Smart Car. Dumb Ass.

I’m picking up dinner—curry from my favorite Indian joint on Sixth Street’s disappearing “Tandoori Row”—when a tidal wave of traffic starts streaming down Second Avenue.

I can make it across if I hurry. I jump off the curb and scoot eastward. I glance uptown to make sure no vehicle will flatten me and see the usual throng of honking cars, trucks and buses. All that swerving and lurching looks like Hollywood’s idea of “New York City.”

But something is different. From the safety of the sidewalk next to Moonstruck Diner, on the other side of Second Avenue, I suddenly realize what it is: the thin designated column of asphalt that stretches toward the Chrysler Building.

It’s one of Manhattan’s bicycle lanes.

And it’s getting used by a fortyish white woman with scraggly red hair, brownish freckles, and a doughy build. She pedals furiously on a basketed two-seater. Small legs ending in green sneakers dangle from behind her. Her daughter, I guess. The kid’s maybe seven, and she shares Mom’s redheady face and hair. The softening up of middle age, however, is still decades off.

Abruptly, Mom brakes. Then her expression contorts in a spasm of righteous fury. She thumb-cracks her ridiculous-sounding bell—ring-a-ling! ring-a-ling!—just as one of those itsy-bitsy Smart cars cuts her off.

Yes, in the bike lane.

The little ovoid auto barely fits in the lane as it soars downtown. But it fits all the same. The vehicle blows by a car-service Lincoln and a rust-bucket Ford van. The Smart surges past me, whipping up a gust of wind and oil fumes. A twentysomething white dude with crooked hair sits behind the wheel displaying a well-rehearsed look of obliviousness.

But Mom, she’s not content to eat his dust just yet. She pedals with more oomph than ever. Her terrified-looking kid clutches the underside of her backseat’s springs. Then the mother-daughter duo squeaks by.

Mom shrieks, “You’ah in the bike lane, ya asswipe!”

The Smart dodges left and turns down Second Street—no signaling for this driver—and Mom pulls a slow-down-and-dip maneuver as if she might give chase.

But no, she then speeds up and heads south toward Houston.

Her daughter’s hands release the seat springs and wrap around Mom’s waist. They go wherever they’re going, I go get dinner, and Mr. Smart goes and drives his dumb-ass self to Alphabet City. 

—Tim Coleman covers the walk-to-work beat in Foot It.