The Grand Tour

The New Dangerous Trend To Be Worried About Is Called ‘Swerving’

Sit down, take a deep breath, because teenagers have started doing wheelies into moving traffic on their bicycles. The dangerous new social media trend, called “swerving,” calls for these underdeveloped young-adults to play chicken with moving vehicles, and see how close they can get without making contact.

Admittedly, I may be catching on to this a little late, but what has seemed like isolated incidents in various cities, has turned into an international quarantine craze. In 2018, The Sun reported on a Hertfordshire boy who was hit head-on while playing “Swerve The Car.” Since then, social media has only compounded the problem, and tricks have taken it to another level.

Philadelphia seems like a hotspot, with one particular viral-swerver catching a lot of media attention. Notice how in the above clip, a police vehicle sits parked directly next to where this nonsense takes place, and how only the Jeep honks. It’s also reassuring to see the boy and his hype-boy/ camera operator gasp and howl with surprise every time they narrowly miss a vehicle.

Again, this showed up in a big way in Boston a couple of years ago. Where local authorities responded to a pack of 25-30 boys riding around and swerving in both moving and stopped traffic. The police arrested a handful of them, and confiscated their bicycles.

In some instances it’s seen as more impressive for these kids to ride around with their front wheel taken off of the bike altogether. Of course, that makes for a nice scraping edge if anything did go wrong.

Now to cheer you up, and maybe lower your blood pressure, I would like you to envision a combination of these swerving videos, with the trailer for Russell Crowe’s new road-rage thriller “Unhinged.” Like Harvey Dent in “Batman” he would handle this swerving problem, not like the hero we deserve, but like the one we need right now.

It’s only a matter of time before these kids run into some redneck with a lifted truck, who just found out his wife has left him for his rival-highschool’s ’82 quarterback. That’s an order of magnitude scarier than slipping up and bumping into an almost parked bus. Just look at Crowe’s eyes in the thumbnail, and know that his gaze is fixed on a swerver who communicates with half words, and half emojis.

How would you react to being swerved? By honking, taking a deep breath, calling the police like a Karen, or…doing a U-turn and giving them a piece of your mind?

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