Stay in bed, New Yorkers. It’s not safe out there.
The bike psychos currently running City Hall tried to bury this.
But a damning new survey that hit the pavement with a thud this week, like an old lady run down by a speeding two-wheeler, reveals a fact everyone who’s had a close encounter with a kamikaze bicyclist (which is everyone) has long suspected:
Three people — every day — are clipped or mutilated somewhere in New York state by entitled bicyclists. More than half the maimings take place in the city.
This means that one to two folks in the five boroughs, each day, is reduced to human carnage in the unholy bike wars.
Well, the reaction was even more depressing than the bloody deed.
“We do not know how any of these [accidents] occurred — who was at fault,’’ the Gothamist.com Web site actually said, implying that some of the injured walkers asked for it!
Transportation Alternatives, the bike-advocacy group that exerts outsize influence on the city, said 1,000 injured limbs and cracked skulls a year isn’t so bad — more pedestrians get struck by cars. (The group gives an uncontested annual estimate of 70,000.)
Well, people, it’s time to rise up, lean against your canes and walkers — and fight! These victims are real.
A lady named Wai King Kwok, 67, was crossing Delancey Street one day two years ago when the Chinese immigrant was struck by a bicycle. Mercifully, she lapsed into a coma.
“She spent 10 days in ICU, another 11 days in [St. Vincent’s] hospital,’’ said her husband, Man Kwok. “She had a fractured head.”
The bright side? “Fortunately, it did not puncture into the brain, or she’d be a vegetable.’’ The long-range effects? “She has posttraumatic stress. She gets tired. Now she doesn’t smell anything.’’
Mr. Kwok plunked down 10 bucks to retrieve a police report. He was floored. It contained little information — not even the name of the crazed rider who cracked his wife’s skull. “Even a dog, they have a record,’’ he said.
Jack Brown was the owner of the Hi-Ho Cyclery bike shop before turning in to an anti-rogue-riding activist. Five years ago, he was hit, hard, by a bicyclist going against traffic in the East Village.
“I had a deep bruise on my right hip, the size of a revolver holster,’’ said Brown, 65. “For at least six weeks, I walked with a limp.’’ But Brown never went to the hospital. How many more victims go uncounted?
A year ago, I asked a city Transportation spokesman how many pedestrians were hit by bikes in the past year. I was told 49.
Oops!
Ten days later, the spokesmouth sheepishly told me, “We don’t keep those numbers. The number could go higher.’’ With no help from the city locating reality, it has.
A first-of-its-kind study by two Hunter College professors reveals that approximately 1,000 people a year in this state were hospitalized after being hit by bicycles between 2007 and 2010. Even that number may not give the entire picture, because some victims don’t go to the hospital.
The results don’t surprise Nancy Gruskin. The study was done on behalf of the Stuart C. Gruskin Foundation, founded on behalf of her husband, a Jersey resident who was mowed down and killed in 2009 by a deliveryman bicycling the wrong way on a one-way street in Midtown. Stuart left behind Nancy and twin 12-year-old daughters.
Now, Mayor Bloomberg and his trusty sidekick, rabid bike lady and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, plan to unleash 10,000 new bikes on the city next summer in a sharing program that should make all New Yorkers shudder in fear.
“I’m all for cycling,’’ said Nancy. Really?
“But how can you put 10,000 more bikes on the street if we’re not having the conversation about safety?’’
A thousand broken bones, busted heads and bloodied lips? Expect 10,000 if we don’t stop denying the bike menace.
That’s one lousy note you hit there, Tony
Legendary crooner Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but he lost his head in Crazytown.
He told Howard Stern this week that the United States is to blame for the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Worse, he exhibited the kind of moral relativism now on display by America-haters infesting the United Nations.
“But who are the terrorists? Are we the terrorists or are they the terrorists? Two wrongs don’t make a right,” Bennett spewed while discussing his service as an infantryman in World War II.
Doing a fair imitation of Sean Penn crossed with Michael Moore, Bennett’s insane rant continued. “They flew the plane in, but we caused it because we were bombing them and they told us to stop.”
Yesterday, he said apologetically on Facebook, “There is simply no excuse for terrorism and the murder of the nearly 3,000 innocent victims of the 9/11 attacks on our country.” But he didn’t take his words back.
Bennett has a right to his opinion. You have the right to avoid his concerts and to refrain from buying his records.
Ashton’s a hottie and a half
Now we know Ashton Kutcher is kind of hunky. Can he be funny?
The guy best known as Demi Moore’s boy toy replaced fired Charlie Sheen on “Two and a Half Men’’ Monday, a premiere watched by 28 million people, and me. He plays a shaggy Internet billionaire who picks up multiple chicks as he whines and attempts suicide over a broken heart. He also likes to take off his clothes, which is fine by me.
Sheen stole the show, even though he was dead. At his funeral, assorted women cursed Charlie to hell for leaving them STDs. His mother used the event to sell his beach house. And his fiancée, Rose, forgave Charlie for taking a shower with another woman — then revealed that she pushed him to his death in front of a Paris subway train. “His body just exploded like a balloon full of meat.”
That’s a tough act to follow, Ashton, especially fully dressed.
Blue-pill sales must be great
Alec Baldwin, 53, can play tonsil hockey with his 26-years-younger yoga teacher, Hilaria Thomas. But he can’t compete with the tackiest romance to hit the D-list — between Michaele Salahi, the White House “party crasher’’ and erstwhile (and future?) reality star, 45, and Journey guitarist Neal Schon, long eligible for his AARP card at 57.
Schon’s wife of two months, former Playboy pinup Ava Fabian, is 49. Michaele’s dumped hubby, Tareq, is 43. The Viagra market thrives.
Creaky casanova DSK should keep it in his France
Freaky froggy Dominique Strauss-Kahn has a strange way of defending himself. The former International Monetary Fund pooh-bah who was accused by a Manhattan hotel maid of attempted rape — the charges were dropped and he fled back to France — told French TV that he’s an insatiable horndog and cheat. But not a sex attacker.
“I think it was a moral failing,’’ he said. Duh.
Stauss-Kahn, 62, also denied sexually attacking a French journalist in 2003 — but admitted to cops last week that he tried to kiss the lady. I have four words for the most miserable excuse for a husband ever to walk our city streets: Not our problem anymore.