Are you about to cross the road? Look each methods — and pray.
The e-bike swarm makes a stroll to the different facet so dangerous, it’s a marvel that pedestrians aren’t required to signal a legal responsibility launch earlier than stepping off the curb.
The menace that units New Yorkers scrambling for his or her lives at each nook requires just one resolution:
Ban e-bikes utterly, irrespective of how a lot car-hating bike advocates scream and impatient New Yorkers gripe about their General Tso’s hen taking a couple of minutes longer to reach.
New Yorkers must be careful for muggers and crazies lurking underneath scaffolds and on subway platforms. Now, since the state legalized e-bikes in 2020, we put our lives on the line each time we step out of our houses in broad daylight. It will be even worse as spring turns to summer season. Citi Bikes simply started rolling out 1,500 extra, fancier e-bikes to its 5,000-strong fleet.
The new e-bikes have handlebar LED screens to point out velocity and instructions. Imagine, riders who not often trouble to look left or proper can now focus all their consideration on a tiny, handlebars-mounted display with sound!
Incredibly, e-bike riders don’t want licenses. But the two-wheel terrors are a license to kill and maim.
The metropolis that closes eating places over a lifeless fly winks at the electric-powered “pedal-boosting” bikes that bear down on hapless pedestrians at 25 mph — silently, usually from the mistaken route, and regularly on sidewalks (the place not even common bikes are allowed).
![food deliveryman e bike](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/05/electric-bikes-3.jpg?w=1024)
Cycling proponents cite the pandemic for serving to to popularize e-bikes. The logic of that isn’t clear, until it’s that the lockdowns of 2020 and lingering, unnecessary restrictions triggered everybody to lose their minds.
Politicians and biking “advocates” ceaselessly suggest brainstorms to want away the e-bike carnage. Require licenses! Register the bikes! Install extra bike lanes! Tougher enforcement!
But it might be simpler to carry again a killer-bees invasion with a single can of Raid. Our streets and sidewalks are overrun. With the variety of e-bike rides in the metropolis greater than doubling from 2.7 million in 2020 to six.7 million final yr, no Mickey Mouse-level tinkering might make a distinction.
The Department of Transportation says there was one dying by e-bike this yr, and three in 2021. But the statistics, or lack thereof — the company doesn’t escape non-fatal collisions — belie the dysfunction they add to already near-lawless streets, and the dread they convey to tens of millions of New Yorkers every single day.
E-bikes scare the bejeezus out of everybody besides the folks using them. Elderly and less-mobile folks rightly cower at their strategy.
![Steve Cuozzo](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/05/ebikes-1.jpg?w=1024)
Uptown and downtown, meals deliverers zoom between restaurant sidewalk seats and eating tents in the road heedless of site visitors lights — or of waiters who threat their lives bringing dishes to tables.
E-bikers in my Upper East Side neighborhood play a sport of hen. Ha, ha! Let’s see how shut I can come to crippling you with out hitting you!
But there’s nothing humorous about it.
My buddy, former New York Post author Doree Lewak, was practically killed by a wrong-way e-bike 4 years in the past. The hit-and-run strike on Sixth Avenue at West thirty seventh Street knocked out a half-dozen of her enamel, broken ten extra, and left her with everlasting accidents.
“Gone Girl” actress Lisa Banes died of mind accidents final June after an electrical scooter, the e-bikes’ shut cousin, ran her down on the Upper West Side. An Upper West Side restaurant supervisor perished final summer season after being struck by an e-bike on Amsterdam Avenue.
This yr, the highest physique rely is to date amongst e-bikers themselves. Among them: an off-duty NYPD cop who misplaced management in Flatbush; one other Brooklyn man run over by a automobile after his e-bike brakes locked, inflicting him to be ejected; and one man killed and a second harm when they drove their e-bike right into a parked truck in Gravesend.
The rattling issues are a menace even when they aren’t even transferring. Lithium ion batteries had been answerable for greater than 40 fires, one in every of them deadly, in the Big Apple to date this yr.
It gained’t be straightforward for Mayor Adams, the City Council or the auto-hating DOT to drag the e-bikes’ plug. Many “progressives” want to see them substitute vehicles altogether.
True management requires guts. But I wouldn’t rely on the pols and bureaucrats discovering their spines earlier than the subsequent tragedies which might be ready to occur.