New York’s two wheeled menaces
As in most big metropolises, New York City can often be a pretty hostile place for pedestrians. Logic would tell you that based just on their size, cars must be the # 1 danger. As far as being badly injured or killed, that logic probably holds true. However, just as a matter of being struck, it’s the miscreants on two wheels that are becoming the biggest menace to people on foot.
There’s no doubt that the streets are filled with maniacs who drive their cars with little or no regard for anyone who happens to have the misfortune of getting in their way. They plow through red lights and stop signs. They fail to yield to pedestrians when making turns. They speed through quiet narrow streets as if they were driving on the Indianapolis Speedway. Anyone who’s lived in New York City for more than a couple of weeks has probably had a close call or two with these people. Those less fortunate have wound up in the emergency room or even on a cold steel slab in the morgue.
However, the fact of the matter is that if you’re a pedestrian and you’re really careful and alert, and you don’t tempt fate, the chances of getting plastered onto a car’s windshield are pretty low. For the most part, even the craziest of drivers don’t come up on the sidewalk, don’t drive the wrong way up one-way streets, and don’t drive on the wrong side of the road. Unfortunately for pedestrians, you can’t say the same thing about cyclists.
In New York City, people on bicycles seem to roam unfettered from rules, restrictions, and traffic laws. They ride in the streets, they ride on the sidewalks, they ride the wrong way up and down one-way streets, they don’t stop at red lights, they don’t stop at stop signs, and they don’t seem to believe that they have to yield to pedestrians in any way. I can’t tell you how many times I almost got nailed by some moron on a bike coming up the wrong way on a one-way street. Like most people, when I know that cars can only come from one direction, I tend to look only in that direction when crossing. What a mistake! I also can’t tell you how many times a dope on two wheels has whizzed by me on a crowded sidewalk close enough for me to smell his breath. I then come to the realization that if I had stepped one inch to my left at that very moment, I would probably be laying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood with the spokes from his wheels sticking out of my ears! Recently, I was waiting on a street corner for the light to turn so I could cross. When the light turned green, I stepped out onto the curb and almost got nailed by some dork on a bike that didn’t even slow down when his light turned red. After I jumped backwards to avoid getting hit, he looked back over his shoulder and shot me a scowl for good measure.
In New York City, the amount of bikes on the road has exploded in the last several years. Many of the bikes are used by delivery people (aka – illegal immigrants) working for pizzerias, Chinese take-outs, and other food related establishments. Due to the metal baskets that are usually welded to the front of their bikes, they tend to be the most dangerous cyclists. Other people who seem to prefer this mode of transportation are the loony left-wing environmentalists who believe that they’re saving the planet by using their stupid bikes. These people tend to ride their bikes with the same air of superiority as the pompous nitwits who drive around in their toaster sized hybrid cars. They’re saving humanity from the evils of the internal combustion engine, so you’d best get the hell out of their way!
It’s no surprise to this New Yorker that bikes are running amok throughout the city. This administration, led by the elitist liberal Michael Bloomberg, is overtly anti-car, and are hell-bent on making life as miserable as possible for car owners. For example; there is one area in Long Island City, Queens, where the city has taken away hundreds of parking spaces by making the entire side of a busy street in an industrial area into a bike lane. The people who used to park there were coming there to work, not for a pleasure ride! It seems that many of the liberals in the city government and the two-wheeling environmental extremists would love nothing more than to have all of us riding around town on bikes and rikshaws.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not anti-bike. I’m just anti-the idiots who ride them with no regard for traffic laws and the rights of pedestrians to walk safely on city sidewalks. With the city government and political correctness on their side, cyclists have taken over the city streets. As opposed to cars and pedestrians, they don’t seem to have to follow any rules. I have yet to see a bicycle ticketed for a traffic infraction. With all the crazy drivers, and now the spoiled and arrogant cyclists, pedestrians are now at the bottom of the pecking order when it comes to the right to freely traverse the city streets. In essence, it has now become open season on the pedestrians of New York City.
