Well, I’m sorry to share depressing news as we head into the weekend, but this one is too close to home for me to ignore:
This was Thursday morning, at rush hour, on a bridge bike path I’ve described in the past as a “complete shitshow:”
Police officers responded at 8:21 a.m. after a 39-year-old man riding a stand-up electric scooter crashed into a 35-year-old cyclist. The e-scooter driver was traveling westbound, while the cyclist was traveling eastbound, the police said.
The men were brought to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Queens, where they were pronounced dead. Photos taken in the aftermath of the collision show a white bike snapped clean in half, with an orange e-scooter lying next to it. The crumpled front tire of the bike rests against the bridge.
The scooter involved will apparently do over 50mph:
The photos of the crash site appear to show a Teverun Blade GT Suit II+ e-scooter, billed on the company’s website as a “wolf in a suit” that can reach almost 53 m.p.h.
“Beneath its sleek, understated design lies immense power and explosive acceleration,” the company’s description reads. “Every twist of the throttle delivers thrilling speed while maintaining effortless control, turning your daily ride into an extraordinary experience.”
And yes, both riders were wearing helmets:
Somewhere I said that if you feel like you need to wear a full-face helmet then you have no business being in a bike lane, but I can’t remember where, so I’m going to say it again, even though it’s kind of gross to do so right after the person has just died. Sorry.
I probably haven’t ridden over the Queensboro Bridge (or the 59th Street bridge as I usually call it, or the Ed Kotch Bridge as nobody calls) since at least last summer, since I live pretty far from it, though prior to that I was using it somewhat regularly, since my friend who died last year lived in Queens and I was going back and forth to his place often. As a regular user of the bridge he’d often talk about how bad the bridge had gotten in recent years thanks to all the motorized contraptions on it, and holy crap was he right. In fact, in recent years the Queensboro Bridge bike path had become notorious, and I’d say it always felt like an accident waiting to happen, but that’s not accurate, because the accidents weren’t waiting to happen at all–they were very much happening:
So I wasn’t surprised to learn about this most recent crash, though the fact that it left both people dead is of course shocking, as is the image of the mangled bike. I’m fairly certain the Queensboro is the steepest of the East River bridges, so no matter where you are on the span there’s always really fast head-on traffic in at least one direction. Before the proliferation of “micromobility” at least the uphill traffic would be moving slowly, but thanks to motors now the uphill and downhill traffic can easily be moving at 20- or 30-plus miles per hour. So welcome to a new era of multiple-fatality head-on bike path collisions, I guess.
The opening of the separate pedestrian path on the south side of the bridge was supposed to mitigate the clusterfuckery of the bike path–and maybe it did, though as someone who hasn’t ridden over the bridge in like a year I’m not qualified to say, and obviously it didn’t prevent this crash:
Plus, no matter where you ride in the city you’ll invariably encounter people on high-speed electric contraptions like the one involved in this collision–which are already illegal, though it certainly isn’t stopping anybody.
In the aftermath of this latest collision both the smuggies and the NIMBYs will tell us what the city need to do to solve the problem once and for all, and I suppose there was a time I’d have done the same thing. But now I just feel sad for a fellow cyclist who didn’t get to finish a ride. Also, the zany e-contraptions just keep getting faster, and I just keep getting older, and so I feel more determined than ever to ride away from the city instead of further into it. Why point my bike that way when I can point it this way instead?
Hey, I guess I can ignore it after all…