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NYC BIKE ACCIDENT OF "INEVITABLE CARNAGE" HIGHLIGHTS THE CITY'S DANGEROUS
MOTORIZED BIKE AND SCOOTER SITUATION

Ruben Bolling
5 hours ago

Photo credit: Jacob Beran / shutterstock.com

There was a collision of electric scooters, e-bikes, and bicycles on New York
City's Manhattan Bridge Thursday night, leaving four people injured. Link to the
article in Gothamist here.



> According to the FDNY, four "electric scooter" riders collided at 11:30 p.m.
> Wednesday and were taken to the hospital with unspecified injuries. But bikers
> on the bridge at the time describe a much more horrifying scene — one that
> involved e-bikes and electric scooters traveling at unsafe speeds and a
> collision that left a trail of blood and wreckage more than twenty feet long.
> 
> "Inevitable carnage," Lucas Freshman, an emergency room nurse, described it.
> "As shaken up by it as I still am, twelve or sixteen hours later, the sad
> feeling I have is that I'm not surprised by this happening."

See more

> Blood and debris stretch over about 25 feet of the Manhattan Bridge bike path,
> where there was a terrible crash last night. pic.twitter.com/2NUe8OFoqN
> 
> — Liam Quigley (@_elkue) July 27, 2023

This highlights an urgently dangerous situation in New York City, in which
bicyclists must share narrow bike lanes with motorized vehicles that often
travel at speeds in excess of the speed limit for automobiles. The bike lanes
have been built in NYC over the past few years to encourage safe biking, but
e-bikes seem to have turned them into speedways more dangerous than the streets.
Worse, e-bikers often go out of the bike lanes and travel on sidewalks, menacing
pedestrians. E-bikes became legal in NYC in 2020.



Last summer, The New York Post (note: Rupert Murdoch-owned) set up a radar gun
to tracker speeders on NYC bridges and bike lanes, and over a third of the
motorized vehicles (e-bikes, mopeds, etc.) exceeded the speed limit.

At a meeting of the E-Vehicle Safety Alliance last month, as reported by the
West Side Rag, New York State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal said, "The issue of
e-bikes is the number one constituent complaint that we get in my Senate office.
Your voices are being heard and I share your concern."



> Hoylman-Sigal said he is working on legislation that addresses issues
> contributing to the safety problem – including a bill to increase penalties
> for e-vehicle hit and runs and another that requires food delivery app
> companies to have insurance. The senator said [Assemblymember Linda B.]
> Rosenthal has introduced these same bills in the State Assembly. Another
> proposal, not yet introduced, would require licensing and registration of
> e-bikes used for commercial purposes.

Of course, because this is 2023, there are huge issues of poverty, immigration
and wealth disparity at play. Many of the motorized bikes are being driven by
workers who are low-income immigrants desperate to make a living working as
freelancers for giant tech food delivery apps.



CNN reports:

> Accidents on sidewalks and intersections. Dangerously congested bike paths.
> Delivery workers with nowhere to pee. Exploding electric bikes and scooters.
> 
> New York City is known for fast meals and easy access to everything, but its
> public spaces are being severely strained by the surge in on-demand
> deliveries, fueled by a pandemic boom in online orders and the rise of a new
> crop of ultra-fast delivery services.



Andrew Wolf, a research fellow at the Workplace Justice Lab at Rutgers
University said, "Before, when the workers worked for restaurants, they supplied
bikes, bathrooms and rest areas. Now, companies have adopted the independent
contractor model where they shift the burden to workers and the public."

It in addition to better rule enforcement for all e-bikes, it seems that the
food delivery apps, like Grubhub/Seamless, who are profiting off this
dysfunction, should be required to provide amenities, incentives, equipment and
rules for their workers (or, as they call them, independent contractors) that
allow them to safely make a living with dignity, and without speeding or
breaking other traffic laws.




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BICYCLES / E-BIKES / NEW YORK CITY / TRAFFIC SAFETY / TRANSPORTATION




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