On his first day in office, Mayor Mamdani told New York City that his administration would “replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism” and promised that City Hall would “use its power to improve New Yorkers’ lives.”

More than seven months later, Mamdani announced that would he start wearing a bike helmet on his frequent rides across the city, apparently in response to the pleas of his constituents. “You’re right, I’ve gotta do better,” he said in a video published on Aug. 18. “Safety first, New York. See you out there.”

The announcement combined everything that Mamdani loves about the city with everything that the city loves about Mamdani: cycling, safety, vertical video and a sense of protectiveness around their globally famous mayor.

Yet the same announcement further entrenched a persistent narrative that assigns responsibility for road safety to individual cyclists while downplaying the government’s role in designing safer streets.
That narrative is completely false. The chief culprits of traffic violence are car drivers who terrorize the city’s streets, maim and kill its residents and evade any punishment for doing so.
This became painfully clear when three drivers — none of whom Mamdani’s NYPD has arrested or even identified — slaughtered three cyclists in three separate crashes in less than a week. At least two of those cyclists were wearing a helmet. But helmets are no match for three-ton motor vehicles.

Read more at the link below.

Copyright © 2024 OpenPlans/Streetsblog & Streetfilms. All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email as a friend of Streetsblog USA.