Yikes: The NY Post reports that a bike messenger was "squished between a truck and a city bus" - an eight inch space, in fact. Doucoure Adama had been riding up Madison Avenue when a truck suddenly stopped at 40th Street.
Pinned between the two vehicles, Adama screamed in agony. The bus driver tried to back away, but it only seemed to make matters worse and he screamed even louder, said witness Sidney Morris. Emergency personnel freed Adama after about 20 minutes by deflating the tires of the bus and truck and using inflatable expanders to push the vehicles away from each other.
The bike, a black Raleigh, was pretty much destroyed and Adama was taken to a hospital, where he's in stable condition. And no broken bones! To be stuck on a bike in an eight inch space is insane - that piece of paper is 8.5" wide! One messenger blamed the incident on Madison Avenue, saying, "It's the street. It's really narrow for an avenue, and then you've got to dodge all these potholes and all these big trucks and buses, too. It's crazy."
In other transportation accident news, two teens were injured after riding their motorized scooters into a police car. The police filed juvenile reports for the kids because the scooters are illegal in New York. It's unclear who is at fault - the police, whom the teens' parents say ran a red light, or the teens who were driving the illegal scooters the wrong way around midnight.
