Bicycling

Eyes On The Street: Cyclists Ticketing Cyclists

Via Bowery Boogie, two photos of bike-riding NYPD officers writing up two other cyclists for running red lights at the corner of Bowery and Delancey.

By Noah Kazis

4:09 PM EST on February 23, 2012

Via Bowery Boogie, two photos of bike-riding NYPD officers writing up two other cyclists for running red lights at the corner of Bowery and Delancey.

The Good: NYPD officers on bikes are not a sight you see every day. Bicycles can help police get around better in heavily congested areas and break down officers’ windshield perspective.

The Bad: The NYPD continues to target cyclists in its traffic enforcement efforts while ignoring more dangerous threats. In 2011, the police handed out almost 50,000 tickets to New York’s cyclists, but just over 25,000 to truck drivers.

The Ugly: Bowery and Delancey, where the cops are handing out these tickets, is one of the area’s most dangerous intersections. Over five years, 82 people were injured in traffic crashes at the intersection, and one year ago last week, a tractor-trailer driver killed a pedestrian at the corner. Here, even more than usual, the police need to be focused on improving safety, not hitting quotas or making a statement.

Noah Kazis

Noah joined Streetsblog as a New York City reporter at the start of 2010. When he was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox. Before coming to Streetsblog, he blogged at TheCityFix DC and worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Toledo, Ohio. Noah graduated from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the class politics of transportation reform in New York City. He lives in Morningside Heights.

Bicycling | Eyes on the Street | Lower East Side | NYPD | Traffic Enforcement

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