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So in the beginning of June I was biking up Park Ave around 20th when my pedals went slack and I heard my chain snaking off the gears onto the pavement. I braked and dropped the bike and ran into traffic to gather the chain and when I got back to the bike I could see that my derailleur was essentially obliterated and a close inspection revealed that my overpriced Sharp in-ear headphones had fallen out of my bag and wrapped themselves around the drive train like a bolo, seizing the rear sprocket. Amazingly they survived in working order, so maybe not so overpriced….
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Manhattan is a very dangerous place to bicycle, straight up. But both of my major bike-related injuries occurred in Brooklyn, and though that’s probably because I live here, and so bike here more often, I don’t know that Brooklyn really gets its proper props as a very dangerous place to pedal. Probably the greatest threat comes from other people on the road, mainly in cars, but they often won’t stop to be photographed, or if they have stopped, are hard to really capture from a prone position, what with all those EMTs and ambulances in the way. Bad streets though can be just as insidious and just lie there while you click away. So I started carrying my camera on my bike to preserve a record of the offenses (click the images for nice, big versions; the street names link to google streetview images of the roads in question).

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