With crazies it's not that bad. I remember the bus getting pulled over once by a car with people with pipes/bats who beat a grandpa for getting in an argument with one of the guys prior. That was the only actually violent occurance over thousands of rides, however I still have yet to feel as threatened with a personal vehicle. With a car I could have rammed the fuck out of them or ran them over, with a bike I could have been gone in a second, when the bus driver stops and opens the front door you're just stuck. Again, realistically it's mostly crazy homeless people who pose no threat but I prefer to have some control at least.
My issue with electric bicycles is:
If limited they don't fit with pedestrians or cars so you need to complicate infrastructure. Good for going to the post office but not as a daily since they're just not fast enough. Lovely for old people and to an extent kids.
If not limited they are less tested motorcycles with usually shitty tires and brakes, no ABS, TC, etc with pedals to fulful some potentially existing legal loophole since there's no way you're doing anything close to the motor output manually yet since you feel inclined to pedal gear becomes problematic.
I still have yet to try an electric motorcycle but I'd guess the little electric scooters would be great for commuting. I'm guessing an electric scooter that can do 100-140kmh would be the utility sweet spot. You'd be able to go everywhere and charge for pennies with minimal maintenance. You'd also get the scooter benefits of improved road muck/weather protection and actual underseat storage.
Anecdote, paid $15 x 2 to take two citi bikes across Brooklyn to avoid a two-leg l-shaped subway ride. Coming home took a $25 uber. The bike trip was ~30% faster. It sucked having to navigate around all the delivery trucks and random private cars parked in the bike lane.
$15 seems too much to me for the citi bike for a 25 minute ride. But I'd do it again to save 10 minutes sitting in traffic in an uber.
Oh and the next day we did the same journey via l-shaped subway ride. It took about 10 minutes more than the bike ride, and included an awkward street-level and overpass transition between the two subway lines. Much much cheaper than uber or bike.
My take is there are a variety of crappy options to get around Brooklyn.
One does need to know where one is going to service it, though, because they can sometimes have stupid electrical issues which are objectively easy to fix but hard for you to fix on your own cause you don't know which wire goes where.
There's an old saying that if you can't spot the sucker at the poker table, you're the sucker.
If you've never felt threatened while driving a personal vehicle by all the road-raging, speeding, tailgating assholes--
The amount of crazy people on there is a lot too. Every friend has some story of some person assaulting or nearly assaulting them on the subway. No one truly feels safe on it.
You know what's more dangerous than riding the subway? Driving in a car.
https://www.chopranocerino.com/blog/new-york-accident-statis....
> There were 5,809 crashes on the busy streets of Manhattan in 2023. The borough reported 34 deaths (19 pedestrians, 11 motorists, and 4 cyclists). In total, there were 7,253 injuries.
https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/how-rare-is-crime-on-t...
> ...there were 1,120 violent index crimes reported as occurring on the subway in 2023, compared to 935 in 2019
Even comparing just Manhattan to the subway system as a whole, driving is more likely to result in an injury by a factor of 7x.
Dangerous to who? Cause you seem to forget about the people outside of the car.