E-Scooter Driver Clips De Blasio While Walking In Lower Manhattan

Mayor Invoice de Blasio was grazed by an e-scooter driver on Monday morning in Decrease Manhattan. In accordance to the NY Post, the mayor was strolling at Pearl and Water Streets at round 10:15 a.m. in the midst of visiting a faculty, when a person and his 7-year-old daughter on an electrical scooter “bumped into his arm.”

The mayor was unhurt, however the rider and his daughter fell from the scooter and suffered minor scrapes; de Blasio reportedly “rushed to ensure the person and his daughter had been OK and gave them a Kleenex,” the Submit reported.

De Blasio press secretary Invoice Neidhardt instructed Gothamist, “The Mayor had a stroll signal.”

Neidhardt added, “Metropolis Corridor encourages everybody to obey visitors alerts and put on a helmet.”

Uptown, close to Columbus Circle, an 82-year-old girl was reportedly hit by a Revel scooter driver on Tuesday morning as she was crossing the road.

In 2019 there have been 165,707 crashes that did not cause injuries in New York Metropolis—roughly 450 each single day. There have been 45,330 crashes on metropolis streets in 2019 that resulted in damage or dying.

No less than 170 folks have been killed in visitors violence in New York Metropolis this yr up to now, together with 9 youngsters; 220 were killed in 2019.

New York Metropolis’s coverage on e-bikes and e-scooters has lengthy been suffering from inconsistency and confusion. In the meantime, motorized vehicle visitors continues to clog city streets as New Yorkers keep away from public transit throughout the pandemic, and eating places are forced to serve patrons in the street to stay afloat. Bicycle visitors measured over the bridges into Manhattan has soared.

For years, Mayor de Blasio directed the NYPD to grab the form of throttle-based e-bikes popularized by immigrant delivery workers, regardless of no proof to show they had been extra harmful than common bikes, and as firms like Amazon, UPS, and Citi Bike employed essentially the same technology without incident.

Final yr, New York State finally legalized e-bikes and e-scooters, with a selected prohibition on e-scooter pilots in Manhattan. (Revel will get round this by theoretically permitting their autos into simply Decrease Manhattan. After a sequence of rider deaths, Revel instituted a handful of new safety policies.) E-bikes are additionally technically unlawful on the Hudson River Greenway, one other carve-out .

The Metropolis Council passed laws legalizing electric bikes and scooters them this summer, and opened the door for a scooter pilot in March of 2021.