Muscle car drivers displaying Trump flags marauded through the city and its environs in a show of intimidation on Sunday that apparently had police backing — one day after a person driving an SUV assault car drove into a crowd of peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters on Fifth Avenue, injuring several people.
The weekend of terror began on Saturday night, when a driver targeted peaceful cyclists towards the end of a StreetridersNYC event in Manhattan. Video shows the SUV plunged into the crowd of bikers (warning: graphic content):
Holy cow. My friend encountered them on the street and noticed that most of them had blacked out their license plates with tape. She filmed them rolling through a red light and when she asked one how many people he was going to kill today he said 7!
— Shops by Bike (@belleoflonglake) October 4, 2020
Streetsblog reached out to the Nassau County Police Department — whose rank and file cops have also endorsed Trump’s re-election — to see if the allegation is under investigation. We did not get an answer.
City Hall also did not offer an immediate comment. City Hall also did not comment about the killing of hero nurse, Clara Kang, who was fatally struck by a motorcyclist on deadly Third Avenue as she bicycled away from her night shift at NYU Langone–Brooklyn on Saturday morning.
Transportation Alternatives Executive Director Danny Harris slammed the city for not doing enough to keep all New Yorkers, let alone heroic frontline workers, safe during the coronavirus pandemic — when city officials urged people to ride bikes:
Our city continues to fail New Yorkers who travel by bicycle, and the mayor does not seem to understand his role in this failure. Earlier this year, he slashed funding for the life-saving Vision Zero program, canceled the Green Wave plan which he released after a spate of cyclist deaths in the summer of 2019, and delayed the implementation of a law which would impound the vehicles of the city’s most reckless drivers. Moreover, he has all but ignored the recommendations of his own Surface Transportation Recovery Panel.
Our city was shut down for two months, but with nearly three months left in the year, we have already reached the average annual total of cyclist deaths during Mayor de Blasio’s administration. Just as each of these deaths is a tragedy, each is a policy failure. Every one of them could have been prevented.
