An attorney who specializes in bicycle crashes is bringing Citi Bike to court because he wants to prove the commuter bikes were wrongly designed.
IT worker Daniel Cole fractured both elbows on July 29 when he was thrown from his bike on the way to work in Manhattan — and his lawyer thinks the front fender might be to blame.
“Without warning the front tire suddenly locked up causing” the crash, the regular Citi Bike commuter says in his Manhattan Supreme Court claim.
Cole, 30, slammed against the pavement — and noticed that the front fender was dislodged and bent in half. His lawyer, Daniel Flanzig, wants a court order to inspect the damaged bike — #01563 — to see if the busted fender was poorly designed.
Flanzig explained that fixed fenders often cause cycling crashes when a stick or other object gets jammed between the flap and the wheel.
“A simple, safe and cheap alternative design should have been considered,” Flanzig said.
He noted that European safety standards require quick-release brackets that detach a fender to prevent a dangerous jam.
“What you can ride over in city streets is endless from a tool to garbage,” Flanzig noted.
The lawyer is also asking the court to remove the bike from the system so other riders are not injured.
Cole, a father of a 2-month-old, still can’t use his arms.
The Post reported last month that there is such a severe backlog of repairs that one-third of the fleet is in a warehouse waiting to be fixed.
A spokeswoman for NYC Bike Share, which runs the Citi Bike program, declined to comment.
But Eric Schofield, a manager at the repair shop Bicycle Habitat in Lower Manhattan, said breakaway fenders are not foolproof and less effective than fixed mud flaps.
The protection is important not only to keep riders clean from dirt that gets kicked up on the wheels, but also to reduce splashing in the rain.