Thursday’s Headlines: The Greatness of E-Bikes Edition

The New Yorker’s shopping writer, Patricia Marx, weighed in this week on the electric bike, which far outsells electric cars right now. The takeaways from Marx’s piece?

• She gets it: Unlike most people, Marx understands that e-bikes are great exercise because e-bike riders “get more exercise than those on regular bikes, because they cycle longer and more frequently.”
• She referenced our Streetfilms colleague Clarence Eckerson Jr.
• She foolishly glossed over the Parks Department’s questionable ban on pedal-assist bikes.
• She got to ride $11,000 e-bikes!
• Yes, she mentioned the fires.
• She gets it when it comes to delivery workers: “Before you curse delivery workers and the ‘Out of my way, I’m coming through, maybe even the wrong way!’ attitude displayed by a handful of them, remember that the delivery apps punish the delivery guys who don’t arrive at their destinations lickety-split.”
• She even got to try the CLIP, which we tried in 2020.

All in all a great piece for the mainstream media.

You know who also showed she gets it (at least a little)? Gov. Hochul:

In other news from a super-slow Wednesday:

• Here’s another reminder of what a simply terrible job the mainstream media does with car crashes, especially fatal ones. As our story by Kevin Duggan showed, the truck involved in Wednesday’s fatal crash had 17 camera-issued speeding tickets and three camera-issued red-light tickets. Duggan got that information by running the plate from a Daily News photo. Pity, then, that the Daily News didn’t bother to run the plate — or even refer to the moped properly (it is not a “scooter”). How blue in the face do we have to get before local papers cover road violence as passionately as they cover other kinds of violence, which gets the “every burp and fart” treatment? Besides, it’s a better news story if you report all the facts.
• Speaking of fatal crashes where the reporters don’t run the plates, a woman died after a truck driver hit her. The truck has a long history of dangerous parking — and of a missing plate — not that amNY reported that part.
• Where’s that MTA report on fare evasion? Like its buses, it’s late. (amNY)
• And here’s today’s criminal mischief — or, more accurately, attempted criminal mischief: