Not sure what they fella is trying to prove here, but his stupidity amused me.
NY is a funny city to cycle in. I've hired bikes a couple of times and explored quite a bit. There are good cycle lanes in places which people tend to use recreationally, in particular on the west side park area and central park itself. But the rest is just a jungle, worse than London. Traffic speed tends not to be really fast fortunately but there is a wide variety of vehicles unaware of cyclists.
I rode the full length of Broadway once, completely oblivious of cycle lanes a lot of the time and hit a car moving through what I thought was stationary traffic. Fortunately I could spoke tension the bend to fix it.
Anyhow, the video was indeed around beyond c-chat for a while ;-) It really helped raise awareness of the laws and crappy police attitudes, so became a positive thing for NY cyclists, rather than a silly thing about the cyclist himself.
Now there is a city bike scheme, a good endorsement of cycling, that it can help make the city better, although some public figures have complained. So along with the hipsters, the lycra louts, the take-away delivery guys (on badly fitting mtbs going the wrong way) are added normal people as tourists into the mix and perhaps the feeling that cycling can be for anyone just getting from a to b on a night out, and with it a feeling that you don't have to be part of a particular tribe to use the roads of NY, be that of a 2 or 4 wheeled variety.