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Some worry that New York City’s crackdown on unsafe cyclists leaves them facing greater consequences than drivers, even though cars cause more fatalities.

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[-] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 1 points 2 weeks ago

This is such a ridiculous claim that it's not even worth responding to.

So is 29 cyclists all getting run over.

https://www.google.com/search?q=innocent+drivers+accused+of+vehicular+homicide https://www.google.com/search?q=innocent+drivers+accused+of+vehicular+manslaughter+of+cyclists

I’ve tried. I don’t see anything to objectively evince your claims in reality. In fact according to the AAA, “Nearly half of those killed in red light running crashes were passengers or people in other vehicles and more than 5% were pedestrians or cyclists.” If you want to prove the opposite, start your own study.

You think the damage of 29 cyclist collisions is insane, and I think it's not. You have biases that lie something else, that’s fine. But accusing me of ignoring what you've said when I've directly addressed them multiple times? In case it wasn’t clear enough, here’s what I meant.

100 people getting broken bones is better than one person dying. Not to mention how probably motor vehicle accidents are to cause a chain reaction, that cyclists' much lower inertia means they slow down much faster, and that motorists are more likely to be distracted—by bells and whistles and passengers and whatnot. Plus the ratio was ~36:1 (~29:1 excluding non-motorcycle bicycles, i.e. bikes that aren't e-bikes or mopeds and can't go above 15mph), not 100:1, as of 2016. Assuming constant speed and ignoring all the not-to-mentions, the median American vehicle delivers the kinetic energy of about 13 e-bikes. That's very little less-than-half of the 29 of the ratio.

That’s a direct analysis of the damage of a car. Cars have the same damage if they just cause accidents merely two times more than e-bikes, which they do at far more than two times; I did this math for someone else before and I think NY had data at the Statistics Repository for Traffic Safety or something like that (though the data did not factor in runs that treated the light as a stop sign). And not to mention that's e-bikes. Bicycles only have a 6:1 frequency ratio and one car running a red light far eclipses the potential damage of 6 normal bicycles. The article doesn't apply to just e-bikes; it applies to normal bicycles too.

As for the cyclist getting impacted, there's no mechanism that would automatically blame the driver or is more likely to falsely implicate the driver. Unless I'm not aware of articles that prove the contrary?

this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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