After tot’s scary brush with an e-bike, NYC needs – Latest News
A Brooklyn toddler’s near-catastrophic brush with an e-bike over the weekend proves that a main revamp of New York City’s bike lanes is long overdue.
In South Williamsburg on Sunday, a 3-year-old lady was injured when she exited a parked vehicle and dashed into the bike lane, straight within the path of a barreling e-bike.
It’s each dad or mum’s nightmare, and an indictment of town’s poorly deliberate bike lanes and feckless response to the rise of e-bikes.
It appears the rider broke no legal guidelines, however that’s half of the issue: The metropolis’s progressive leaders have been so desperate to make the streets cyclist-friendly that they’ve ignored pedestrian security — and common sense.
The scene the place the tot was hit is a prime instance: A motorcycle lane doesn’t belong on Bedford Avenue, a busy avenue with high foot and vehicle site visitors.
Sabrina Gates, a Brooklynite operating for City Council in opposition to long-time pro-cycling advocate Lincoln Restler, rightly referred to as it “a hazard.”
The Department of Transportation needs to more rigorously review the place it’s placing bike lanes; regardless of activists’ calls for, not each neighborhood ought to have one.
And town needs to rethink the type of protected bike lanes that places parking on one facet and a sidewalk on the opposite; that provides bike riders a false sense of security that may render them much less cautious of their environment and provides to a sense of confusion over who has proper of means on any given half of the street.
As it’s, cyclists, pedestrians and even drivers can assume priority after they don’t have it.
Clearer steering and higher enforcement would help — which is why Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s crackdown on lawbreaking drivers and cyclists is so important.
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Without ripping out current bike lanes (no matter how ill-placed), town can and should take steps to spice up security.
Bike lanes ought to have their own, posted pace limits; e-bikes can high 30 miles an hour, which is way too fast, and endangers pedestrians who don’t count on a fast-moving vehicle when strolling by means of or subsequent to a bike lane.
Brightly coloured pace humps (particularly at intersections) can encourage cyclists to remain underneath these limits.
More bike-lane purple lights alone isn’t enough: Too many cyclists barrel proper by means of them.
So: Install more pace cameras in bike lanes — and power all e-bikes to register their autos and use a license plate, as within the law City Councilmember Bob Holden has been attempting to go since final yr.
E-bikes aren’t your grandma’s Schwinn; they’re quicker, heavier and more harmful.
With tens of hundreds on the streets, town has to evolve its bike lanes and legal guidelines to match the new actuality.
Anything much less is madness — and places New York’s most weak at risk.
