Last fall, this woman with her dog shouted obscenities at me, including that I had almost killed her family. I don´t know anything about her and never met her before, but I was actually just courteous. I quietly stopped for her at a crosswalk as she was waiting to cross the bicycle path. This is the moment where she used the opportunity to vent at me, even though her "entire family had almost been killed" by some completely different cyclist. As I sped off from her verbal hysterics, I said, all-righty then, well, I hope you have a great day!
And you know, I also have "almost been killed" by e-bikers. But there is a lot of misconception to the extent of injuries caused by bicyclists. Here are two data maps I extracted on crashmapper, a public NYC information site.
Both of these show the same twelve year period, from 2011 to (6) 2023. A yellow dot is an incident reported, an orange dot is a pedestrian injury, a red dot is a pedestrian who died.
The first accumulation map (A)
shows cyclists and e-bikes, killing or injuring pedestrians.
The second accumulation map (B)
shows the same, but caused by drivers.
So yes, people shouting obscenities at you for just bicycling is a big thing, for me it is particularly noticeable on the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side. Anyone bicycling seems to be a fair target on which to vent frustrations -most likely caused by laundry-room and elevator conversations with neighbors. It could also be a sign of some collective psychiatric disorder or disconnected wiring in the brain from looking at the wrong media.
ÓÞ NYC
