A Slow-Speed Pursuit

A chase for justice across two boroughs

An electric Citi Bike can’t exceed 18 mph – even when you’re chasing someone across the Queensboro Bridge. 

As the head of a transportation advocacy organization, I tried to be one of the few cyclists who modeled good behavior and followed traffic rules. Or, better said, I attempted to do so while wearing clothing that visibly identified me as an employee of the all powerful bike lobby. When I was just another black-clad New Yorker, the traffic signals were mere suggestions. But, on this day, I was fully adorned in work paraphernalia and headed to a ribbon cutting for a new bike lane.

There I was, happily enjoying freedom from the kids and relishing in the calm of honking and yelling on 2nd Avenue. Like the law abiding Danish cyclist that I attempted to embody, I stopped at all of the red lights, including the one on 60th Street, waiting for the cars and trucks to muscle their way through morning traffic. As I watched a Volkswagen try to squeeze into the 14 millimeters between an express bus and garbage truck, I felt impact and found myself flying through the air. The impossible pace of the city slowed to a mere ludicrous speed, as I lurched forward into oncoming traffic. I saw my life flash before my eyes - presented as an Instagram reel of moments and memories from holding my children for the first time to losing my virginity in a dorm room to the sounds of a Dave Mathews CD.

A beautiful life, about to end all too abruptly as I flew off of my Citi Bike and into morning traffic. 

By the sake of sheer luck, I landed on the sidewalk and the bike rolled into traffic. My urban necessities - keys, wallet, and smartphone were splayed across the lanes of traffic. As this is New York, pedestrians merely pointed and stared at me, but no one came over to help or collect my things. One elderly woman simply pointed to a delivery guy on an e-bike racing towards the bridge and screamed, “It was him!” 

In this town, it is not help that we offer to those in need, but being an accomplice in the quest for revenge. 

As I got up, ensuring that my limbs were attached, the hit-and-run cyclist racing towards the bridge finally looked back to assess the damage he caused. Once he saw that I was alive, he offered a brief half-wave. His hand salute was neither apologetic nor relieved, but more of a flippant don’t hate the player, hate the game gesture. He then turned back to the route and raced up the incline of the Queensboro Bridge. 

While the normal course of action for most people in most places would be to shake it off and keep moving, or engage the cops who would arrive within three hours, take a statement, write a case number on the back of a Chik-fil-A receipt, and tell you that a detective would be in touch within two-to-three union contracts. However, this is not a normal town and I’m not a normal person.

In New York, we’re all just a minor misunderstanding away from pushing each other onto the subway tracks and looting the goop store. Plus, this was one of MY people - a cyclist - who almost killed me and left the scene. Since stepping into my role in September 2019, I had spent most of my tenure advocating for bike people, including listening to the endless concerns from elected leaders, neighbors, friends, and family that cyclists were street pirates who paid no mind to rules or regulations.

To each, I responded with data, case studies, and lessons learned about why bikes were the panacea to our city’s problems and how we needed more people using them with even fewer rules and regulations for cyclists. No helmets! No licenses! No crackdowns! No round ups! No stings! Bike advocates are like the NRA in that both groups will fight to the death against any regulations that seek to limit or control. Because any regulation, even a tiny one, offers a slippery slope towards a city where bikes are illegal.

When the data failed, I turned to emotion. I leaned in with a calm, kind smile and invited the haters back to memories of their first bike ride and how wonderful and freeing it felt. Just as their memory transported them to that moment, I would chime in with a, “That! …That wonderful freedom is what we are trying to bring to this city.” Some were convinced and joined the transportation revolution, while others remained firmly rooted in their rabid anti-bike ideology, believing that cyclists were the reason for every urban ill from gentrification to lawlessness.

But, in this moment, there was no data or meaningful anecdote that I was interested in calling up to justify what happened to me. A person riding a bike that I helped bring to this city on a bike lane that I advocated for had almost killed me and left me on the street. I fumed with rage at the betrayal. How could one of my own people do this to me? Didn’t he know of all that I had done for him and our brethren on two wheels?

