NYT is victim blaming, plus if you are driving an auto, penalties for killing some is almost non-existent if you are not impaired. At the very least, you should lose your license for a few years.
Remember "jay-waking"?
It's legal, certainly. But where I live at least (NYC) it's as likely as anything to exacerbate dangerous driving as cars try to pass you anyway. I don't mean to sound alarmist but driver entitlement is a helluva drug and police enforcement for traffic offenses is incredibly low. It's the Wild West out there.
Legality doesn't matter if the drivers who think they own the streets don't know the law or aren't willing to abide by it.
This is dependent on where you live, and I would not recommend taking the lane unless you observe local cyclists doing so as well. I've ridden across several states and in some parts of the US the rules of the road are dictated by Newton's laws rather than state and federal ones. You may be within your legal rights to ride in the middle of the lane, but depending where you ride you may have to deal with more than just everyday honking and swearing. Punishment passes, thrown aluminum cans (hopefully empty), brake checks, swerving, etc.
I'm the sort of person who "takes the lane" when necessary but it doesn't work great in practice: Many drivers will aggressively tailgate and I've even been "bonked" by one who thought it was a totally normal and acceptable thing to do.
I even live in an area where cyclists are recommended (by the police) to ride ~3 feet from the curb and we require drivers (by law) to give cyclists ~3 feet of clearance. If cyclists were to follow those rules they'd be taking the full lane almost everywhere. But likely due to a combination of it not being common in practice and motorists being generally impatient it ends up being a dangerous set of guidelines to follow.
In the greater context of this and the NYT article: The answer is probably better bike infrastructure.
Why would density make policing more difficult?
Not being from there, what is the minimum speed limit (when the road is being shared), and is that based on 'conditions'?
That being said, as a cyclist and ebike rider myself, I stay off roads where the speed limit is higher than 35mph.
I gave up cycling for two years when we lived in one of them because of this.
I tried to ride, but when I had to get a GoPro on my helmet and saddle and caused delays on the only arterial two-lane (45mph) road in our neighborhood because most drivers won't even try to get close to a cyclist (probably because depth perception), it got too stressful to continue.
I'm back on the saddle now that we moved into a significantly more bike-friendly part of town, but saying "Bikes shouldn't be sharing the road when the speed limit is 55mph" is basically saying that cyclists should ride on their main roads.
They’re the same as motorcycles, scooters, mopeds. They need to be more powerful, not less, to keep up with traffic.
We don’t need separate bike lanes for e-bikes, it’s called lane splitting. Every Asian country has this already. Bike lanes are for bicycles.
On one end of the spectrum are regular-looking pedal bicycles with assistive motors that cut out at 20 mph and weigh around 40 pounds. On the other end of the spectrum are electric mopeds, motorcycles, and dirt bikes (some street legal, some not) with fat tires and vestigial or removed pedals that can reach 35+ mph and can weigh 200+ pounds. Both have valid use cases and both can be ridden well or poorly, but they are qualitatively different vehicles in terms of weight, power, riding style, and safety risks.
The fact that both of these vehicle types are often simply referred to as "e-bikes" without specifying their class makes discussions more difficult than necessary.
Edit: Electrek is particularly egregious about this, referring to anything with a battery and pedals as an "electric bike" or "e-bike", for example:
https://electrek.co/2023/07/18/british-soldiers-electric-bik...
https://electrek.co/2023/04/13/eunorau-flash-launched-as-220...
https://electrek.co/2023/05/28/wau-project-cyber-cryptically...
https://electrek.co/2023/07/07/police-crackdown-on-illegally...
I almost hit an ebike yesterday because I was reversing and had zero space for another car to surprise me, so a biker decides to squeeze in whatever space was available to get by. I almost missed them as they were in my blind spot and flew an inch away from my wheels as they were gonna back into them.
Not saying it is all victim blaming here, but ebikers riding at 25mph ignoring road rules is a massive problem in addition to everything.
Seems like there have been a few shocking/tragic e-bike related incidents lately in NYC.
The other “paths” in NYC are split, greenway down/midtown, Flushing/Kent path, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Red Hook path. And of course the vast majority of bike lanes are on the street rather than “paths”.
Hahaha. You do not see the irony at all do you?
You and a stroller have zero business being on a bike path to begin with. The solution everyone is talking about here is Roads for Cars + Bike paths + Pedestrian-only Sidewalks. The issue of having bikes near people is the same as having cars near bikes.
