In case you wonder how the New York City motor scooter situation is going, here’s your answer:
Motor scooters should certainly have license plates, but I don’t see how that’s going to keep idiots from riding them on the sidewalks–next time someone in a vehicle with a license plate does something reckless, go ahead and call 911 with a plate number and see how that works out for you.
In a way I’ve almost come to like the motor scooters because they’re the one thing everyone in the city seems to agree on; pretty much everyone hates them, and even the safe street advocates don’t really seem to defend them anymore. Besides blackouts and terrorist attacks, motor scooters seem like pretty much the only thing that can bring New Yorkers together. In this sense they’re becoming a symbol of unity, and I think this gentleman speaks for all of us:
[“What are you, meshugeneh?”]
Please note however that I said “almost,” and mostly I just hate* them because they’re ruining the bike paths and generally suck ass:
*[I don’t intrinsically hate motor scooters, I think they’re great in the road where they belong, I just hate them the way people in New York use them, which in keeping with the way we do most things here is completely ass-backwards.]
They run the fuck out of the red lights, too, and as an enlightened motorist who’s generally inclined to give anyone else who’s not driving a car plenty of wiggle room I can only conclude that most of these people simply want to die.
Another reason to almost like motor scooters is that New Yorkers’ increasing hatred of them (as well as the e-bikes and e-scooters and other fast-moving nuisance devices that are generally associated with them) may finally be distracting them from how much they used to hate regular bikes:
Though I suppose it’ll be that much harder to get anyone to support new bike lanes, which are no longer bike lanes anyway, so it probably doesn’t matter. ( Just ride a regular bike in a so-called “bike lane” and count how many times someone honks one of those annoying electronic e-bike horns at you.) At this point we need separate e-bike lanes and regular bike lanes just like we have separate parkways and expressways for cars and trucks, but good luck enforcing that. You can say license plates make it possible to separate cars and trucks, but ultimately it only works because if you drive a truck on a parkway in New York this is what happens:
That Robert Moses was fiendishly clever.
Meanwhile, yesterday the driver of an NYPD tow truck killed a young child while towing away some asshole’s car with bullshit out-of-state plates:
Who had racked up an impressive number of camera tickets:
Towing a car with a shitload of tickets would be a win for license plates if only we were able to do so without killing a child in the process. Whether it’s cars or scooters or anything else, everyone always thinks they have the solution: More bike lanes! More intersection daylighting! Get rid of the bike lanes! Mandatory registration and licensing for e-bikes! But after awhile it gets harder and harder not to engage in “New York exceptionalism” and conclude we’re uniquely stupid and incapable of operating any vehicle in any situation in a remotely competent manner. We’re so dumb that if you banned everything except for public transportation we’d still manage to run each other over with our grocery carts:
Except a City Council member to propose mandatory grocery cart registration within the next 10 years.
Speaking of life in New York, how about a bike path between the George Washington Bridge and the Tappan Zee Mario Cuomo Bridge?
This is a hugely popular area for cyclists, especially since the Tappan Zee Mario Cuomo Bride bike path opened back in 2020 or whatever it was, yet besides the bridge paths themselves there are virtually no amenities for them apart from signs ordering them to ride single-file:
The above makes it sound like everyone’s just casually riding up to Canada, but basically it’s people doing the bridge loop by riding up one side of the Hudson and down the other:
Anyway, I really should have become an urban planner or whatever, because it sure seems like easy money:
I got your study right here:
Just give me 300 grand and we’ll call it even.
Ironically, it’s the people who currently ride 9W who stand to lose the most, since they’re almost entirely roadies and a path full of “normies” will not be conducive to humorless high-speed paceline riding. Then again none of it really matters since it won’t be long until it’s taken over by motor scooters and nuisance devices.
Fuck it, I’m riding the Old Croton Aqueduct.