I bike to and from work here in NYC, and regularly hit 30MPH in certain areas. According to Strava my max speed is near 50MPH. I'm not an athlete, but I am in decent shape. On most NYC avenues during a work day I can outpace motor traffic due to congestion. Bikes don't slow down cars. Cars slow down cars.

You know how I know you're not a cyclist? Because you say "bicyclist" instead of cyclist.

NYC cyclist here. The parking lane is still there. They just narrowed the motor lanes a few feet, swapped the bike lane to be on the sidewalk-side of the parking lane ("Parking protected"), and put a left turn pocket at left turn intersections (Every other intersection, since our streets are one-way). The turning pocket only takes up 3 to 4 car lengths, the rest of the parking is still there. There's also parking on the other side of the street.

Actually, it's astoundingly rare in the US for a motorist who strikes and kills a cyclist or pedestrian to be charged with anything related their death. If there was a DUI, hit-and-run, suspended license or bench warrant involved then law enforcement will diligently follow up on those offenses, but as a member of the NYPD once explained to me (I'm a cycling advocate in NYC so I get into these discussions), it's surprisingly hard to charge the driver with manslaughter in most cases, or anything related to the death. For one, the legal definition rules out any situation where an otherwise-lawful driver can say "Well gee I didn't see them!" and secondly, draconian US penalties for crimes like vehicular homicide tend to make prosecutors recoil at the thought of 'ruining the life' of an otherwise law-abiding citizen by sending them to prison for 15 years, a person who's shoes they can see themselves in. So it doesn't happen unless the perp already had it coming for other huge reasons. It's a legal problem where we lack appropriate sentencing, and a cultural problem where we identify with the criminal. As you can imagine, some cycle-savvy Scandinavian countries have already done a good job of tackling these issues via appropriate sentencing (License revoked or limited for a reasonable period of time, and transportation-related community service) and infrastructure improvements (No death on the road can be put to rest without a thorough analysis of the traffic conditions that caused it and steps taken to correct the problem, such as actual road changes - Something we in the US seem to require a quota of 3 or more deaths at a location before doing).

Here, this NYTimes article does a great job of expanding on the issue, despite it's clickbait headline.

Note that your odds of being the worst person increase the same way.

I wholeheartedly agree. Before I grew out of them, me and a friend managed to build an Empire State Building-style skyscraper out of them that was as tall as my house. It took us three days and we had to raise it in sections.

As far as I know, they've moved from large, free-build sets and over to smaller, less creativity-encouraging themed packs in recent years, the same way that Lego has. But the height of their popularity in the mid-90s was fantastic.