It’s Spring! Time for NYPD to Punish People for Riding Bikes

Photo: @Tyson_J_White
Photo: @Tyson_J_White

The weather is finally warming up. Flowers are in bloom. Trees are green again. And NYPD is devoting traffic enforcement resources to punishing people for riding bikes.

Twitter is buzzing with reports of bike ticket stings this morning in Midtown and on the Lower East Side — the Midtown North, 13th, and 7th precincts, specifically.

The NYPD public information office didn’t know of a coordinated bike operation happening today, but the spokesperson we talked with said he couldn’t rule it out.

The number of fatalities caused by New York City cyclists is practically zero. Yet every spring, when more people start to ride, cops camp out near bike lanes and poorly designed intersections to tag them for rolling through red lights and wearing earbuds.

This does nothing to make streets safer, but the NYC version of “Vision Zero” does not differentiate between a person on a 20-pound bike and the operator of a multi-ton tractor-trailer designed for interstate highways — except truckers are generally free to ignore traffic laws, even when the result is death.

Did you encounter a bike ticket trap this morning? Let us know in the comments.

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