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Cops Are Now Using E-Bikes To Chase Illegal E-Bikers
(insideevs.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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micromobility - Ebikes, scooters, longboards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
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I hope it works - there's a real need for enforcement. In NYC I constantly see e-bikes driving on sidewalks, going the wrong way on one-way streets, and running red lights. They're a real threat to pedestrians, and the police aren't able to do anything about it. I was happy when e-bikes were legalized here, but now I would vote to ban them again unless something changes.
The two situations are not really comparable.
Cities aren't built around e-bikes and the e-bike adoption rate, availability and all those things aren't on par with cars. It's just not the same. Unless you simplify it to "they're used to move around".
To say that laws should apply more to e-bikes because cities are designed for cars is both wrong and dangerous. You realize that the bike came before the car, right? That cities actually were built around bikes, horses, and ..ugh.. walking, long before the assembly line was even a twinkle in young Ford's eye?
The poster is saying that if you are going to call out the operators of one for gross negligence, then the other should be called out as well. It is a very comparable situation and pretending that because cars are more ubiquitous, they should somehow be less restricted is a leap in logic that is rather ludicrous.
I don't think they're saying that. They're hoping e-bikes get banned because of the issues they cause. Cars, regular bicycles and whatnot are sorta a lost cause at this point, they're so crucial and numerous that it'd be really hard to ban them. So you have to deal them in other ways. Not so much for e-bikes which are new and nowhere near as numerous, so could feasibly be banned without as much issues.
It's all well and good to consider them all equal and want to treat them as such, from a fairness point of view. But there's big differences between them and in reality you'd have to take that into account and work with those differences. Even if it means being more lenient to one method.
Unless we're talking about just pure hypothetical or fantasy scenario. Then it's fine, don't have to care about the differences then. But it's good to keep things somewhat grounded imo.
By all means. I'm just saying it's not the same, for the (imo) obvious and well, now mentioned reasons.
Don't know what you mean with less restricted. I don't care if you ban all vehicles. I'm not advocating for some policy. Just saying it was a bad comparison because of the big differences.
But you don't have to. And you wouldn't treat everything the same since they aren't the same. It's like saying when designing traffic routes, you have to treat every class of vehicle the same. Of course you wouldn't, you'd consider prevalence, design goals, feasibility, need, all kinds of things.
Simplifying too much is a bad thing.
They're applying it to e-bikes. They said nothing about being an universal policy that affects any other vehicles the exact same way.
Driving on sidewalks because there are no bicycle lanes preventing you from being crushed to death by an emotional support truck.
Going the wrong way on one-way streets because it hardly matters on a bicycle since one-way streets were created for cars specifically.
Running red lights because solely cars can ride the Green Wave, bicyclists have to stop at significantly more traffic lights.
I live in NYC too. I get that there are a lot of delivery workers zipping around on e-bikes. And yeah, it’s a little annoying and dangerous.
But I’m in WAY more danger and am way more consistently shocked by the stupidity of car drivers in this city. Blatantly running red lights, speeding, going up one way streets (in my neighborhood it happens plenty), doing real stupid shit where they shouldn’t/don’t have the time nor space…just because we’ve for some reason grown to think of cars as inevitable, we ignore just how insane the space we’ve sacrificed to them is. Think of how much public space is dedicated to cars. It’s like we live in a car’s world.
In the city! Barely anyone truly needs cars here. And somehow people decide to sit through hours of traffic to not take the train. And they block bike lanes because they’re running errands and double park, the trucks have to squeeze through and then THEY block the bike lanes—or even the walking lanes! The car situation in the city is off the fuckin wall. The e-bike situation by comparison is fuckin nothin.