Originally Posted by
Roody
Yeah, I once outrode a guy trying to jack my bike at night. I bragged about it for a while because the guy was about 30 years younger than me, but nowhere near as fast! Sometimes I mentally rehearse how I would get away from somebody in a car--hop a curb, cut through a vacant lot, wrong way on a one-way, and so forth. Generally I feel safer than I did 10 or 20 years ago, since the street crime rates have gone down a lot most places.
Unless somebody has a gun or there's more than one of them, I don't worry about it. I'm not going to out-run or out-maneuver anyone but I do have a 2 foot end of a rake handle with a bike handlebar grip on the end attached to the top bar of my bike and painted to match it. I may not escape scratch-free but whoever tries to attack me will long regret it.
Out on the fringes of the city I'm more worried about running into a big, loose dog more than people anyways.