It’s Spring! Time for NYPD to Punish People for Riding Bikes
The number of fatalities caused by New York City cyclists is practically zero. Yet every spring, cops camp out near bike lanes and poorly designed intersections to tag people for rolling through red lights and wearing earbuds.
By
Brad Aaron
12:09 PM EDT on May 22, 2018
The weather is finally warming up. Flowers are in bloom. Trees are green again. And NYPD is devoting traffic enforcement resources to punishing people for riding bikes.
Twitter is buzzing with reports of bike ticket stings this morning in Midtown and on the Lower East Side — the Midtown North, 13th, and 7th precincts, specifically.
This does nothing to make streets safer, but the NYC version of “Vision Zero” does not differentiate between a person on a 20-pound bike and the operator of a multi-ton tractor-trailer designed for interstate highways — except truckers are generally free to ignore traffic laws, even when the result is death.
Did you encounter a bike ticket trap this morning? Let us know in the comments.
Brad Aaron began writing for Streetsblog in 2007, after years as a reporter, editor, and publisher in the alternative weekly business. Brad adopted New York's dysfunctional traffic justice system as his primary beat for Streetsblog. He lives in Manhattan.
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