1.5M Packages a Day Bring Chaos to NYC Streets
A few thoughts as a bike commuter in Manhattan who sees this first hand every day:<p>The congestion tax can&#x27;t come soon enough (and it should have no carve-outs, certainly not for people who live here).<p>We need to get rid of lots of free on-street parking in the city and replace it with loading zones so that taxis&#x2F;Ubers and trucks have free spaces on every block to conduct their business without blocking travel lanes or bike lanes.<p>The constant blocking of bike lanes by trucks and cars is super dangerous, kills multiple people per year, and when the police do enforce these infractions at all, all they can do is write up some measly tickets that the truck drivers write off as the cost of doing business since they&#x27;ve already accumulated hundreds of them.  No joke: Here&#x27;s a truck I reported in the bike lane that&#x27;s closing in on a thousand tickets: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Reported_NYC&#x2F;status&#x2F;1187381912253411328" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;Reported_NYC&#x2F;status&#x2F;1187381912253411328</a><p>There are two solutions to this problem, both of which should be undertaken: Bike lanes should be actually physically protected, so that vehicles cannot enter the bike lane at all.  They did this on the Hudson River bikepath after a terrorist drove along it and killed six cyclists a few years ago, and they need to do it in the rest of the city too.  All it takes is some jersey barriers, bollards, and&#x2F;or new curbs put in.<p>And the second solution is make the penalties on trucks meaningful.  Have the fine amounts escalate with every violation within a certain period, with no cap (so that a ticket could eventually cost tens of thousands of dollars for a particular scofflaw truck, rather than the current ignorable amount of around a hundred).  And tow&#x2F;confiscate trucks that have enough tickets.<p>And one more thing: A lot of trucks are manifestly unsafe to be in such dense cities.  &gt;=53&#x27; semi-trailers, for example, are completely banned, yet you see them routinely in the city (and cops don&#x27;t ticket them).  They barely have enough space to turn through a typical intersection, and the they have very high beds and wide-open wheels that can easily pull in and crush to death a pedestrian or cyclist.  We should ban all unsafe trucks in the city and <i>enforce</i> it.  The only trucks allowed should be ones with sidewalls that go nearly to the ground, to prevent anyone from being run over.  These trucks already exist and are widely used in Europe where they are required; here&#x27;s an example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alamy.com&#x2F;stock-photo-coca-cola-delivery-truck-berlin-germany-30054924.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.alamy.com&#x2F;stock-photo-coca-cola-delivery-truck-b...</a><p>Note that, despite trucks being a minority of vehicles on the road, they account for way more than their fair share of pedestrian and cyclist deaths, because traffic speeds here are generally pretty slow and if you get hit by a car you&#x27;re likely to be thrown up and over and survive.  But you can be killed by one of these trucks going at just 1 mph simply by being crushed to death.  This is not theoretical; it happened earlier this year when a cyclist traveling in a bike lane was doored and was thrown underneath an adjacent truck stuck in traffic, which when it started moving crushed him to death.  The large open spaces between the ground and the truck deck allowing you to get run over by the wheels is highly dangerous.