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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13730 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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The Economist has published an article (paywalled, sorry) on the state of cyclists in New York, which dropped the day I was leaving the city. It was the first time I had visited as an adult. I came away with some respect for it (loved the food, service, and how fast everyone walked). The point of the story is supposedly that cyclists are now being treated unfairly:

The New York Police Department (NYPD) has started issuing criminal summonses for bike riders committing a slew of seemingly low-level fouls. Now, if caught running red lights, stopping in the pedestrian crossing or wearing headphones, wayward cyclists must appear before a judge, even if they are not contesting the fine. If they do not, they risk arrest.

I’m a cycling nut, so the issue is close to my heart. In a T2 city, I feel like our role is that of a scapegoat. People fantasize about killing cyclists pretty regularly, and none of them understand the challenges and tradeoffs we have to deal with. At this point, I've just thrown up my hands in despair at this ever being better, so I just get on the road as little as possible.

The people on two wheels in NYC are a different breed. Each of the longtime residents I asked - 100% - are now more scared of cyclists than cars. My 3 day trip felt the same to me. Every car was attentive and respectful of me as a pedestrian. The cyclists were fast, heavy, and disregarded almost every crosswalk signal or red light, despite having their own lanes. What’s the quantitative danger?

Of the 449 pedestrian deaths in the city between 2020 and 2023, electric bikes, scooters and mopeds led to just eight of them.

Notice the sleight of hand here. What’s included are E-Bikes, scooters, and mopeds - each of these truly motorized vehicles. The number of people killed by analog cyclists nationwide has been, for many years, single digits. This is important. E-bikes allow users to achieve speeds and momentum totally beyond their skill, and are often part of poorly maintained machines that are part of sharing programs. My mind is blown that even 8 people have been killed - that's an enormous number even in a place as dense as NYC. It probably means a huge number of serious injuries as collateral damage.

Cyclists kill between 1-9 people in the US per year. Cars kill 7,000+ Pedestrians (Not to mention other drivers). If you compare lethality on a per-capita basis, it's not even close. Cars are 230x more deadly (Including only pedestrians, not the 40,000 total deaths). Per-person-miles-travelled reduces the disparity a lot. It gets down to where cars are "only" 8.5x more deadly than bikes.

Put simply, the fixie riders racing through the city are psychotic but not dangerous to pedestrians.

As you’d expect, the lede is buried, along with the Culture War. The cyclists zipping through the city on E-bikes are exclusively yapping in a foreign language on speakerphone, with DoorDash bags on the back of their cycles. Nothing should get in the way of private taxis for burritos.

E-bike riders are “one of the top, if not the single, highest generator of complaints” from constituents….Mr Hoylman-Sigal (city senator) supports putting licence-plates on commercial e-bikes, so that violators can be held accountable. But such proposals have gone flat due, in part, to a desire to protect the largely immigrant delivery drivers.

To recap how insane this is:

  • The problem is 100% illegal immigrants on E-bikes and mopeds
  • No solution to control this will be put forward out of sympathy for the illegal immigrants
  • Punishment must be metered out, though, since it’s one of the biggest problems facing the city
  • Therefore, the solution is to punish analog cyclists with social security numbers!

It’s so similar to LA, albeit with fewer vehicle fires and bricks on heads. The fix just cannot be the obvious and correct one. Instead, it’s to hop on Reddit to “map police hotspots” or refuse to stop as a way to LARP civil disobedience.

To recap how insane this is:

The problem is 100% illegal immigrants on E-bikes and mopeds No solution to control this will be put forward out of sympathy for the illegal immigrants Punishment must be metered out, though, since it’s one of the biggest problems facing the city Therefore, the solution is to punish analog cyclists with social security numbers!

That's quite the assumption to just throw in there, just saying. You have presented zero proof that illegal immigrants make up a large number of hazardous DoorDashers on ebikes.

Honestly it sounds like the problem is that from a regulatory standpoint, ebikes and motorized two-wheeled vehicles are being lumped in with bicycles rather than being regulated as a separate thing.

  • While it'd be nice to have a scholarly article about who's delivering food, there's negative incentive for universities to do this sort of research, and I'm sorry: pretending like this isn't true is just too stupid to entertain. Step outside in any major western metro, look around, and then come back to the keyboard. I will concede that "100%" is high :) (EDIT: The fact that the authorities in NYC are specifically worried about hurting immigrants and therefore not acting to improve the situation with dangerous cyclists is another reason I can't take this seriously)
  • You're absolutely right on this point. Another point of regulatory skirting in NYC: Amazon has four wheeled delivery machines with vestigial pedals on them and huge batteries and motors. These seemed to be helmed by slightly more "professional" drivers but are obviously dangerous vehicles hanging out in lanes designed for human-powered transport. The problem is that all of these exist on a gradient, and nobody wants to make the first move of creating an onerous regulatory regime on what was, just a couple of years ago, a simple machine that some nerds started riding as a hobby.

I don't think @gafpromise was necessarily disputing the "immigrant" part, so much as the "illegal". You can certainly look around any major city and see that most DoorDashers are non-white and probably immigrants or descendants of recent immigrants. Bit harder to judge whether their papers are in order on sight. While the number may plausibly be high, I would be fairly surprised if >50% of immigrant DoorDashers were illegals, let alone 100%.

DD says they require SSNs and IDs. Account Sharing seems rampant - their own algorithms flag more than 100,000 accounts right now to have to "reverify identity* every shift, and they're incentivized to maladjust the algorithm in their favor.

You'll almost certainly never get the real data. Instead, I'd use someone's inability to understand English as a sufficient proxy for what I'm suggesting. It's a severe enough problem on Uber (for people driving cars under a regulatory regime) that I just can't reasonably play along with the theory that the problem is reduced or eliminated when it comes to bicycles. I'm going to believe my lying eyes and ears.

From Newsweek

Normally traditional hot "zones" of money-making became overly saturated with drivers out of nowhere, he added. He said he often chats in Spanish with foreign drivers, many of which tell him they are from Venezuela.

"[Us drivers] run into each other all day long at these various businesses and restaurants and so forth," he said. "We chat it up. I chat with the migrants, too. I'm a grandson of an immigrant. I'm sympathetic for them but I'm a rules guy first."

Preston said he personally met countless "unqualified" individuals—estimating that the senators' concerns about hundreds of unverified or illegal drivers could be understated on a national scale.

He alleged "fraudulent" accounts are commonly sold or shared via the dark web or openly in Facebook groups. In August, Preston said he hadn't been re-identified by the app in over two years.

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