New York Times, November 21, 1997
By KIT R. ROANE
NEW YORK -- Earl Morton, a nine-year veteran of the bicycle messenger wars, sat on his bike in midtown Manhattan Thursday and watched as a team of six police officers swooped down on a bewildered restaurant deliveryman who had coasted through a red light.
In a matter of minutes, the officers had issued the deliveryman four summonses -- from not having a bell on his bicycle to not heeding pedestrian traffic -- totaling nearly $200 in fines.
The police department has intensified its efforts to catch bicycle messengers and deliverymen who break traffic laws since a 68-year-old businessman leaving an Upper West Side restaurant in Manhattan on Tuesday night died after being struck by a deliveryman illegally riding on the sidewalk.
"There are a million cops out there and it's just going to get worse now that a pedestrian got killed," Morton said. "They're really cracking down."
Officers at precincts throughout the city were told at roll call Thursday to keep an eye out for bicyclists breaking the law. And the department has added officers to bicycle enforcement patrols like the one Morton watched at the Avenue of the Americas and 50th Street, which have been operating for three years to catch scofflaws in action.
Sgt. Joe Grogan, who was leading that six-officer team, said he had given out more than 100 summonses by Thursday afternoon. "I'm about done," he said, rounding up the officers for another detail. "My hand hurts."
Noting that precincts in midtown and upper Manhattan last month had been alerted to the problems caused by cyclists, Leonardo Alcivar, a police department spokesman, said that the death of the businessman, Arthur Kaye, had "caused the department to reinforce the importance of bicycling laws."
On the Upper East Side on Wednesday, a previously scheduled police operation resulted in 162 summonses being issued, including some to owners of restaurants who failed to provide deliverymen with uniforms and identification cards or to keep logs of where their deliverymen were sent. Five bicycles were also confiscated from people who rode them on the sidewalk, the police said.
The raid followed a declaration by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani on Wednesday that bicycle scofflaws were among the biggest quality-of-life issues now facing the city.
Kaye was the second pedestrian this year to die after being hit by a bicycle and the third such incident since the beginning of 1996.
While the number of deaths is small, many pedestrians said Thursday that the statistics did not take into account the daily close calls they had encountered on the city's crowded streets.
Mohamed Elsayed, 34, said that he had been hit numerous times by cyclists maneuvering between his hot dog stand and a street near Rockefeller Center.
"The police shouldn't have waited until somebody got killed to enforce the law," he said. "The sidewalk over here is almost too dangerous to walk on."
William Griffin, a 45-year-old security guard at Rockefeller Center added that he often tells cyclists to slow down only to be ignored.
"These guys ride like maniacs," he said. "They ride against traffic, run red lights, hop on the sidewalk and, well, kill people. They're riding a weapon really, and it should be treated like one."
But for the people who rely on bicycles to earn a living, the city's crackdown was just one more hazard that they must contend with.
Jose Giobano, who was riding against the flow of traffic on Columbus Avenue Thursday night delivering food from the Museum Cafe, said that he often worries about being struck by cars. "I think we sometimes ride on the sidewalk to be safe from cars," he said. "We must work fast because we have to do our job."
Cyclists stopped by the police Thursday said that the officers appeared more willing to give out tickets for all possible offenses, including relatively small infractions like not having a bell on the handlebars.
John Kaehny, the executive director of Transportation Alternatives, a bicyclist advocacy group, said that the police crackdown was misguided, and he suggested that the police seemed to be giving summonses to messengers as a way to fill quotas.
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