There’s a certain sect of the car world that’s locked in an eternal battle with cyclists. These drivers, for whatever reason, simply can’t accept that they have to share the road with people riding bikes, and hate the fact that cyclists are increasingly being granted bike lanes of their own in major metropolitan areas.
Personally, I can’t understand this attitude. Sure, it might be a tiny bit inconvenient to make room for a cyclist as you drive past them, but when you’re driving through a populated place or down a fun, twisty road, that’s just part of the environment, and there’s nothing you can do about it. What’s wrong with playing nice with one another?
Alas, some people just can’t figure it out. The occupants of a BMW took things a bit too far when they decided to start road-raging against a couple of bikers in California, forcing one off the road and throwing liquid at another, before speeding off. Instead of just ending things there, the driver of the BMW started messaging the biker on Instagram, asking to fistfight. Now, they’ve been arrested.
A Bike Lane Is Called A Bike Lane Because It’s For Bikes
This all started last Saturday when pro biker Luke Fetzer, who goes by the username sendy_mcgee on Instagram, published a video on the social media platform of a BMW M3 driver running up behind him and his friends while they were biking down the marked bike lane on the Pacific Coast Highway in Corona Del Mar, a neighborhood in Newport Beach.
View this post on Instagram
The video shows the BMW driving fully in the bike lane, inching up to the cyclist behind, who eventually has to hop up onto the sidewalk to avoid getting struck. After that, the BMW comes up next to Fetzer before the passenger splashes a drink onto him and chucks the empty cup out the window before speeding off.
The clip immediately went viral, accumulating millions of views in just a couple of days. According to Fetzer, the interaction didn’t begin when the camera started rolling, but a few minutes before that. He published a follow-up video explaining the entire encounter, before and after the camera started rolling:
We’re riding single file, and we move right in towards the bike lane. At this intersection, the driver honked at us, swerves at us, and then the passenger rolls down his window, yells, slurs it at us, and then they get stopped at the following stoplight.
I was angry, adrenaline was pumping. These guys had just tried to kill us by swerving their car into us, and in the heat of the moment, I grabbed my water bottle and I squirted onto his car while he was stopped at the red light. When I did that, I had no idea that they were going to try to run us off the road. I pulled out my phone because I knew that there was gonna be some angry drivers, and I was filming for my own safety.
It’s at that moment you can see what the BMW driver and their passenger do in the video above. While Fetzer isn’t totally, 100-percent innocent in instigating the situation, I’d say the BMW driver took things a bit too far, especially when you hear what happened next.
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According to Fetzer, the BMW didn’t just speed off into the distance, never to be seen again. He and his friends actually stopped down the road to blockade the bikers and harass them further.
A few miles down the road, him and four buddies all stop on the side, waiting in line at the Shake Shack, a local burger joint. Cars will usually park and wait in the line at Shake Shack, blocking cyclists, which is fine. We move to the left, and we go around. But this time, these four individuals got out of their cars, ran into traffic, pushed into the two right lanes, blocked us, told us that they were going to kill us, and tried tackling us.
Well, that’s no fun. And Fetzer says it wasn’t just his crew that got stopped, either. Two other bikers who were totally uninvolved until this point were caught up in this:
It didn’t only do it to us. There were two other cyclists that weren’t involved with us at all who were also put in harm’s way by these guys. In shock, I stopped with these two two cyclists who were clearly already on the phone with the police, trying to get an officer to the scene.
Eventually, everyone went their separate ways, but the story doesn’t end there. In fact, it gets even weirder.
The Aftermath
After the video blew up on social media, Fetzer was interviewed by CBS News Los Angeles, where he shared messages he claims were sent from the BMW driver over Instagram DMs. If you don’t feel like or can’t watch the video embedded above, I’ve reprinted the messages here:
haha you’re a [redacted] dork, pro cyclist making 20$ an hour thinks it’s ok to spray gatorade at a $100k car, hope you enjoyed the soaking wet bike ride back home peasant ????
Hey bro let’s both sign waivers and meetup for a consensual Full MMA sparring session, let’s settle this like Men
if you have the [redacted]
Something tells me that the fight might have to wait. Yesterday, the Newport Beach Police Department released a statement saying it served a warrant in the nearby city of Corona and arrested an individual identified as Samir Weiss, charging them with assault with a deadly weapon. The police say they also seized a blue BMW M3 from the residence where the warrant was served, as evidence.
The investigation is ongoing, but Fetzer told The Canyon Carver in a Thursday interview that he’s happy with the outcome so far. “It’s good to know that he’s in Johnny Law’s hands now, and they’re going to throw the book at him, and we’ll just see where it goes from here,” he said.
If there’s any lesson to be gleaned from this, it’s to simply mind your own business and give people space to enjoy themselves, whether they’re on a bike, a motorcycle, a car, or a three-wheeled contraption that falls somewhere in between those. At best, you’re ruining someone’s day, and at worst, you end up in jail. Just share the road, people.
Top graphic images: sendy_mcgee on Instagram
This is just disgusting. The absolute ignorance on display by the BMW driver.
Everyone knows you meet up in Temecula to settle these things.
always hilarious when drivers think they’re more tough or manly because they drive a truck/car. which involves sitting on a comfy chair and pushing some buttons with their feet. compared to someone who cycles who is literally using the pure “man power” of their legs and core to propel themselves, sometimes for 100+ miles at a time as im sure this pro cyclist does regularly