Insane urban antics

When I was a kid and living on my bike pretty much all day every day, the one kind of rider I looked up to was the almighty Bike Messengers of NYC and SF. They rode fast, in tight traffic, brakeless. To a dumb 12 year old that thinks he is going to live forever, it seemed fun.

I even remember the movie Quicksilver that glorified the profession a bit starring Kevin Bacon, and featuring my friend Woody as one of the stunt dudes doing tricks in the middle of the film.

When I moved to San Francisco in 2000, I rode my bike most days from the panhandle/upper Haight to SOMA where the Blogger office was. I'd ride the wiggle for the first half of it, then at Castro I'd bomb down Market at full blast, dodging taxis and car doors and buses before heading south to our building near the Caltrain station on Townsend.

Luckily, I never got seriously hurt doing it, but after about six months of getting my heart racing every morning, I started to see it was only a matter of time before any driver's mistake in front of me would send me to the ER. I eventually chilled out, figured out which streets had bigger bike lanes and no longer fought the daily gauntlet of deadly traffic on Market at full speed.

This week I caught two amazing videos of people mixing it up with NYC traffic, one is Bill Perry, a great bmx street rider that lives in NYC and regularly does videos with a GoPro attached to his chest as he rides through the city. This video is heavy on cutting through dense traffic and there are a couple points I couldn't believe he threaded the needle between two buses or trucks while doing a manual (wheelie) and turning his bars to fit between.

This other one I'll just call "if Jet Grind Radio was real life" and if you get that reference, kudos—for everyone else, it's just badass crazy rollerblading through dense traffic.

Both videos are amazing and super dangerous and not something I would suggest doing day in and day out as your daily commute fun time because honestly, both videos have several close calls and if you did this more than once in a blue moon, you'd probably wake up in a hospital bed not knowing what happened to you.