For one, I've seen plenty of non-motorized bikes go over 20mph in bikes lanes, particularly down hills.
> zooming by me and my infant in a stroller at speeds that are too dangerous to be on paths
To be clear: you and your infant are not sharing the path with this bike, right? It's on a bike path, you're on a pedestrian path. I don't understand what a "pedestrian bike path" is. If a car drives past the sidewalk at 25mph do you have a similar reaction? If not, why not?
And just so we don't get too many "won't somebody please think of the children!" accusations thrown around: I own a cargo e-bike and I take my kids to school on it every day, via a separated bike path. If I were required to bike on the road instead I simply wouldn't do it, it's far too dangerous. So we'd probably end up having to get a car and if, heaven forbid, I were to get in any kind of an accident a pedestrian would be considerably worse off.
EDIT: From the replies I can see many cities do have shared paths so I take that back. Seems like a very unwise choice and goes back to the original point: 90+% of of road space being dedicated to cars is the core problem, not bikers. And plenty of non-motorized bikers travel at unsafe speeds so I maintain a blanket ban on e-bikes feels like it isn't coming from anywhere logical.
Uptown, around the 80s I think, it is shared, but it’s less crowded and it’s more New Yorkers that know what’s up rather than tourists.
That said, many, many of the bike and pedestrian paths are adjacent and are only separated by a painted lines, and signs urging pedestrians to stay out of bike lanes :/
A narrow paved path through city or suburban parkland, built to be shared by pedestrians and casual, non-electric bike riders. It's an extremely common setup in the US and safe as long as the bike riders ride slowly (which was the cultural norm when such paths were built).
Wannabe racers with road bikes and lycra shorts make such paths dangerous for pedestrians. Fools out of control on electric bikes - even more so.
A major factor is that (the vast majority of) people can't hop on a pushbike and just go 20+ mph. Non-athletes typically ride about 12 mph when they first hop on. By the time they develop the muscles and cardio to ride a sustained 20 mph, they also develop the bike-handling skills to reasonably ride that fast, as well as an awareness of when it is appropriate to ride that fast.
In contrast, anyone who hasn't ridden a bike since childhood can hop on an eBike and be going 20 mph seconds later. They often don't know how to handle a bike around other people.
> If I were required to bike on the road instead I simply wouldn't do it, it's far too dangerous. So we'd probably end up having to get a car and if, heaven forbid, I were to get in any kind of an accident a pedestrian would be considerably worse off.
A collision, not an accident. And you make it sound like something that happened to you as the driver of the car.
honestly... lol. I'm lucky enough to live near a large park often populated by the lycra-clad performance bikers and while I certainly hope they have awareness of when it's appropriate to ride fast they don't demonstrate it. They blow through pedestrian crossings, buzz past slower riders in choke points all while blowing a whistle or screaming "ON YOUR RIGHT" as if it makes everything okay. There's a strong culture of entitlement at work.
> A major factor is that (the vast majority of) people can't hop on a pushbike and just go 20+ mph.
They can, though, if they're going downhill. Largely they don't because they don't feel comfortable doing so and they apply brakes. The same applies to e-bikes. As someone who rides one all the time I certainly don't jump on it and immediately feel invulnerable or something. It took me a long time to get comfortable riding at 20mph and even now it's very rare that I do.
> A collision, not an accident. And you make it sound like something that happened to you as the driver of the car.
OK, sure. I don't even own a car, I don't see a lot of value in debating the semantics of a theoretical event I don't even own the means to create.
It's not semantics: it frames the situation in a certain way.
> According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, an accident is "an unfortunate event resulting especially from carelessness or ignorance" and a crash is "a breaking to pieces by or as if by collision." These two words have different definitions and implications and are not very similar, so why would these words be used interchangeably?
> When we call something an "accident" it implies that no one is at fault and that no one, including the driver, bears responsibility for the outcome. The term "crash," on the other hand, is more specific in terms of the action's outcome without the unpreventable implication.
* https://www.michigan.gov/mdot/travel/safety/road-users/crash...
> We don’t say “plane accident.” We shouldn’t say “car accident” either.
* https://www.vox.com/2015/7/20/8995151/crash-not-accident
> Before the labor movement, factory owners would say "it was an accident" when American workers were injured in unsafe conditions.
> Before the movement to combat drunk driving, intoxicated drivers would say "it was an accident" when they crashed their cars.
