Someone wants to hurt cyclists.
A bunch of little gold tacks were found on Wednesday on the bike lane on the loop road in the southwest corner of Prospect Park, a Brooklyn tipster said, raising concerns about the pernicious form of vandalism.
A poster on Reddit initially flagged the attack, and a worker from Bicycle Habitat on Fifth Avenue in Park Slope confirmed to Streetsblog that two customers had visited the store on Wednesday to seek repairs of flat tires that had indeed been punctured by gold tacks.
The NYPD did not have any initial information on the vandalism and the Parks Department did not immediately return a request for comment.
The attack prompted significant outrage on social media.
"I just want to ask the people who do this where they find the time or lack of morality to create discord among people they will never meet, but blindly are trying to mess with or even injure," one cyclist Darbies posted in a long chain of comments on Reddit.
The attack is reminiscent of an act of vandalism — which some called a terror attack — on the 43rd Avenue bike lane in Sunnyside in 2018. At the time, the attack was seen as more than just harmless vandalism because a handful of opponents had vociferously opposed the lane when it was being discussed, and protested its opening that year.
Then-Police Commissioner James O'Neill rejected classifying the incident as terrorism or even a hate crime, but he did call it "a particularly nasty crime."
"Look, it was couple of blocks long, with hundreds of tacks. And not only are you going to flatten people’s tires, but you are going to get people seriously injured so we are taking it seriously," he said.
The latest crime underscores how dangerous it is for cyclists because of villains who either want to injure or prey on them. Delivery workers have been repeatedly beaten for the little cash they may have on them, and there have been reports of highwaymen stringing wires across bridge bike paths to snag cyclists when they are least likely to be on alert.
