Mean Streets: My Close Call With a Crazy Driver

On September 14, I was headed home from work on my electric bike when I had my worst experience yet cycling in Denver.

Commuting from the Westword office at 1280 Lincoln Street to my apartment in Uptown, I was traveling north on Pennsylvania Street between 16th and 17th avenues around 5:20 p.m. when a driver behind me revved his car's engine and zoomed past, coming very close to me.

This really ticked me off. And as I continued biking north, I noticed the car, a silver Kia Sportage, stopped at the intersection. I caught up with it and yelled something along the lines of "What the fuck are you doing?"

The front and rear passengers rolled down their windows, revealing a male driver and two female passengers, all of whom looked to be older teenagers or young adults. They cursed back at me, and then the female passenger in front threw a paper cup filled with water at me, while the female in back threw a crumpled bag of chips at me. After we exchanged some more words, the driver drove the Sportage through the intersection.

I followed, since I was headed home in the same direction. Then the car stopped. I pulled out my phone to snap a picture of its California license plate when suddenly the driver put the car in reverse, backed into my bike, paused and then reversed into my bike again.

I screamed, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, stop, stop! What the fuck are you doing?!" A man walking his dog also screamed at the driver to stop. The driver then took off, heading north on Pennsylvania Street.

Although I was unhurt and my bike seemed okay, I was feeling pretty rattled. I got the phone number of the man who had seen what happened, then called 911 to report the incident.

The next day, I walked to the Denver Police Department's District 6 headquarters to file a report. An officer told me that my report would be logged into the system, and if a car with that license plate was pulled over, the report would show up. I got the sense there would be no investigation into what had happened, but I was still glad I had filed the report.

The next day, I got a call from a DPD officer letting me know that the car that had backed into me was actually a stolen vehicle, and officers had found it abandoned late the night of September 14. The cop told me it was a good thing that the driver and his passengers didn't have a gun earlier that day, and I agreed with her.

I'm viewing this incident as a learning experience. As someone who uses my e-bike to commute to and from work every day and also to get around town, I can get pretty exasperated with certain drivers. Some act like unaware idiots, others drive like insane assholes; in either case, I'll sometimes flip them off or tell them to go fuck themselves. It's a bad habit, not because the people on the receiving end of these expletives or birds don't deserve them; they do. It's a bad habit because these people could easily decide to do much worse. That's an indictment of the society in which we live, but I realize I need to accept it and stop interacting with drivers. It's just not worth it.

I'm also regarding this incident as a reminder that the City of Denver needs to work harder and faster on building out its protected bike-lane network. The multi-use trails in Denver are lovely, but riders really need to be able to get from point A to point Z and everywhere in between without having to bike right next to a zooming car that just might be stolen...and whose driver has nothing to lose.