Riding the Bullet home from work one day, I felt something graze my right leg on a narrow city street. A nervous-aggressive driver passed me in the bicycle lane on a short block, 15 mph zone, breaking the mirror of another car while his own mirror touched my leg and almost wiped my handlebar.
This was one of maybe three or four times in my life that I've ever lost my composure.
I followed him turning right onto Bergen St and stopped at the next light between him and a scooter. He was doing something on his cell phone when I banged my fist twice down on his window and yelled "What the f--- was that?!?!?" He looked up at me startled and just drove through the red light and turned left into traffic. Wish I'd gotten his license plate number instead.
Then there was the time I was waiting at a light on the West Side Highway, right near the USS Intrepid, when my front wheel starts slowly but steadily climbing toward the sky. "What the F---?!?!?," I thought to myself. Why is my bike doing a stationary wheelie? Did my clutch cable snap?
The bike went down on the left peg (thankfully no further), while some guy came running to my side asking frantically if I was OK. "Yeah, whatever, I'm fine. But something's really wrong with my bike." Turns out the dude in the SUV behind me didn't realize he was inching forward (read: he was texting). His bumper hooked my tail light and turned my back wheel into a lever for lifting up the front.
He was kind enough to stop traffic, help me to the side, help inspect my bike, take pictures of the bike and the intersection signs and email them to me, and pay for the damages no questions asked. Long story short, the broken light shorted the ignition circuit ten minutes later and killed the bike completely just inside the Battery Park Underpass tunnel, where there's no shoulder and evening rush hour had just begun. Took me 45 minutes to duckwalk the bike back out of the tunnel, into furious bus drivers, and onto a crosswalk, and I had to lock it up and come back the next day for more electrical troubleshooting. Would have been a lot faster if my bike had come with up to date electrical diagrams showing the fuse box under the seat, which I didn't notice until several hours into the frigid Winter day. Even Chuck D worked with me for a couple of hours in that blustery alley.
After the accident I had decided not to call the cops for a report, and boy was I lucky to have tangled with an honest person (another rider, actually). I won't ever do that again, though.
Jeff