We need to fight back again oppression of bike riders. Electric bikes are genuine revolution in transportation, more so than electric cars even.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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Imagine if people started using ebikes to get around their town/hood...
All the lostr profits for the car and oil industry 🤡
And the Gym industry, and the Healthcare industry, and the Tow Truck industry....
So many losses.
This is exactly what's happening in Western Europe, from Sweden to small islands in Italy, from Paris to the country side in Brittany, habits are changing. It's slower than I'd hope for but bike lanes are being setup, electric batteries are charged from solar panels on roofs, elderly get autonomy again. There is no need to imagine, we're doing it! :D
Unpopular opinion, both sides should stop running fucking red lights.
Cars running red lights = driver slamming on the gas trying to beat the yellow. 3000kg of steel and glass travelling at 60+km/hr in a crowded city
Bikes "running" red lights = riders looking both ways and coasting through when it's clear... 100kg of flesh and aluminium going 10km/hr
These are not even remotely close to the same levels of danger...
So while everyone should follow the rules, enforcement should focus on those with the potential to do the most damage
Bikes “running” red lights = riders looking both ways and coasting through when it’s clear
FWIW this is not how it works in Philadelphia. Here, a lot of cyclists just sail through red lights and stop intersections without stopping first and without even looking to see if there's any cross-traffic first. As an avid cyclist myself, it absolutely blows my mind how often they do this and somehow avoid dying. There are a lot of bike fatalities here, but it's almost always the result of large trucks turning right across bike lanes and flattening somebody they never saw.
Sure, there are those crazy bike messenger types blowing through red lights at full speed
But thats not the majority of offenders. And still nowhere NEAR the danger of cars doing the same thing, even at lower speeds.
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These are E-bikes we're talking about. They can be quite fast. Some can do 50-60 even. Killing people is certainly possible. Requiring both to obey traffic signals, isn't unreasonable.
Pretty sure in the EU they are supposed to be limited to 25kmh, which is the upper speed limit for bike lanes too
Speed-pedelecs are allowed to go 45kmh and are allowed both on bike lanes and car lanes in the Netherlands. They have a license plate as well, looks like a regular ebike.
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Then lights should turn green for my bike, instead of me having to wait for a car to active the sensor on order to cross.
Some sensors in my city detect my bike, some only detect it if I tilt it almost right against the ground, and some don't detect it at all.
You bet I'll gladly run a red light if it won't ever turn green for me.
In my city, I can trigger a traffic signal on my bike by going on the coil that senses the car. This is probably intentional given that the city also puts markings to show that bikes can trigger the sensor, though it does not appear to be any sort of special sensor. No idea if it's natural that the coil can detect my bike or whether my city specifically tubed the system to detect bikes.
It used to be that those coils had trouble detecting motorbikes
I was gonna say I had to park my motorcycle at intersections and hit the crosswalk button before.
Both lights at the end of my residential street cannot detect my motorbike. If I'm heading out from home and there's no cars around I'm essentially trapped (legally) since they've also banned right on red turns in my city.
I've had those work in other cities, but not this one. I'm also not going to dismount to push a button with a toddler on the back.
So brave.
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Commenters here are missing the reason police are issuing court summons:
Some advocates for delivery workers say that the increased scrutiny of cyclists weighs especially heavily on an already vulnerable group. Many people who ride electric bikes in New York are undocumented migrants working for restaurants and food delivery apps, said Ligia Guallpa, the executive director of Los Deliveristas Unidos, which represents delivery workers. The crackdown on electric bikes and scooters comes in the midst of the Trump administration’s aggressive enforcement of immigration law.
Sal Cohen is among the immigrants who received a pink court summons connected to the increased enforcement effort. Originally from Turkey, and in the United States on a conditional green card, Mr. Cohen had not heard about the push when he rolled through a red light at the intersection of Grand Street and Union Avenue in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood on his way home from the gym this month.
A squad car pulled up alongside him and he was issued a summons.
A week and a half later, Mr. Cohen, 28, stood in line outside Courtroom No. 3, on the 16th floor of the municipal building, worried that ICE agents might appear.
“I’m here legally, but you never know,” he said. “I’m nervous.”
So, new edition of the "war on drugs" I see.
Everyone should read the words of one of Nixon's top aides regarding why they started the war on drugs:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,” former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
And yet the wikipedia entry for the war on drugs starts like this:
The war on drugs is a global anti-narcotics campaign led by the United States federal government, including drug prohibition, foreign assistance, military intervention, and counterterrorism, with the aim of reducing the illegal drug trade in the US.
Emphasis added. I would say that is flat out false. It may be the openly stated aim, but it is not the true aim, and they've admitted it. Just another reminder that these fascists know exactly what the fuck they're doing and that wikipedia is subject to propaganda influences.
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Running them, or using the Idaho Stop? Huge difference.
But even still, if the consequences for cyclists are greater than those for drivers, then something is seriously messed up.
Right-turn on red is enough to get a ticket, even if both streets have bike lanes. Don't ask me how I know....
This is car culture logic. Here in the UK cyclists are regarded with the same vengeful attitude by drivers. Red lights are primarily a traffic control feature and it's dangerous to drive through them as a car driver. This isn't the case with a bicycle, due to the visibility a cyclist has and its light weight. It's also a non issue to ride one way streets because a bike is much smaller and more manoeuvreable. Cyclists should be celebrated for reducing traffic, emissions, particulate and noise pollution but the opposite is true, everywhere people speak English because this is a mental disease afflicting anglophones. They are addicted to cars.
There should be a process where the rider can accept blame and pay a fine without spending a day in court. That also sounds like a waste of court resources, to be honest.
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