from Hacker News

New York Is Confiscating Delivery Bikes, Hurting Immigrants, And Helping No One

by mmel on 3/9/18, 3:13 AM with 43 comments

• by ramzyo on 3/9/18, 5:12 AM

  I’m sorry but I just can’t line up my daily observations of some bikers’ and ebikers’ dangerous behavior in NYC vs that of drivers (who admittedly I have also seen drive dangerously) and the data often cited showing that drivers break just as many laws.

  Call this some fallacy of observation or confirmation bias or whatever, but I see bikers biking the wrong way weaving between traffic on NYC streets, running red lights (generally when there are no cars, but hey, it’s still running a red light), and doing other dangerous-for-pedestrian things literally every time I go outside. A few months ago I was clipped by a biker going the wrong way through a red light as I was in the crosswalk. Almost a year ago a friend was hit full speed by a biker in the East Village and lost two teeth.

  Of course a car hitting a pedestrian will be worse for the pedestrian than a bike in the same situation. But many bikers are dangerous too, at least in NYC, and when I walk the streets I’m more afraid of a biker coming out of nowhere than I am of a car doing the same.

  I have a hard time understanding the knee-jerk reaction to marginialize how dangerous bikers can be when an article calls out this behavior. There’s always some counter argument about how dangerous cars are. They are both dangerous, now can we just admit this and start asking cities to police dangerous biking too?

• by yogi123 on 3/9/18, 5:14 AM

  I’m wondering how many commenters here actually live in NYC. Delivery bikes are a menace. A 20-something guy in my building recently started hopping around on crutches. Athletic guy. Got hit by a food delivery bike and fractured his leg. I have a near miss at least once a week. They’re like darts that pop out of nowhere even on sidewalks, at full speed, sometimes swerving at the last second. Zero respect for any traffic laws. It’s especiaily dangerous if you have a dog as I do, esp when crossing a street, bc a bike can slice into the leash in the space between you and your dog, since the bikes pop out of nowhere so fast. I’m exceedingly cautious at night now in scanning around me at crosswalks.

• by vevoo on 3/9/18, 5:02 AM

  I love bikes and bikers, but think that the kind of freedom some of us exhibit is dangerous. We should abide more by the rules for bikes, as we expected the car drivers to abide by their own rules.

  If when we bike we break the rules, we might generate dangerous situations for pedestrians, for ourselves and for cars. It took me while to realize this.

  On the other side, if the rules are inappropriate, then yes, we have to bargain for new rules. But the article did not added anything about this. God thanks I do not need to register my bike and get a plate!

  But we might need to develop a test to get a e-bike license :)

• by pfarnsworth on 3/9/18, 5:43 AM

  I love how they're making it an "immigrant" issue and the gig-economy companies are "abdicating responsibility". Meanwhile actual residents of NYC are vehemently against how reckless and dangerous these people are. It's a good example of how agendas in the media have gotten out of control.

• by skybrian on 3/9/18, 5:26 AM

  If delivery using cyclists is unsafe and they should slow down, it seems like the city has to go after the businesses that provide the incentive to speed.

  Maybe enforce a minimum elapsed time and price for a delivery? If they get there sooner, they have to wait for the next job.

• by bobcat9 on 3/9/18, 4:22 AM

  Those electric bikes are a nightmare. They are so quiet you can't hear them coming. Coupled with how recklessly the delivery guys ride them it's a recipe for disaster. These guys plow through red lights and gun it in the opposite direction on one way streets. Maybe it wouldn't be a problem if these guys didn't ride like assholes.

• by t2riRXawYxLGGYb on 3/9/18, 5:46 AM

  In case you find these confiscations as misguided as I do, it looks like there is an existing petition against this: https://www.change.org/p/legalize-class-i-pedal-assist-elect...

• by Arbalest on 3/9/18, 5:35 AM

  As much as I don't like to malign modes of transportation which are environmentally friendly, cases like this are exactly why regulation is introduced. Once you get large numbers of people getting away with borderline criminal behaviour, regulation is brought in to explicitly deal with it to deal with the now commonly occurring edge cases.

  Of course corporate entities don't want it, they tend to be pro-deregulation. So injuries have been downplayed because, as others have said, they are not deaths.

  This could perhaps be handled by requiring registration of all vehicles for commercial purposes, as they are usually under the most pressure to increase throughput and thus bend rules. This would deal with the issue of unfairly disadvantaging the poor who need the economy afforded by bike transport, while dealing with the exploitation of the lack of regulation by corporate entities.

• by alvah on 3/9/18, 4:41 AM

  "..calling them a public threat because their riders exceed speed limits and disobey traffic laws by riding the wrong way on streets and on sidewalks. This reasoning is faulty: Do Lee, a researcher at CUNY Graduate Center and organizer with The Biking Public Project, which works to amplify the voices of underrepresented cyclists like delivery workers, tells Fast Company he has found no evidence in his research that e-bikes have ever killed anyone.."

  The reasoning contained in this excerpt is faulty, and it's so glaring I'm surprised the editor let it through - hasn't killed anyone yet <> is a public threat!

• by DrScump on 3/9/18, 6:20 AM

    given that immigrant delivery workers tend to earn only around $10/hour
  

  That's below NYC minimum wage.