Bicyclist Ticket Blitz Sees Hundreds Fined In February

In yet another installment of the never-ending saga of Brooklyn’s bike lanes and the bicyclists who love them, cyclists all over the borough are gnashing their handlebars over an explosion in the amount of traffic tickets they’ve been slapped with this year versus the same time last year.

As reported by the bicycle enthusiasts over at the Brooklyn Paper, nearly 700 summonses were issued to “rogue bikers” in February 2011 as compared to 375 in February of the previous year, and that has cyclists crying foul against the NYPD’s claim of “pedestrian safety” as the motivation behind the costly surge.

The law for cyclists is the same for motorists, who do not always take kindly to their two-wheeled counterparts in Southern Brooklyn, and since the city’s crackdown was announced in January, riders in the more bike lane-friendly Northern Brooklyn claim they were nevertheless caught off guard by the onslaught of costly summonses, for everything from running red lights and riding against traffic to riding on the sidewalk and — in the case of the thrice-ticketed 26-year-old Tejas Singh — for unleashing a barrage of language so salty on the unsuspecting ticketing officer that it would have made South Park’s Eric Cartman blush.

So cyclists, try to keep it inside the lines, er, lanes, and for Pete’s sake — no riding on the sidewalk. You are not 6 years old trying to graduate from training wheels.