> Planes don’t have accidents. They crash. Cranes don’t have accidents. They collapse. And as a society, we expect answers and solutions.
> Traffic crashes are fixable problems, caused by dangerous streets and unsafe drivers. They are not accidents. Let’s stop using the word "accident" today.
So your assumption was hilariously backwards. If a pedestrian and a bike are in conflict it's safe to assume that it's a mixed path, and the biker is being a jerk. After all the pedestrian has the right of way on the mixed trail.
> To be clear: you and your infant are not sharing the path with this bike, right? It's on a bike path, you're on a pedestrian path. I don't understand what a "pedestrian bike path" is. If a car drives past the sidewalk at 25mph do you have a similar reaction? If not, why not?
In my experience in the US, it's not very common to have separate paths for bikers and pedestrians. In my area, they almost never occur together, and the only areas with separate paths for bikes and pedestrians are especially popular parks.
Colloquially, I understand "bike path" to mean an "asphalt sidewalk" (that may or may not parallel a road), and a "sidewalk" mean a sidewalk made out of concrete slabs that usually parallels a road. Bike paths are usually wider than sidewalks. Both are used by bikes and pedestrians, but in residential areas (at least), it's rude to ride a bike on the sidewalk unless you're a kid.
The mopeds and e-bikes will fly out around a corner and start riding the wrong way (“salmoning”) in a protected bike lane.
Gothamist has an article today covering the recent Manhattan Bridge crash caused by two mopeds illegally riding in the bike lane: https://gothamist.com/news/cyclists-say-e-bikes-scooters-are...
I'm tired as a pedestrian dodging motorized vehicles on the sidewalk. I'm also tired having to look both ways when crossing a one way street because of a salmon-ing bike. Plus, when I'm crossing with the light, many times bikes have come up between the cars and ran the light, just barely dodging me in the crosswalk.
Ebikes and scooters are a real problem in NYC. If they'd just follow some of the basic road safety rules, everything would be peachy.
Well, I wish, but we can’t even get the obviously good Mcguinness blvd redesign done, the 59th street bridge south pathway conversion has been not happening for years, heck they can’t even trim back the weeds that have been overgrowing the bike path on Kent by the navy yard. Not sure nyc can walk or chew gum at separate times.
> Drivers will behave like oblivious idiots, but they are predictable idiots.
I wish I shared that optimism (if you can even call it that). NYC drivers are, in my experience, a deeply unpredictable bunch. Running red lights, wild U turns, excessive speeding, it's all a flip of a coin whether someone is going to do any of it right in front or behind you.
Drivers are supposed to yield to cyclists, as they are left turning across a lane of straight moving traffic. It is extremely predicable that they never do, so I can prepare by instead cutting a bit outwards and going around them on the right.
OTOH mopeds/e-bikes will simply come flying out the wrong way from a cross street and start riding head-on downtown. This isn’t something that you can see well in advance, and need to suddenly react to.
It’s particularly bad on 1st because if they are salmoning out of a cross street they could have just gone the right way and ended up on 2nd, which goes downtown…
I also disagree with the safety angle for them riding in bike lanes, because very few of them are even close to wearing proper motorcycle gear (ATGATT). If they cared about their safety they wouldn’t be wearing shorts and flipflops. They’re using bike lanes because it’s faster.
NYC is a city. It has 8 million people. There is no room for private cars.
Where is the moped lane? Why is there only one bike lane? Every avenue should have two full-sized bike lanes (the same size as car lanes), one for each direction. Then a bus lane, and no car lanes.
If that doesn't happen, you can't blame bikers for riding on sidewalks or the wrong way in a one-way bike lane. You can't expect someone on a bike to cross to a different avenue just because they want to go the other way. It's the city's fault for failing to provide proper infrastructure.
However, I do not understand people advocating for two way bike lanes on avenues. It defeats the point of green waves. It would still be faster to go over to 2nd to go downtown rather than (legally) salmoning down 1st and quickly hitting a red light.
With a green wave a cyclist can make 20-30 blocks easily if they are decently trained and riding a road bike. I’ve made it from Houston to the 59th St bridge without hitting a red light (1st Ave tunnel helps!!)
The person who said that clearly doesn’t understand that Manhattan is mainly 1-way streets.
> We need an NYPD crackdown on e-bikes/mopeds (mostly delivery riders) to get them off the road, so that drivers can reclaim their rightful first place.
Ah yes, the good old "natural" order of things, where cars come first, just as god intended.