NYC! GIVE CASEY HIS $50 BACK!

Yeah, give Casey his Fifty Bucks back before he really hurts himself. 

I related to this video and this story because I rode a bike on these mean streets almost everyday for over 25 years. I rode in spring, summer, fall and winter. I loved to ride on Sunday mornings when the streets of Manhattan were almost totally deserted. I loved riding after midnight in lower Manhattan in the summer.

In all of my time on a bike, I was never ticketed and only suffered a few scratches and bruises...there was that incident with a car door on Grand Street, but amazingly, I landed on my feet!

There were no bike lanes except for a brief period in the 80's when Mayor Koch experimented with them, but the sight of healthy people enjoying themselves while commuting outraged the fat assed conservative gasoline huffing automobile addicts and due to a certain closeted conservative editorialist in the NY Post, who wrote of their embarrassment at having to look at healthy young men in tight lycra bike shorts, they were removed.

I recently was in NYC and got to bike quite a bit and experienced the new bike lanes. I have to admit, in principle, it is a good idea, but in reality, the traffic, the continual road work and the necessity of commerce presented a continula obstacle course which had to be ignored and avoided. That's what happend to Casey. That's why he got a ticket in one of the cities "crackdowns" on bike riders.

It makes me nostalgic for the good old days. I was a bike messenger for about 3 months, until I realized that was the probable life expectancy of a bike messenger on the streets of Manhattan, but there was a time when muscle powered demons on 2 wheels ruled the streets!