Still in shock, I looked over to the sweet older woman on the corner. She could sense that I was deliberating revenge vs. just letting it go; 25-to-life vs. going to my kids’ weddings. In response, she raised her frail arm and pointed towards the bridge.

“Go!” she mouthed.

To be clear, I’m not a psycho, which, I acknowledge, is exactly what a psycho would say. In that moment, I was simply a principled vigilante, the character in every NYC-as-the-evil-villian movie who takes the law into their own hands when society breaks down. And, with that trying-a-bit-too-hard-to-not-make-myself-sound-insane sentence, I, a 44-year-old husband, a father of three, an executive director, and a recipient of multiple degrees took off towards the bridge.

A bike chase on an electric Citi Bike is complicated by Lyft’s required speed governor, which I know way too much about due to the fact that my job helped to legalize e-bikes. No matter how hard you pedal, how steep the decline, or how much weight you jettison, the will of the motor keeps you forever at 18 mph. To pedal harder merely adds resistance and does nothing to your speed.

Up ahead, the delivery guy moved without care and took in the view, having no idea that I was sweating through my clothes to catch up with him. After hitting me, he likely assumed that I would accept it, move on, and share it as another story of New York City’s demise with my Ivy League rowing buddies at the Harmonie Club. So, he went back to his thoughts as he throttled towards Queens.  

Meanwhile, I raced – willing the speed governor to relent and join me in my pursuit of justice. Pushing hard on the pedals and increasing the resistance as the bike’s speedometer stayed flat. With my heart pounding, I turned my focus from the Superfund brown waters of the East River and towards the black milk crate on the back of his e-bike, layered with bruises and dings from a series of crashes and hit-and-runs collected over a million miles of Seamless deliveries. How many other bodies had he left behind, I wondered. 

Above, the tramway passed as the commuters from Roosevelt Island stared down on two middle-aged men moving slowly across the bridge, along with a wave of pedestrians and mopeds, unaware of the tension building as I closed the gap. I was within feet, as we descended to street level and a 7 train emerged - clanking and screeching within inches of our eardrums. As he slowed ahead of a red light at the base of the bridge because apparently he abided by Queens’ law, but not those of Manhattan, I pulled up next to him and started screaming.

My words were incoherent due to a mix of panting and the fact that I had not imagined actually catching him and, if so, what I might do or say. Fortunately, I leaned on Emily Post’s New York City etiquette rules. Post recommends that you begin all conversations resulting from miscommunication, error, accident, mistake, or confusion in the five boroughs by using the subject, “YOU! - e.g. Hey YOU!, what the fuck do YOU! think YOU’RE! doing?!” Should the person not respond, or reply in a manner unsatisfactory for your emotionally imbalanced state, you are invited to escalate to a more direct subject like, “Asshole”, “Shithead”, or “Bitch Ass Motherfucker”. Given we live in a welcoming melting pot of cultures, Post also invites the celebration of strereotypes and racial epithets that align with your interpretation of the person’s background, socioeconomic status, age, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Her etiquette Esperanto remains so universally respected across New York that you could accidentally step on the toe of any New Yorker from Chelsea to Crown Heights and receive a standard response of, “Hey, fuck YOU!, YOU! Fucking asshole!”

Thus, I channeled Postian polite society and belted out, “YOU! hit me back there and left the scene! What the fuck were YOU! thinking?!” My finger aggressively pointed towards him, as the parent in me sought to awaken a conscience that knew better than to almost kill someone and leave the scene of the crime.

He just stared at me, dumbfounded that I had not followed the better angels of my meditation app and, instead, chased him across a bridge and into another borough. “Wow, of all of the people I hit on my e-bike each day, today it had to be some yuppie thinking he’s Charles Bronson. Just my luck!” he likely lamented. 

His silence invited more of my yelling,  “Fucking asshole! YOU! hit me and left me without even coming to check if I was okay.” I sounded like a scorned transportation lover, furious that he only saw me as another piece of infrastructure to bang and not a person with feelings, hopes, and aspirations. 

“Apologize!” I yelled. 

