The debate about legalizing assisted suicide is raging nationwide, and now New York state has joined the fray.

By law, New York prohibits assisted suicide. Nonetheless, it’s promoted in My Home Town.

Don’t believe me?

Just start riding your bike around town some afternoon.

Given the abysmal conditions for bike riding here, merely staying alive is a Herculean chore.

The problem as I see it (and being an avid bicyclist, I’ve seen it first-hand for decades) is caused by three things.

First is the public’s almost universal ignorance of traffic law.

The most important point in the traffic code that concerns bikers is this: Bicycles are defined as vehicles, every bit as much as cars, trucks and motorcycles. Therefore (at least on paper), bikes have as much right on the roads as those other vehicles.

There are some conditions attached to that right. One is bikers have to obey all traffic laws. They have to stop at red lights; signal before they turn; stay off sidewalks; drive with the traffic flow, not against it, and on and on.

Bikes also have to stay in bike lanes, but there’s an interesting twist to this that almost no one knows – including lots of cops. It’s this: If the bike lane is obstructed or unfit for riding, bikers have the right to ride on the road itself.

Yep, you read it right – if they can’t ride on the shoulder, than can ride, legally, on the road itself.

Unfortunately, the right to ride on the road is also the option to get flattened by every jamoke whizzing up behind you. And this leads to another issue – drivers’ awareness — or more exactly, drivers’ lack of awareness.

“Lack of awareness of what?” you ask.

Of all sorts of things, that’s what.

To start, most people (including too many bikers) know as much about traffic law as they do about the reign of Ramses II. So with almost everyone riding on the roads, engine- or foot-powered, chaos rules. Cars park in bike lanes. Drivers pull out of parking places without checking if a biker’s approaching. Bikers run stop signs or turn right on red when it’s prohibited. Drivers turn right at lights … right into bikers trying to go straight (and having the right of way). Bikers — specially the Tour de France wannabes — ride on main roads when the shoulders are perfectly navigable, sometimes four abreast. Drivers blow horns at poor slob bikers in the bike lanes. The list is endless, but I’ll spare you.

The whole point is because so many drivers and riders pay no attention to either the law or the environment, bikers — even the most law-abiding and vigilant — are flirting with disaster every time they ride.

Town without pity

The second reason biking is such a mess here is the town streets themselves, which are horror-shows-watiing-to-happen.

For example, if I ride into town on Route 3 from Crescent Bay, life is but a dream. The shoulder is wide and in fine repair. But once I get to town, the dream tips toward the nightmarish side.

Say I want to keep going straight, to Aldi. At first, right after the light, there’s a good bike lane. At least it’s good if no one’s parking on it, which is not the case during Farmers Market, when it’s parked up for a good 50 yards at least. So then, I have only one option – riding on the road itself — much to my consternation and too many drivers’ ire.

But once the lane’s free of parked cars, I’m fine, right? Wrong. Because at the curve by Madden’s, the bike lane simply vanishes. So now I can either pull into traffic again or ride on the sidewalk, which, while safer for me, puts pedestrians at risk, and is illegal besides. I know the bike lane ceases to exist at that curve, but think about some poor zhlub from out of town who doesn’t and suddenly finds himself fighting for road space with cars. On second thought, don’t think about it.

After that curve, when the bike lane returns, so do the parked cars, at Mountain Mist and later on, at the tennis courts.

All right, that’s the scenario if I went straight at the light. Howz about if I turned left and went through town?

The good news is there’s none of that appearing-then-disappearing bike lane trauma. The bad news is there’s no real bike lane at all.

Oh, there are bike symbols painted on the street. But for all the good they do, they might as well be skulls and crossbones, or peace signs, or no symbol at all.

The fact is, riding to the right of traffic in town puts you in a perfect position to get nailed. Parked cars might suddenly pull out, or drivers might open doors – both without first looking. Cars driving on the street often don’t notice how close they are to bikes — if they notice them at all. This hassle continues all the way up Broadway to Aubuchon’s.

And don’t think Main Street and Broadway are in a class by themselves — the other streets in town are no better. One of my rave fave death traps is Church Street Extension, heading toward River Street from the stop sign at St. Bernard’s street. There’s a bike lane there, but it looks like it was put there by Monty Python. At its widest it’s maybe two feet; then it narrows to a foot or so. I kid you not.

Head ’em up, ride ’em out

The typical solution to solving this mess is to call for more laws, but that’s exactly what we don’t need. The laws are already there. They only need to be enforced.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the town’s atrocious situation with pedestrians and crosswalks. And that’s being generous, since there are almost no actual crosswalks, their paint having worn away long ago. My suggestion to remedy that was to have our cops patrol the streets on police bikes (of which, years ago, we bought a couple but they’ve since vanished like the crosswalks). It’s done all over the States, and successfully at that. So why not here?

As a matter of fact, I saw on the internet that the Potsdam P.D. holds workshops about those bikes for other police departments. So for any subtleties involved in using police bikes, SL’s Finest could find out at the end of a simple 60-mile drive.

When ignorance will be anything but bliss

I believe we have this unhealthy biking situation here because we have it all over the U.S. The sad fact is Americans are in love with their cars, and thus bikes are children’s toys. So any adult who rides a bike, either for exercise or for transportation, is a kid trapped in an adult’s body. And since he or she’s a kid, he or she is not taken seriously — either in writing or on the roads.

And so it follows, this column won’t be taken seriously either.

Does that bother me? Not really. I expect to be ignored.

But what does bother me is if the powers that be keep ignoring the issue itself … until they’re suddenly faced with a downtown disaster that can’t be ignored.