First, the excellent news: the Brooklyn-based company Revel has announced that it’s going to end its moped-sharing program, freeing Latest York streets from the tyranny of its two-wheelers, which turned town into a foul “Mad Max” remake.
Now, the bad news: 1000’s of more Citi e-bikes are set to hit city streets by the tip of next yr.
They’re exactly what those of us who’re already on fringe of over Gaza, subway-pushers and $29 hot dogs don’t need.
Are our leaders high on goofballs — the heroin-methamphetamine compound — once they make decisions that impact our day by day lives?
Or are they merely smoking adulterated, mind-numbing pot from the hundreds of unlicensed dealers?
Mayor Adams and Department of Transportation Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez were plainly under the influence of something once they announced a deal last week to let Citi Bike double the variety of e-bikes in its 27,000-strong fleet to 10,000 by the tip of 2024.
The hundreds of thousands who get around on foot will soon face greater peril than ever. Like many elected officials, Adams is cowed by Transportation Alternatives lobbyists who show up at City Hall and community board meetings and shout down opposition. The Big Apple is within the throes of so many crises with gutlessness at the highest of the list
The goal of getting more e-bikes to “promote micromobility” is the micro-brain pipedream of woke types who’d ban cars altogether in the event that they could. It’s a tasteless, heartless move, coming lower than two months after a Citi e-bike struck and killed beloved Chinatown school teacher Priscilla Loke, believed to be the primary Citi Bike pedestrian fatality.
City Hall’s impulse to remove whatever sense of safety our streets and sidewalks once had is of a bit with its seemingly turning a blind eye to shoplifting, illegal pot-vending and forever-standing scaffolds.
Once merely congested, our streets are actually the anarchic domain of drunk motorists, wrong-way cyclists — each motorized and analog — and tourist-schlepping pedicabs that round corners like rogue Harley-Davidsons.
Now, prepare for hundreds more Citi Bike riders who don’t know the best way to ride. Although not often aggressive, they’re as scary as expletive-shouting sociopaths who zoom by at speeds appropriate to UCI Road World Championships.
Having learned to ride a motorcycle after I was 8-years-old, I consider myself qualified to spot those who don’t belong on two wheels. Most Citi Bikers clearly never learned the best way to pedal and keep their balance at the identical time.
They wobble on their wheels like tipsy reverends, leaving us clueless as to their next move. They start to go to your left, then to your right, only avoiding catastrophe with last minute maneuvers.
As my colleague Nicole Gelinas recently identified, “Many Citi Bike riders don’t have any experience driving a motorized vehicle or motorcycle” and may not know that moving at 18 mph — which supposedly is Citi e-bikes’ top speed —“is dangerous to themselves and to pedestrians.”
I once wrote tongue-in-cheek that crossing a street was so dangerous, pedestrians should should sign liability release to step off a curb.
That was in (barely) less insane times — that’s, May 2022, when the variety of day by day Citi Bike rides was 30% fewer than today’s roughly 126,000.
But once the e-fleet expansion takes effect, an armor suit is likely to be more appropriate.
It might need protected my friend Doree Lewak, a former Latest York post author, who was struck and nearly killed by a wrong-way e-biker on Sixth Avenue and West thirty seventh Street in 2019.
Or “Gone Girl” actress Lisa Banes who died of brain injuries after she was struck by an electrical scooter —an in depth e-bike cousin — on the Upper West Side in 2021.
Or poor Priscilla Loke, an innocent Latest Yorker merely attempting to cross the road, whose tragedy surely won’t be the last.
