As long as you stay off the highway, you’re more likely to get a ticket for riding your bike on the sidewalk in New York than you are for speeding in a car. That’s despite the fact that speeding is the most common cause of traffic-related deaths in NYC, with 81 fatal crashes in 2012, and the last cyclist-caused fatality happened in 2009, as Streetsblog points out.
The NYPD issued roughly 25,000 summonses for sidewalk riding last year, which, you might guess, must be lower than the number of speeding tickets. And you’d be right–71,305 drivers got written up for speeding in 2012, but 52,186 of those incidents happened on the highway. Stay on local streets and that number plummets to 19,119.
Going by 2012’s numbers, cops will write about 70 sidewalk-riding tickets today. In unrelated news, the cop who hit and killed 61-year-old pedestrian Felix Cross while allegedly talking on a cell phone last week probably won’t be punished.
(Photo: Alexander Baxevanis/Flickr)
