Sol — Vancouver, Canada

I was biking up a small hill at night, had some good momentum, of course all my lights going, and all of a sudden this guy in a parked car, with no lights on whatsoever, opens the driver's side door. He did this when I was about 2-3 feet from the door, and if I hadn't swerved, I would have gone straight into the metal and probably snapped the door off it's hinges. Unfortunately for me, swerving to avoid the door led to my kneecap smacking into the edge of the door as the driver instinctively slammed the door shut. I couldn't walk, much less bike, for about an hour, and my mom picked me up and took me to emerg to see if I had any damage. I didn't, but the triage nurse digging into the gash on my knee to extract the road gravel was damned painful. The guy was nice and helpful and very sorry about it, and it wasn't really his fault, I just was frustrated because I had no way of knowing that the door was about to open, and he hadn't checked his mirror before opening the door or he would have seen my lights.