Balanced on bikes

Two more New Yorkers died riding their bikes this week, both hit by trucks on city streets. That brings the number of cyclists killed this year to date to 17, already almost double the total for all of 2018. The horrifying surge in bloodshed demanded a strong mayoral response, which came too late Thursday in the form of a new action plan. Forgive Mayor de Blasio; he had South Carolinians to make promises to.

Almost 90% of the people killed on bikes over the last five years were riding on streets without bike lanes. Which is why the city is right to build more protected bike lanes, particularly in Brooklyn, where most deaths occurred this year. Make it a strategic, interconnected network, not a haphazard and redundant tangle.

Other new plans: slowing cars as they make turns at the city’s 50 most dangerous intersections, and a continued campaign to target both law-breaking cyclists and motorists parking in bike lanes.

The city also needs far better cyclist safety education for both bike riders and drivers. Too many are ignorant of the rules of the road.

Battles over precious street space in New York City are often reduced to clenched-fist culture war shouts that bikes should just go the hell away, or that cars and trucks should be barred from most streets. Neither’s going to happen. Nobody owns the roads, which means all have responsibilities to obey the laws.

That said, men and women pedaling around on two wheels are the most vulnerable. Protect them.