In First Year, Not One Person Has Died on an NYC Bike-Share Bike
One year ago, New York City launched a bike-share program, and pundits predicted a safety nightmare.
“The most important danger in the city is not the yellow cabs, it is the bicyclists,” raved the Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz in a segment titled “Death by Bicycle.” The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart offered a similarly blunt assessment: “A lot of people are going to die.” The bike-share program did give him an idea for a business, though: “Jon Stewart’s Street Brain Material Removal Service.” A Rutgers professor got more specific. In a New York Post story headlined, “Citi Bike ‘Heading’ for a Fall,” he predicted that cyclist fatalities could triple in the program’s first year, from 20 to 60.
It has now been a full year since the first foolhardy tourists began menacing the city’s streets in those fat blue Citi Bike bikes. Riders have taken more than 8.75 million trips so far, Citi Bike reports, travelling some 14.7 million miles in all. Want to guess how many have died?
None.
“Out of 8.75 million trips, we’ve had about 100 crash reports, of which about 25 warranted a trip to the ER,” Citi Bike spokeswoman Dani Simon told me. “To my knowledge there have been zero fatalities to date. I am keeping up my daily prayers that this trend continues.”
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/30/nyc_citi_bike_zero_fatalities_in_new_york_city_bike_share_program_s_first.html