Dangers and Annoyances
Being doored (colliding with the door of a car unexpectedly opened) is a prominent hazard. Many painted bike lanes run in the door zone. While the law requires caution in opening car doors into traffic lanes, dooring remains common, and doored cyclists face injury and sometimes death. Cyclists must exercise caution, riding a door's length away from parked cars whenever practicable.
Approximately 20 cyclists are killed most years, usually by collision with a moving motor vehicle (including those who are knocked under wheels by a door). Some fatality locations are marked by white-painted ghost bikes. Traffic accidents kill approximately 160 pedestrians per year (about half as many as in the late 20th century) and a lesser number inside cars.
Read more about this topic: Cycling In New York City
Famous quotes containing the words dangers and/or annoyances:
“There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind.... Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.”
—Joseph Heller (b. 1923)
“It is a conquest when we can lift ourselves above the annoyances of circumstances over which we have no control; but it is a greater victory when we can make those circumstances our helpers,—when we can appreciate the good there is in them. It has often seemed to me as if Life stood beside me, looking me in the face, and saying, “Child, you must learn to like me in the form in which you see me, before I can offer myself to you in any other aspect.””
—Lucy Larcom (1824–1893)