I've decided to keep the videos of the little incidents ... I encounter while riding/commuting in the great city of New York ... To learn how to avoid the situations that could be avoided and how to deal in the situations where it couldn't.
Collecting Go-Pro video of these kinds of events is a great idea. Somebody - maybe a motorcycle safety organization - should create a dedicated YouTube channel so that anyone can contribute videos like this.
Because there's nothing a rider can do about the behavior of the driver executing the U-turn (leaving aside earlier comments about trying to be more visible), I have been thinking about what riders, myself included, could do differently in this situation.
The main thing that struck me was that the rider didn't see that the driver of the car was in in the car, in motion and turning his wheels before being passed by the SUV. To see this clearly in the video, use your cursor to go through that part of the video frame by frame and then watch again while running the video at full speed.
The other thing that struck me was that the rider appears to be doing 30mph (see the speedometer) in a city where the default speed limit is 25mph. I also noted that the rider, while it would not be an issue if this incident had taken place on a different stretch of road, is not slowing down before what is both an intersection and a school crossing. In New York, pedestrian crossings at intersections present a particular visibility issue because there is no right turn on red, meaning that vehicles can and do park right up to pedestrian crossings.
A couple of people have noted that the rider was not covering his brake. On that, I came across this interesting article and video:
http://www.therideadvice.com/two-fingered-motorcycle-braking-save-life/I'm indebted to JProdun for posting this. It was an opportunity to think about whether I'm being sufficiently rigorous when riding busy city streets.
