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Notes -
Update on the Black Teens Versus Pregnant Nurse story.
This twitter thread seems like a reasonable summary. I know it's not entirely unbiased, but absent additional contradictory evidence, the story seems to basically check out like this:
Kids had checked out the ebikes for a ride, and docked them before the 45-minute "free" period ended, planning to undock them to resume riding. (This is apparently a pretty common practice?)
They're sitting on the bikes chilling, when Comrie, the pregnant nurse, approaches and asks to have one of the bikes.
The teens say no, unmoved by her appeals for consideration for her pregnancy.
She scans (checks out) a bike one of the kids is sitting on, and tries to take it.
The kerfluffle we saw on video ensues. The kids apparently filmed it with a legitimate fear that she would turn it into "gang of teens harasses pregnant white lady."
So basically, no one looks like an entirely innocent victim here. The kids were just hanging out in preparation to check out the bikes again, but since they were docked, you don't really get to "call dibs" on a bike you are not currently renting. Technically Comrie was entitled to take an available bike; the kids shouldn't have been squatting on them. They were also kind of jerks for not showing a little compassion for an obviously pregnant woman (their version is that if they'd given up the bike, one of them would have had to find some other way to get back to the Bronx).
That said, deciding "Screw you, I'm taking your bike anyway, get off" wasn't great behavior on her part, even if legally justified. I cut her more slack because apparently she just got off a 12-hour shift, and she was pregnant.
However, even if the teens were perhaps being inconsiderate and less than gentlemanly, the narrative that's basically portrayed them as ganging up on her and trying to steal her bike appears to be inaccurate.
Some say people who game the system like this actually deserve to have the bike taken more.
Burning man has a set of free use bikes called “yellow bikes”. They’re just left around the city and wherever they are you can take them and ride them.
Some people will take them and try to reserve them for themselves by hiding them, locking them to their friends bikes, or decorating them in a way that disguised their status as a free, community use bike meant for eveyone.
Every year it is considered good sport to spend some time hunting for these bikes and punishing the people that do this.
My favorite is when I find that they’ve locked a yellow bike to their friends bike, to pick up both, and move them somewhere else, not so far that the owners will never find it, but far enough to cause them some panic. Others are if somebody leaves one of these bikes in their camp to loudly and publicly take it back and put it in the street, hopefully shaming the camp along the way.
Somehow burners, often some of the most entitled people on earth, can figure out the concept of a shared resource, and figure out that the people abusing it should be punished, but the people reading this story can’t?
These kids should be getting fucked with for abusing the system. Not only is the pregnant lady in the right to take a bike she simply paid for. She’s also in the right for doing it to these kids, who are effectively acting as thieves.
I encourage anybody who sees people abusing a public resource like this to act like pregnant lady.
Edit: the more I think about this the more angry it makes me. A normal person, the type of person I grew up with, not only wouldn’t bully a pregnant lady, they would get off of their bike and give it to her, even if it cost them money, simply because she is pregnant.
What level of anti social behavior are we at where anybody is defending these kids? I don’t even care if the most charitable version of their story is true. Get off your bike and give it to the pregnant woman you idiot. We are trying to have a society over here.
I would agree with this were it not for the fact that, so I am told, such behaviour is a widely accepted part of New York bike culture. If a rule like that (i.e. a 'first come first served' principle where if you get a bike out you can keep redocking as you like until you're finished) has been broadly established among most users, as it seems, conversely, it has not in the place you cite, then it seems perverse to lay blame on anyone conforming to the widely accepted rule. This also doesn't seem nearly as bad as the stuff you cite, since those people are clearly trying to just keep the bike for themselves semi-permanently even when they're not using it, whereas these chaps it seems were just keeping it for the time they were using it, albeit longer that the technical limit.
What if that's a rule that is established and tolerated in some cultures but not others? How do we decide who is right?
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