Comment by antisthenes

Tl;dr: Not sure why you're catching downvotes here, you aren't wrong.

True Story:

~25 years ago, well before ubiquitous mass shooting events or the now weekly local road rage incidents, I went for a ride early one Sunday morning. With the sun barely up, the air was crisp without being chilly even at speed, and the local roadways were empty. The two most common stressors while riding being the weather and other drivers this was shaping up to be something special. The kind of borderline tantric riding conditions you daydream about but only encounter once or twice a year if you live in a busy metro area.

So imagine my irritation when this blissful communion of man and machine was rudely interrupted by a Bentley running a red light. Dude blew through the red and pulled 3/4 into my lane before he noticed me and slammed on the brakes, leaving me about 8/10ths of a second to juke a full lane width to get around him. Not only was this the only car in sight in any direction but literally the only other vehicle I'd encountered on the road this morning and this dickhead has just made a passable attempt at killing me.

Now I'm not one to hide my light under a bushel so of course I gave the driver the finger on my way past. I noted the driver appeared to be in his late 70s, had his similarly elderly wife in the passenger seat, and a very young girl in a lovely church dress in the back seat. It's amazing the amount of detail you can capture in a split second while riding an industrial grade adrenaline dump, but I digress. This dude had absolutely earned some flavor of response and given I wasn't prepared to get into a fist fight with a guy old enough to be my grandfather I figured the least aggressive option that conveyed my total disgust at his driving skills would get the job done.

My miscalculation here was in discounting the psychology of the kind of geriatric upper middle class white guy that drives his family to early church services in a Bentley. In hindsight I'm guessing it had been several decades since that guy had caught any flavor of static off of literally anyone and had grown so unaccustomed to getting called on his shit that when it finally happened dude divided by zero.

At the time I was also ignorant of the performance characteristics of a 4 door Bentley sedan. Having mistook it for your garden variety land yacht I exited the interaction at a sedate 20mph over the speed limit confident that was sufficient to get me over the horizon with no further hassles. So you can imagine my surprise when I checked my mirrors and saw this guy power slide through another red light and charge me from behind at something like 3x the posted speed limit. The chase that followed was deeply stupid in ways usually reserved for action movie scripts. This guy just would not let it go. I dragged him through 6 red lights, two neighborhoods, and a mall parking lot before finally cutting through a pedestrian greenway to lose him. I ended up stashing my bike and riding gear behind a service shed in a local park and hiked home, returning hours later to retrieve my ride.

To this day this encounter haunts me a little. I can't say for certain what would have happened if either or both of us had been armed but the potential was certainly there. These days I frequently take back roads to avoid a section of the local highway due to how frequently folks are getting shot in traffic through there, and you couldn't pay me to ride a motorcycle anywhere within a 50 mile radius of any major metro area. Y'all be safe out there, shit's crazy.