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Comment by guardiangod | Hacker News Reader

I live in NYC and I agree with you. I ride bikes for my entire life in different cities and I've never seen so many bikers with a death wish. They dash in between traffic and blatantly ignore any applicable traffic rule. Not even bikers in India and China dare to ride this fast in traffic.

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.)

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Maybe its "food delivery" pushing for those aggressive behaviour, not e-bike.

Exactly. Those e-bike delivery drivers are directly incentivized by Grubhub and Doordash to put themselves at risk. The ever increasing demand for instantly delivered meals and the unscrupulousness of those companies has created the present circumstances, and much as it annoys me that I have to be more cautious when walking around, I don't blame the gig workers barely eking out a living.

They are incentivized because the NYC is designed around cars, not (e-)bikes.

If non-permit holding cars were banned from the city center and bikes given an equal share of space, the landscape would quickly change.

I guess delivery drivers would be much more reckless than average even with perfect cycling infrastructure. It would just be less fatal.

If you fine the companies, the behavior would stop very quickly.

> They dash in between traffic and blatantly ignore any applicable traffic rule. Not even bikers in India and China dare to ride this fast in traffic.

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...

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