“No, fuck YOU!, it’s YOUR! fault!” He screamed back. “YOU! stopped at the red light and I had to swerve around you.”

I leaned closer as I belted out, “Just say YOU’RE! sorry! YOU! almost killed me.”

Instead, he double downed, “No! Fuck YOU!” 

At this moment, I weighed telling him what I did for work and why his reckless behavior mattered so much to me. I considered lecturing him about all of the time I had spent making sure he could ride an e-bike in this town across a growing number of protected bike lanes. I wanted to show him every letter and phone call of concern about reckless cyclists, especially delivery workers, that I had received since starting the job along with every careful and thoughtful reply in their defense. I longed to explain to him why his reckless actions impacted all of us in the transportation advocacy, especially me as a leader in the movement.

But, instead of lecturing him or sanctimoniously boasting, “Do you know who I am?”, I simply engaged him as an anonymous angry stranger - one of 8.8 million random neighbors in various stages of mental distress. While I can willingly attest that my judgement was bad enough to chase a stranger across the bridge, it wasn’t so terrible as to not comprehend the implications of getting caught alongside a New York Post cover photo of me in cuffs with the headline “Bike Boss Breaks”.

“Just fucking apologize!” I screamed.

A traffic cop, failing at her attempts to influence the sea of cars inching their way towards the bridge, overheard our yelling and walked over.

“You good?” She asked.

We were definitely not good, yet both looked over and nodded with a forced smile, “Yeah, we’re good.” Despite our mutual loathing, we had a shared interest in keeping the cops out of our transportation tussle. Officer Parking Ticket shrugged, and waded back into the tsunami of box trucks. 

I looked to the man, my anger lessening to reveal my endless disappointment in humanity, especially in one of my own.

“Come on, man. Just say, you’re sorry.” I begged.

While his body remained in fight mode, something inside of him softened. His eyes turned to the floor, and his body loosened.

“Fine, I’m sorry!” he offered, with strong traces of a sorry-not-sorry vibe. 

A weighted moment of silence passed. 

“No, really, I’m sorry.” he said as a deep sense of guilt seemed to engulf him. As our energy settled and our tempers cooled, he seemed to be asking himself, “What kind of a person has this place made me where I would knock a stranger into oncoming traffic and simply leave?”

In that moment, his eyes looked deeply into mine as he said, “I’m very sorry. Really, I am.” 

“Thank you. That’s all I needed to hear,” I replied.

He extended his hand out and we shook. Burying the hatchet in Long Island City, surrounded by the most broken of transportation cluster fucks in all the five boroughs. Then, off he went deeper into Queens and I turned back to race to the bike lane unveiling, to which I was now late. 

I arrived sweaty, still shaking with anger and sadness, and took my place behind the elected leaders to welcome a new bike lane to New York City. A project promised years before, and finally completed as a watered down version of its once mightily planned self. 

Another quasi-protected bike lane built to keep people safe-ish in a city where no one follows the rules. 

Another venue for our city’s no holds barred, steel cage match of simply getting around. 

Another invitation for vigilante justice.

As I stepped to the mic with pants frayed from my morning tumble, I shook off the experience and stepped back into my role as a bike advocate. For despite the morning’s deep betrayal, I could still say with sincerity and conviction, “This is a great day for New York! We need more people on bikes and more safe places for them to ride. And to the critics out there, cycling isn’t the problem, it’s the solution to so many of our city’s problems.”

Whether the cyclist who almost killed me remains part of the problem or is now part of the solution remains unknown.

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If I Can Make It There is a collection of stories about the things and people, including me, that move through New York City. A celebration of the characters who crawl through endless traffic, slog through the subways, and stroll under the shade of scaffolding.

Like our fragmented and broken transportation system, some stories race with enthusiasm to a red light and others remain hopelessly stuck behind a double-parked Mercedes with New Jersey plates and blinkers on as the driver screams over the honking, “Just hold on for a minute! I’m only stopping in for a quick dinner at Sardis.” 

And, all of these stories could occur nowhere else but the greatest city on Earth - New York Fucking City.