alt Hacker NewsCongestion isn't limited to cars.
My pregnant wife was hit yesterday in SoHo in broad daylight by a delivery driver on an e-bike. He ran a redlight. He hit her in a crosswalk. She was wearing a bright orange dress. She was not on a phone or listening to music. She went flying ass over teakettle. We spent 6 hours in the ER yesterday evening to make sure our unborn baby was okay. Fortunately, everyone is OK despite her being banged up.
The goddamn lawlessness of electric bikes is a consequence of NYC implicitly encouraging their illegal use. Meanwhile, I get to pay $9 MORE to drive my licensed, registered, insured vehicle on increasingly narrow roads filled with increasingly negligent 2-wheeled asshats because it's the preferred business model.
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Oof, that sucks. Glad that delivery driver wasn't in a car though! Could've ended much worse.
In other forums there are lots of complaints about the NYC crackdown on e-bikes. NYC has taken steps to discourage their use. Maybe not enough, but definitely more than in most other parts of the country.
> Meanwhile, I get to pay $9 MORE to drive my licensed, registered, insured vehicle on increasingly narrow roads filled with increasingly negligent 2-wheeled asshats because it's the preferred business model.
It sounds like measures to limit the danger of electric bikes might be warranted, but that’s a separate issue. Even if electric bikes are a problem I’d be shocked if they came anywhere close to causing the pedestrian fatality rate of cars (even when controlled by frequency of use) in an urban environment, not to mentioni the additional impacts of things like emissions (including non-tailpipe), noise, space, etc. of cars. I don’t know much about motorcycle statistics. I can imagine the group that rides motorcycles might be less likely to hit pedestrians than those of e-bike riders, but I don’t know.
If we have to choose only one of these problems to tackle at a time—which we don’t!—I’d rather they tackle the one which is killing hundreds of people a year.
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Were that delivery driver using a car instead of a bike, then your wife would likely be dead instead of in the ER.
(At least in the US, having a driver's license is in no way, shape, or form an indication that the driver is capable of driving correctly, much less their willingness to do so.)