Originally Posted by
livedarklions
I don't live in the area, so I'd totally defer to your sense of what's going on
As somewhat hinted in Steve's post, there are a lot of different areas of the city, from areas with extreme density of intersections, to areas more desolate than suburbia, to expressways. Most of the enforcement (of everything) is going to happen in the dense areas where the people are.
Those are also the areas where fully complying with the law while cycling is the most frustrating. They're also the areas where the
opportunity to commit a moving violation with a motor vehicle is reduced - you can't really speed or go through a red light if there's another vehicle in front of you.
my understanding is that truck drivers regularly break laws concerning parking their vehicles in lanes
That's indeed a very serious and officially neglected safety issue overdue to be taken seriously (the cops habitually do it themselves), but parking violations are not moving violations. Regardless who is writing the ticket, it's going to go under a different total. Fun fact: the city actually has a deal with fleet companies where in return for not contesting parking tickets, they only have to pay a fraction of them.
driving on restricted streets
People tend to forget that truck routes are
through truck routes. Except where there are clearance or load issues, trucks can legally use other streets to get to their local destination. That doesn't mean things aren't done illegally, but it does mean that to enforce an off-route truck you have to recognize a pattern or be investigating subsequent to something else which exposes the actual purposes of the trip.
What is widely neglected and easy to spot are full length 18-wheelers, which are illegal in the city. But most of the carnage seems to be box trucks and especially private garbage trucks.
The garbage trucks are really the only motor vehicles you'll regularly see committing violations of the traffic laws
as they are written in dense parts of the city at the same habitual rate as cyclists - and probably for similar reasons of trying to do something that doesn't really fit the usual traffic flow.
taking the blush at intersections.
Not sure exactly what you mean, but again you generally have to be first in line to commit a violation with a motor vechicle, since shoaling doesn't really work with large boxes. The reality is that motor vehicles honor red lights the
overwhelming majority of the time, while daily observation would suggest that cyclists violate them a
simple majority of the time. And as much as motor vehicles like deeply orange "yellows", there will often be a bike coming through still later.
Also, if NYC is like any other city in the US, I'm sure there are roads where you could take a radar gun and find that there are almost no drivers obeying the speed limits. If NYPD chose to speed trap those places, that would be a fish in a barrel situation as well. Speed traps are, however, harder than stepping in front of a bicycle--hence the "low hanging fruit" analogy.
Only in specific times and places is there the physical opportunity to speed. Since trucks aren't allowed on most of the parkways, those would generally be the main stretches through more auto-centric or still industrial parts of the city. And indeed some of those are problematic. Progress is being made in school zones with camera enforcement, but those tickets fall in a different statistical (and legal) category than manually written ones.