alt Hacker NewsYeah, just imagine. I did. For hours yesterday evening I imagined.
Had a car killed my wife or unborn child, there would have been a legal trail and insurance.
Had the e-bike killed my wife or unborn child, there was neither. I doubt I could ever find the killer of the unborn child if the baby died later due to injuries-- there's neither license nor registration on an e-bike.
Pushing powered transportation into the unregulated, uninsured space is madness.
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You would likely be unhappy if you saw the outcomes of almost all vehicle manslaughter cases. It’s the easiest way to kill someone and get away with it consequence free
Yeah two things are true:
Reckless behaviour in traffic should be prevented, and
The same reckless behaviour is more dangerous when performed in a car. (People rarely actually get killed by an e-bike. It happens all the time with cars.)
The perpetrators of most vehicular homicides face little to no consequences.
You'd have to be an utter asshole (like a kid totaling three cars in a year, all going 70-100+ mph on urban streets), or the world's dumbest criminal (motorcyclist out on parole running a red, killing a pedestrian, fleeing the scene, and ditching the motorcycle in a field) for killing someone with a car to be more than a 'whoopsie daisies, at least nobody important got hurt'.
In my town, just last year, a cop running down a young woman when she had right of way in a crosswalk, while doing 74 mph in a 25 mph zone at night, with no sirens, got a $5,000 fine for it.
That's how much the life of a grad student is worth.
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Look, I'm all for traffic enforcement, but anyone who thinks that bikes are the big problem on the road is nuts.
>Had the e-bike killed my wife
That’s ridiculous. How many e-bikes do you think caused fatal accidents last year in the US?? Are you legitimately scared of this happening?