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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • NYC’s cyclists (of whom I know many) need to follow traffic laws.

    Those laws are there because people need to act predictably on the street. When a red light becomes a mere suggestion for cyclists, motorists eventually start treating them as such as well. Monkey see, monkey do.

    …and getting t-boned by some douchecanoe driving a car when you have the light is commonly fatal for a cyclist.

    There was an uptick in utterly shitty driving from 2019 onwards in NYC, and the police stopped all enforcement actions even in egregious cases… then the roads became, and largely remain, a free-for-all. I’ve seen some attempts recently to start clearing the mess up, but too often NYPD are ignoring these dangerous road users… or hiding their license plates and being offenders themselves.

    …and this is before you’re fighting for space in a the bikelane with some drunk+stoned asshole on a moped.

    I’m fully in favor of delivery professionals being required to have a license and display it at all times when on the clock. They should also be required to have specific insurance, and a highly visible personal identifier when working. They should also get automatic Union representation and a living wage.

    Anything more powerful than a class-C e-bike should have a license plate, and if not it gets taken and destroyed, or auctioned to a more responsible owner. Sales of these vehicles without a registration needs to be illegal. Anything more powerful than a class-C e-bike found in a bike lane should be impounded on the spot. Running a stop sign or a red light should get you a ticket, regardless of what wheels you’re on. Going the wrong way down a one way street should get you a ticket.

    It doesn’t help that NYC doesn’t have the space and largely practices “maximum-conflict” street design… but that’s just the slow, shitty entropic action of self-serving interests pushing communities around, and they react very slowly. It takes (usually multiple) fatalities for anyone to wake up and actually do anything about it.

    Also wear a damned helmet.






  • For the same reason a human in a bad automobile crash may be conscious and yet be immobile - the brain releases its own mix of painkillers along with other chemicals such as adrenalin when your body gets badly damaged.

    That’s sometimes why you can get a big gash in your arm running or fighting or even moving furniture around, and might not immediately notice until you move into a lower state of excitement and those chemicals clear out of your blood stream.

    Someone can be very badly injured, but since they’re in shock they might not be able to tell how badly they are hurt until the local environment changes.