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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, I've recently felt far more threatened by e-bikes in NYC than I ever have by cars. Cars in NYC are nuts, but they're a competent kind of nuts. I've never had one get even close to me, and that's with me jaywalking as much as any local.

E-bikes are a totally different story. They'll shoot through narrow streets twice as fast as the cars do and blitz through stop signs without even slowing down. There have been multiple occasions where I was nearly hit by one of them.

They seem to think that because they're smaller they don't need to care as much, but at the relative speeds of cars and bikes on those narrow streets I'm pretty convinced they'd do more damage to me than the 5-10 mph car would.

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being a pro-bike activist in a very car-friendly french city, this argument comes up in every. single. comment section. no matter whether there's anything related to actual bikes in there, or whether accidents were the topic at all. Literally in comments on articles like "hey we're organizing a bike ride for kids this weekend."

So forgive me if it's a bit hard to take this seriously. I'll still try to address this because for once I'm not handicapped by my lacking French. :D

The reason you don't feel as threatened by cars as you are by bikes is (without knowing you in person) twofold:

1. As societies, being collectively used to cars and accepting things we'd never accept in any other context when things relate to cars. Search the webs for "motonormativity" if you want the slightly more academic take on this. Since you were a kid, you were probably taught how to "co-"inhabit the road with cars. I put the quotes there because in most places, it's really cars who inhabit, and everyone else who's accepted onto the road, provided they don't impede on drivers' comfort.

2. Infrastructure is built in most places to more or less cleanly segregate pedestrians from cars. There's nothing stopping us from doing the same for bikes and pedestrians, but in most places we don't. Even though inside cities bikes can and do often move faster than cars, and therefore have a higher speed differential wrt pedestrians, their infrastructure is often woefully inadequate to deal with this. Here in southern france they even often put bikes explicitly on the sidewalk, which comes down to a "no biking" policy. Even where bike lanes are put in place, they're often ill-conceived. It turns out, the bike/pedestrian interaction in traffic is not at all the same as the car/pedestrian interaction. The Netherlands and other places have decades of experience in this by now, yet somehow this knowledge is not actively pulled by hesitant local authorities.

I was already quite interested in all of this but recently I also read "Movement" by Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet [1] and I loved it. If you're wondering why certain things in cities suck so hard, IMHO it's a good start.

[1]: https://islandpress.org/books/movement

edit: had swapped "cars" and "bikes" in one sentence, that made no sense. :D

> The reason you don't feel as threatened by cars as you are by bikes is (without knowing you in person) twofold

Neither of your two points covers the reason I feel more threatened by e-bikes, which is that the last time I was in Manhattan I stepped out into a one-way street without looking the other way (my bad) only to be nearly hit in the bike line by an e-bike coming the wrong way at max speed.

The person you were responding to pointed out that the operators of bikes simply don't obey traffic laws (perhaps France is different, but I doubt it). That is at least forgivable if you're trying to conserve hard-pedaled momentum but not if you're operating a 75-pound motor vehicle at 28mph.

Perhaps my chance of being killed by an e-bike is still lower than it would be for a car, but it's not totally irrational for people to prefer things that are higher risk, but more predictable, to those that are lower risk but still dangerous and aren't at all predictable.

I think these conversations are inherently tainted by our culture of widespread acceptance and subsidizing of motor vehicles. Cars are held to a much lower standard of behavior in just about every regard, and they're frequently the number 1 most prioritized from of transportation when we build, well, anything.

It's easy to say that cars obey laws but really they don't, that's part of the reason why cars are orders of magnitude more likely to kill you. That's why, despite cars being the golden child of transportation infrastructure, they're still the most dangerous. Because people don't obey laws. They speed, they follow too close, they roll through stop signs, they stop on crosswalks, they turn right as pedestrians are crossing, and on and on. And, when they do disobey laws, it's much more difficult for them to abort.

As a cyclist myself I can't say that cars are terribly predictable. Especially not when parked. I've had my fair share of near-death experiences with doors randomly opening right onto the (mandatory) bike lane.

Solid post! If you ever come to Brooklyn, would love to get coffee and chat more about this stuff.

But how much of that is rooted in some kind of motonormativity where one as a pedestrian just "accepts" all the drawbacks of car infrastructure (like not being allowed to cross a street where you want), but then ignoring how cyclists often are forced to share space with pedestrians etc? Aka, you don't get into the conflicts with cars at all, because you're trained to allow the car most of the space and act subservient to them. (But I do think your feelings are off, most stats would show cars are the big offenders, but still, feelings are important and everyone should feel safe in the city)

To me, many of the pedestrian <=> cyclist conflicts are due to bad infrastructure and a prioritization of cars, having cyclists and pedestrians forced to share or accept bad solutions.

Street lights are for the benefits of cars. To me they should all be just pedestrian crossings where cars have to yield. Pedestrians should be top on the totem pole, and should be able to walk in the city as they please. Having to wait to cross is just a way to increase the throughput of cars, forcing you to press the "begging button". And here's some of the issue as well. If it was only cyclists and pedestrians, we wouldn't need red lights. But how it's built today doesn't take into account that cyclists can pass safely through an intersection if it weren't for the cars. So it feels almost like an affront to you when you have to stop due to the infrastructure being tailored for someone else.

I never bomb through a red light myself, as I said, I prioritize pedestrians above cyclists, but I do understand why it's happening. More ticketing or "enforcement" won't help, as it doesn't solve the underlying issue:

Cities are prioritizing cars, when it should prioritize humans.

200 people are injured by cars in NYC every single day.

Operative word is "felt"

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