Come on down and start kickin' the side of the locals' pickups to teach these fellas a lesson in curtesy. You might learn something. Or on second thought better stick to hassling old men and little old ladies with your bad barbarian routine.

lol sorry mate, but thats the way it is. If I have my car damaged for making a simple mistake by a cyclist then I will follow, I will chase, and I will place him under arrest. If needs be I will call the police using hands free and allow them to make the arrest.

That said I dont drive at the moment (no licence, never been arsed to actually get it), but yeah... im sure im not the only guy out there who's done similar things in the past. :)

Does this hotline act on anonymous reports? If so it is ripe for abuse and should be disconnected. If the complainers are unwilling to identify themselves how much credibility should they be given? A quick glance at the posts on this thread should indicate that some bicyclists lack all sense of proportion, have no credibility, and if anything should be reporting themselves to the authorities.

"citizen's arrest". yeah right. you must be one tough hombre if you can arrest anybody. please.:)

dude. you know i roll fixed. ain't no hicks gonna teach me nuthin'! just sayin'!:)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/crime/law/powersofarrest.shtml (Scroll to bottom)

In the uk the general public have the right to place people under a citizens arrest, providing they have witnessed them commit a criminal act.

Myself, I arrested 3 blokes after being assaulted by them. Then got the police involved whilst I held them on the floor, as opposed to transporting them myself to the station.

Its a certain possibility for you to encounter (not sure on laws in the USA but would have thought the capacity should be there) and if I had someone such as yourself damaging my car you can expect to be confronted with "reasonable force" and brought to justice over your actions.

I never said I put a boot or a pedal on the car. In fact I did no damage to the car whatsoever, despite the fact that they HIT me while travelling parallel to me. I slapped the side of the truck with the palm of my hand, doing nothing more than making a resounding bang.

The motorist then chased me across the road, and the passenger leaned out the rear window and struck me across the back with a 4 foot long ice scraper.

Bunch of kids joy riding around in daddy's brand new SUV.

If I make contact with a vehicle, it's 100% the driver's fault. I don't chase people or swerve towards them in an attempt to damage their property. If you're close enough for me to touch the vehicle, YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW. period.

Go ahead and call the police.

You'd need to be pretty well versed in the law to get away with that here. Holding the "blokes" is false imprisonment under most circumstances and state laws. You get to defend yourself and others up to the point when there is a clear escape from harm, beyond that the criminals have more rights than you do.

Case in point, a former instructor of mine took out some home invaders and held them in his garage until police arrived. Charged with false imprisonment. He was within his rights to defend himself and his family, had they been there, even with lethal force since they had weapons. He did not have the right to detain them.

Granted there is also the comeback of wrongful arrest if you do it, or excessive force but to put it into perspective.

This is acceptable force and is about as close a thing I can find on the net that is similar except I was straddling 2 of the guys.

http://www.machinehead-software.co.u...ns_arrest.html

And I wouldnt attempt to arrest you if you simply yelled at me, slapping my car is excessive.. but if I didnt see you then fair enough, prefer you let me know your there as opposed to mowing you over because your in my blind spot. It was more in response to the guy with the size nines.

Oh.. they saw me. They were screaming out the window (6 inches from my face) to get out of the road.

How many single occupancy cars even look at their passenger side rear fender?

Well... not really.

For starters, I don't run into hassles with raging cagers on my bicycle nearly as much as I do when I'm in the thick of traffic with these idiots. For me, riding a bicycle is tons better than by any other vehicle. Totally peaceful by comparison. I love it. A much purer experience.

Anyway... The spark plug trick is pure self defense. The other two tricks are revenge are done so that no one can trace it back to the rider. (BTW, in 22 years of maintaining a motorcycle license, I have hurled objects or gotten into real beefs fewer than five times. I count myself lucky; friends have experienced much worse.)

To go full circle, I still say driver education is the best solution. Adding 20 questions all concerning sharing the road with bicylists and motorcyclists to the written portion of a driver's license test will do a much better job reducing on the number of dumb drivers and solving our problems. Vandalizing some stupid cager's car teaches them nothing. All it does is satisfy your base need to get even.

For once, I'm with I like to bike on this. Unless you're just hitting back at the easy targets, getting aggressive is just going to end badly. Fortunately, I got very little hassle here in the UK, but if I did, I'd be trying to restrain my desire to hit back, because whilst I'm a big guy and I can take care of myself, 3 Chavs in a souped up Saxo, quite possibly carrying knives, and definitely armed with a 3/4 ton killing machine are likely to be too much of a match for me.

I also can't see how that type of reaction is going to help overall - the USA has a cutural problem with aggression and selfcentredness, and if you respond in kind, all you do is show that you are equally a product of the culture. You can only hope to affect that culture AT ALL by finding a better way. Going the same way just ensures that eventually, the person with the biggest weapon wins, and unless you're going to start carrying a gun, it's always going to be the guy with the car, right?

i have to call bull**** on the whole "citizen's arrest" thing. urban myth.:)

No, it happens in the UK. Not often, but it really does happen.

Sorry, but all I can picture is someone waving their fist and yelling "Stop, or I'll say 'stop' again!"

Well, you'd have trouble citizens arresting someone in their car when you were on your bike, but that's not the situation your man described, is it? I considered doing a citizens arrest on my neighbours son - he was off it on cocaine, had kicked their fence down, broken a window, attacked his dad, punched me in the face when I tried to calm him down, then tried to hit me with a piece of the fence. I restrained him (I'm big, like I said), and we tried to get him to go home. If he hadn't, I would've called the cops, and it would've been a de facto citizens arrest. I'm glad it didn't come to that, because as it ended, he was apologetic, whereas if I'd handed him to the scuff, he most probably would've hated me forever.

dude! "the scuff"!! i love that!!:) :) :beer:

See also "Plod" "Filth" "Rozzers" etc etc etc

"If it's in a dense urban area, you can get little guns that shoot magnetic tracking devices with those small gps devices they use in cell phones that'll hopefully stick to the car (or better yet place it underneath), then track it using something akin to mologogo. Accounts of what the driver/car did and looked like could be updated online after the incident since the cyclist will have the ID number of the device they just tagged the driver with and can associate a desciption with that unique gps device. Considering sub $100 cell phones have them the gps devices probably aren't that expensive and are probably pretty durable, the tough part would be modifying a paintball gun (CO2 canisters for minimal noise) to shoot the magnet/gps combo. All the software shouldn't be too bothersome."

Check out the latest issue of Popular Science magazine. They are working on just such a thing for police to help end high speed chases. I think a civillian version would be nice.

Andy
www.myvemma.com/unbent