A Bike-Lane Scam

Dear Diary:

The city’s recent move toward becoming more bicycle-friendly may have also created an entirely new revenue source for clever New Yorkers.

I was recently crossing Eighth Avenue at 37th Street and stepped out, inadvertently, into a bike lane. Suddenly, I heard someone yelling, “Get out of the way, get out of the way!” and looked up to see a gray-haired man in his late 50s, bearing down on me at full speed on his bike.

I barely had time to take a step back before there was a terrible crash. I was simply, and fortunately, glanced off as the man and his bike tumbled down in front of me.

My first reaction, of course, was to say, “Are you all right?”

He groggily got up and began to yell at me: “It’s a bike lane. What are you doing standing in the middle of a bike lane? I could have been killed!”

Then, he picked up his bike. The front handlebar was bent. “And look at my bike! Look at what you did! How am I going to get home? Who is going to fix this? I can’t afford this!”

Feeling worse by the minute, I asked what he thought the repair would cost.

“Forty dollars,” he said, rubbing his sore arm.

I started to reach into my pocket when another man ran up to me. “Don’t give him a dime,” he said. “He just did the same thing to me,” and pointed south on Eighth Avenue.

“He’s a liar,” said my biker.

Just then, a third man appeared. “He did it to me too!” he said. A small crowd had begun to gather.

The biker took one look around, got back on his bike, which now seemed to work just fine, and took off like a shot, no doubt in search of his next victim.

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