Statisticians Confirm Event Is Historically Anomalous, Rider Describes It as ‘Actually Fine, Mostly’
The Perfect Ride: A Statistical Impossibility Achieved on a Thursday Afternoon
A Citi Bike rider completed an eleven-mile journey from the Upper West Side to the Brooklyn Bridge and back on Thursday afternoon in what cycling advocates are calling ‘an extremely unusual outcome’ and the rider himself is calling ‘pretty standard, I don’t know why everyone’s asking me about it.’ The journey, which traversed Riverside Drive, the Hudson River Greenway, Chambers Street, the Brooklyn Bridge Bike Path, and the return route up the East Side, produced the following incident totals: eight honks from vehicles whose operators felt the bike lane was encroaching on their operational space; three near-doorings from parked vehicles whose occupants opened doors at speeds that suggested unfamiliarity with the term ‘door zone’; one pedestrian who walked into the bike lane while looking at a phone and expressed surprise at the presence of a bicycle; and zero actual physical contacts with any vehicle, door, or pedestrian.
‘It was fine,’ said the rider, software engineer Marcus Webb, twenty-eight. ‘I mean, the guy in the FedEx truck on Canal Street was not great. But I went around him. I’ve had worse.’
Infrastructure Context
New York City has installed over fifteen hundred miles of bike lanes since 2007, a number that advocates describe as significant progress and the city’s cycling safety data complicates with figures showing that cyclist injuries have declined in protected-lane corridors and increased in corridors where bike lanes are painted on the road without physical protection and are therefore treated by delivery vehicles as narrow parking options that happen to be painted green.
‘The protected lanes work,’ said Transportation Alternatives director Danny Harris. ‘The paint lanes are aspirational. The aspiration is good. The paint is not structural. We are making progress and people are still getting hurt and both of those things are true simultaneously which is the uncomfortable condition of building a cycling city while the city is still primarily organized around cars.’
NYC bike infrastructure info at NYC DOT. Comedy: The Onion.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK