A route map from 2006!

Note: There will be a pre-Mass ride to route scout on Monday, the 21st, at 7:00pm. Meet at Dolores Park, across from the Dolores Park Cafe. And bring your bike!

Last month, someone I know threw a route together on his own initiative and sent it to me, and I posted it here. The month before, I and others suggested we visit the Palace of Fine Arts as our final destination.

In each case, I heard from a few people that they felt the use of a route or destination was uncharacteristic of Critical Mass. As on person said on our Facebook page, “I thought the whole idea of doing CM was that the route is not fixed. IMHO, wIth a fixed route there is no fun doing CM.” Another said “the Mass is supposed to be democratic and spur of the moment, at least how I have experienced it for the last 10 years.”

It’s true that we haven’t had many route maps in the past 10 years (the last I recall was in 2006, on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and that was a rarity), but in the early days of Critical Mass we did them all the time. Each month we would visit a different location — the Presidio, Ocean Beach, Twin Peaks, even Sausalito were destinations. We didn’t always stick to the script, but we definitely mixed it up.

As the commentators noted, this isn’t the most democratic way of deciding where the ride will go. But I would argue that neither is having the handful at the front of the ride make the decisions for everyone behind them. In my experience, the people at the front are universally loud, aggressive and male (and I include myself in this description). What about people who may not be so loud and opinionated? What about the folks in back?

Another disadvantage of spontaneity is that we seem to visit the same locations each month. For the last 5 years, we have been through the Broadway Tunnel and Union Square almost every time, as well as several other familiar locations. We rarely get out to the avenues or other neighborhoods — and that’s too bad, since we want the people of San Francisco to see us!

One solution is to try doing what the San Jose Bike Party does, which is regular bike rides to route scout beforehand. This way we have a route, but many people who are interested can contribute to the conversation. Also, we can use the Facebook and Twitter feeds, and the comments on this blog, to throw around ideas. And, if the route is unworkable, it can always be switched up by the riders. Nothing is ever set in stone, and all routes are just suggestions. (And we don’t need to have a route every month!)

So, as I noted above, there’s a pre-Mass ride scheduled for Monday the 21st at Dolores Park at 7:00. In the future, we’ll try to make these semi-regular, but you can get updates via Facebook & Twitter.

If you and your friends have thoughts about what direction Critical Mass should take, I am eager to get your voice out there. Post something in the comments, send me ideas to me here, or post to Facebook or Twitter and I will try to help circulate your feedback. We can use social networking, blogs, and face-to-face meetings to make Critical Mass as democratic and decentralized as possible.

Art by Hugh D'Andrade

As I noted last month, San Francisco has benefited over the last decade and a half from a resurgence of bicycling as a mainstream traffic option. Since 1992, when Critical Mass began, we have seen the following positive changes:

• More bikes on the road, increasing every year
• Massive and unprecedented increases in the membership of bike advocacy groups
• More funding for bike infrastructure
• Increasing respect from motorized traffic

Was Critical Mass a help or a hindrance to this positive change? To many, it is obvious that Critical Mass is hurtful, pointing to the anger it often inspires in motorists. Others, myself included, claim a net positive influence from this monthly ride, which after all was a major meeting place for the city’s bike-nerd intelligentsia — and in many cases inspired the very same individuals who were instrumental in making these changes a reality.

Many commentators wrote to remind me that my view lacks evidence (“correlation is not causation,” etc). And I respond by pointing out that the other side is equally lacking in evidence: the common view that Critical Mass has hurt the cause simply has no proof to back it up. None. There is no empirical evidence, that I know of, on either side of this argument.

Well, if empirical evidence is not available, we can find plenty of anecdotal evidence. I interviewed some of the bicycle activists that were involved in both mainstream bike advocacy and in Critical Mass. As you’ll see, some of what they say resonates with my argument, some of what they say negates it. You be the judge!

Did SFBC encourage Critical Mass? Was there much overlap in the two groups?

Dave Snyder, head of SFBC from 1991 to 2002, regular participant in Critical Mass since ride 1:
I think we were most helpful simply in not vilifying, criticizing, or opposing the ride. We tacitly approved of it, and listed it in our newsletter every month. We probably helped turnout a little bit, which might have been important but I think most of the outreach was more direct than through our newsletter, and we probably helped by just telling the mainstream bike crowd “this is OK.”

Do you think SFCM contributed to a boom in SFBC membership?

Dave Snyder: Slightly in the beginning. We would occasionally go to the events and sign people up. Then, with the crackdown [in 1997], our membership jumped about 50%. Huge! I personally thanked Willie Brown for our increase in membership.

Mary Brown, SFBC activist from 1996 to 2003 and regular Critical Mass participant:
Not directly. Early on (c.1996) Joel Pomerantz bought 100 or 500 subsidized memberships to SFBC and handed them out at Critical Mass. I remember that the renewal rates for those memberships were dismal. The real boom in membership only occurred in the last five years or so, and honestly I can’t figure out what precipitated such a tremendous increase in paid memberships. Likely the cumulative impact of many factors that’d been building for years.

Joel Pomerantz, founding newsletter editor for SFBC and co-founder of Critical Mass:
No impact. I handed out 20 to 40 memberships (Mary’s memory inflated it) and my memory is that it was hard to find people who really wanted them, and harder than I expected to find people who live in SF coming to Mass, at that time.

Do you think SFCM contributed to particular negotiations or bike projects?

Dave Snyder: In one instance, absolutely. It was during the huge explosion in CM and the crackdown in 1997. We asked for the city to “implement the bike network” which we agreed for the time being meant 8 key bike lane projects linking the city (2nd, 5th, Howard, Townsend, Polk, Arguello, Cesar Chavez, and 7th Avenue). The Mayor agreed to hearings on all 8, setting up a dynamic where we had to get something or else it would look really bad. We were careful to choose 8 projects which were not the easiest ones to implement. We eventually got bike lanes on 3-4 of the 8, hardly a resounding victory but more than we’d have gotten without CM, for sure, and setting us up for bigger success in the future. (As an aside, it’s worth pointing out that more than a decade later we’re still missing bike lanes on 2nd, 5th, and Cesar Chavez.)

Mary Brown: I doubt that CM currently has much of an impact on negotiations, but back in the day it was a large beast that loomed over various proposals for bike projects. It very clearly alerted decision-makers as to the existence of a large, unruly, and pissed constituency. Didn’t push any projects over the edge, but the general awareness of a large constituency was very helpful.

Joel Pomerantz: I’m sure policy-makers think about the looming monster of CM when they think of bikes, and the scary part is probably that they can’t fit it into their category system. It’s not a holiday, nor a parade, nor a demonstration, nor a sport. What is it? It’s not an organization or particular group of any kind. The police similarly have no easy way to fit it into their command and control system, but they probably understand the nature of it more than policy-makers who have never seen it’s many dimensions.

Was the net impact of SFCM on cycling issues helpful or a hindrance during your tenure?

Dave Snyder: Absolutely helpful. Not perfectly helpful, but, you asked about the net impact and undeniably it was great.

Mary Brown: Net impact? Helpful, absolutely. But it’s important to note that the people doing the actual nitty-gritty organizing around specific bike lanes/proposals, (i.e., presenting at neighborhood meetings, lobbying the BoS, building support from seniors, pedestrians, etc.) often had the hassle and image of CM thrown back at them. There is and always have been a fluctuating backlash against CM.

Joel Pomerantz: I’d say, if Critical Mass is good for bicycling, it’s mostly because it helps define a culture, which imparts strength to that culture. But that’s not empirical. If it’s bad for bicycling, then there must be a lot of other things hiding in the alleys that are really great for bicycling, because something is making cycling pick up incredible popularity. I guess that’s part of your metrics argument, eh? That’s not empirical, either. More excellent evidence that Mass has helped is that it spreads, keeps changing, and has never been overtaken by aggression — at least not when compared to car driving, which seems to turn calm folks into raging lunatics.

Any thoughts on SFCM at present? Has it outlived its usefulness?

Dave Snyder: Hell no it hasn’t outlived its usefulness. For me, it’s not that fun any more for a variety of reasons, and I think that it needs a bit of a reinvention or rejuvenation to achieve a better role in city life, but it’s still a chance for people to bike in a crowd feeling safe the way they don’t or can’t on the streets typically. And it still gives a glimpse of what the street could be like. But it’s worth pointing out that there are other events like that now that didn’t exist when we started Critical Mass, like Sunday Streets (or Open Streets as folks around the country are trying to rename it). I don’t think it’s that useful to mainstream bicycle advocacy as it was in the mid-90s, but that was never its main reason for existence anyway.

Mary Brown: CM used to be at the center of my social calendar, but for me personally, it got boring. I was having the same experience over and over — a fun, oft-exhilarating experience, but the sameness got to me. And I got sick of the confrontations. When I do go to CM (usually just on Halloween) I’m thrilled to see how many new riders have claimed it as their own. Riders that were in junior high during what I think of as the golden age of Critical Mass. It’s honestly also weird to barely know anyone at Critical Mass, whereas, in the 1990s I knew or recognized a large percentage of riders. Despite its professed lack of organization, back in the day, it was organized by a loose confederation of CMers. A great deal of thought and care went into creating a positive, corked ride with thoughtful missives. Not sure where that’s at today.

If you have evidence, empirical, anecdotal — or chemical for that matter — that argues one way or another on this point, I would love to hear it. Please share your thoughts! Thanks!

Tail end turns on Powell from Geary as the traditional loop around Union Square commences. San Francisco, Critical Mass, January 29, 2010.

That’s pretty tiny, but luckily a crew from KPIX was there to make us feel important.

Turns out, KPIX joined us to report on the news (brought to you by Honda!) (they repeat their absurd claims first reported last summer) that SFPD Chief George Gascon is reviewing department policy on Critical Mass, as part of his commitment to cut crime by 20%. Here’s the video:

Of course the police view our monthly ride as a nuisance and an expense — that comes as no surprise. But this report raises the question: if Chief Gascon were somehow able to stop the ride, what percentage would he claim he had reduced crime? I can hear him now… “Red light running by cyclists is down by exactly 4%!”

If the cops think they have better things to do with their time, we agree! (Let’s not begin to discuss their spending priorities, and how using phalanxes of cops on overtime to stop a 2-3 hour, once-a-month bike ride is a remarkably dumb use of public resources!) We’d love to see the police escort disappear (though we acknowledge that they have been helpful in calming dangerous motorists). But the idea that our monthly ride should be anywhere near the top of the list of law enforcement priorities for a city with real violent crime issues is laughable!

As Justin points out in the video clip, the police tried and failed to stop Critical Mass once before. In 1997, Mayor Willie Brown sent the cops out to ticket, harass and arrest dozens of cyclists each month, with absolutely no effect. In fact, the rides just got larger and larger, ballooning into rides of 5000 or more each month. In the end, the mayor backpedaled, the cops backed off, and we’ve had a sort of truce ever since.

If the police try again to prevent our popular movement, the same thing is guaranteed to happen. More people will show up, and we’ll just invent new tactics — a welcome opportunity, since our ride has been entirely predictable for years now. Hey, maybe we could try skipping Pee Wee Herman Plaza in favor of meeting in 4 or 5 separate locations. With ubiquitous cellphones and twitter messaging, organizing that sort of decentralized response ought to be even easier than it was 13 years ago!

We’ll stop short of asking Gascon to “bring it on,” but only because we’re not macho idiots, and we know he has more important work to do. Gotta get a jump on that 20%!

Averaging between 750 and 3000 riders on any given month, the birthplace of Critical Mass keeps going strong, in spite of the total lack of promotion or organizing during this past decade. But many of us long-time riders have been dismayed to see the persistence of silly, aggressive, and counter-productive behavior that makes the Critical Mass experience worse for our natural allies on buses, on foot, and even folks in cars who might join us in the future. Not to mention that it makes it worse for us cyclists too, to the point that many former regulars have stopped riding. Part of the frustration for us long-time riders is that we went through all these issues quite intensively back in the early-to-mid 1990s, and to see them cropping up again is a harsh reminder that we’ve done a piss-poor job of transmitting the culture, the lessons learned, from one generation to the next. Plenty of current Critical Massers were under 5 years old when we started it, and the ride’s culture has been more loudly and consistently transmitted by distorted representations in the mass media than it has by those of us who put our hearts and souls into it for years.

Chris makes a nice plug for our blog, but the truth is that it’s going to take more than internet chat and blog posts to change the culture of Critical Mass. It takes face-to-face communication, and hopefully that’s where all this discussion ends up: in conversations between real people in real space in the public streets of the city, talking about how we can change life for the better.

Link: Streetsblog San Francisco: A Lost Decade for Critical Mass?

The ride in Budapest routinely and dramatically surpasses all other Critical Mass ride records for size. Why is that? On the one hand, why is it that the ride is so big? On the other, why aren’t all of them like that, in every large city?

It’s easy to point to some of the superficial causes for CMB’s size: It’s only twice a year. The weather’s mild in April and September. Budapest is a capital city. It’s mostly flat. Bikes have been popular for generations in Hungarian cities. But to get to 40,000 riders and more, there’s clearly more going on.

Budapest Massers, while cooperating with authorities, lift their bikes in the air en masse, a gesture that has come to represent defiance and territorial reclamation in American cities.

Rather than point to all the promotion, civic organizing and volunteer effort that creates the ride (and there’s a lot), I’m most fascinated by the underlying reasons for all that effort. In this article, I’m going to build a hypothesis that the success of the ride is, as elsewhere, largely a reaction to intolerable interaction with cars.

Historically, motorized transportation shifted from railroads to automobiles slowly in most places. The first private automobiles made a nasty reputation for themselves by getting stuck in mud easily, being loud, scaring horses, breaking arms (before the crank starter was replaced with a “self-starter” model), and careening through crowds of pedestrians trying to innocently cross the public thoroughfares. The problem of mud, alone, was at such a level that it influenced habits of etiquette into the 1970s, when I was taught to walk between a lady companion and the curb, so as to protect her from splashing mud.

Let’s compare the American story with the proverbial frog placed into a cool pan of water and slowly boiled before it can know what’s happening clearly enough to jump out of the pan.

Now let’s look at the frog in Budapest. Budapest under the Communists was a place of public trains, buses and streetcars, bicycles and serious pedestrian ways. People shopped on foot, near their homes—even in the new suburbs. Commuters used “tram” streetcars instead of cars. The first subway in the world was built in Budapest.

And, of course, there were cars—but not very many. Only the well-connected and politically-favored could drive with any regularity, and an undercurrent of discomfort existed, reflecting a combination of fear, envy and resentment against power and special privilege, including car use. In 1974, only 80 out of each 1000 people in the population owned cars, and fewer still were using them for commuting. [Data from the Hungarian Institute of Transport Sciences.] Compare that to ownership rates of 480 per 1000 in the U.S. at that time.

When the decade of the 1980s ended with the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet control over Eastern Europe, the white-hot culture of the automobile came blazing in. Suddenly the frog felt the heat. Unlike in places where roads had to be slowly paved and extended, an infrastructure capable of supporting high-speed car use was already in place, inviting its use.

The opportunities offered when Communist corruption was replaced with Capitalist corruption (and marketing) were similar to those in the recent U.S. housing scandals when banks were newly allowed to make housing loans even to those unable to afford them. Suddenly in Budapest more than half the adult population made it one of their top priorities to own and use a car. People who could barely afford one bought cars to enhance their business opportunities, and their self-respect in the new eyes of a scorching fast culture. By 2004, the car ownership rate in Budapest was 350 per 1000 residents.

To summarize, the Budapest frog went from cool to hot in a very short time.

And it jumped.

The Budapest Critical Mass is evidence of that leap. A quick look at how Critical Mass is viewed in Hungary gives insight into the confused nature of the politics simmering in reaction to the onslaught of cars and dangerous streets on a large, accelerated scale. When I arrived in April 2006, I saw major promotional materials about the ride in the most unlikely of places, by San Francisco standards.

A contingent of hundreds of route monitors leads the ride. The uniformed volunteers peel off in pairs wherever safety monitors are to be stationed. The streets used for the ride are already closed for the entire day by the police, so Budapest's monitors generally act as a buffer between the ride and pedestrians.

The free tourist booklets advertising hotels and nightlife were promoting it—on the front cover. Full size billboards beside the Danube River were promoting the ride. In the newspaper editorials, party bosses and union leaders from all political lineages were promoting the ride. Recumbent bicyclists were promoting the ride with large sign board trailers.

Needless to say, I had to participate. So I borrowed a bike from my hotel, went out on the street, and flagged down every cyclist I saw. Each had a different answer to the question of when and where Critical Mass Budapest began. This is how I learned that the ride started in multiple places, each contingent setting a time corresponding to how far it was from the official congregation point along the river.

When my section of the ride had gone two miles down the river, across the bridge, and then two more miles back north along the other side, I could easily see the crowd across the river. The official starting point was still thick with contingents just beginning the Critical Mass route. We were told that there were 32,000 riders that day. I don’t doubt it.

What I found, though, was a ride with a balance of celebration and politics that I couldn’t quite calibrate. The ride took over the city, with police cooperation, road closures, official shirts and safety monitors. But I couldn’t find one person who could explain why this outpouring hadn’t yet translated into policy changes suppressing the growth of the automobile. Every ride since has topped 40,000—and yet city officials are still promoting infrastructure for cars, trying to balance it with new bicycle measures.

The ride gets going slowly, because of the extremely dense crowd.

As I’ve seen in my visits to rides from Chapel Hill to New York, from San Francisco to Rochester to Rome, the draw of a city’s Critical Mass seems to correlate directly to the absolute quantity of bicyclist frustration on the streets. If the infrastructure makes bicycling a non-issue, as in Amsterdam, or the overwhelming control by cars suppress bicycling altogether, there is no Critical Mass ride. In locations with a small number of cyclists or very polite automobilists, there is a small ride. Where there is a difficult street experience and a large number of bicyclists, there is guaranteed to be a large Critical Mass. Nowhere do these conditions converge so dramatically as in Budapest.

For a few years now, the Budapest frog has been jumping. As we pass the twentieth anniversary of the end of Communist control in Hungary, when will Budapest’s frog find its way out of a pan that has grown very large?

On the weekend of Critical Mass in Budapest, our hotel is sponsoring a sports car rally. That's my mom complaining to the tour leader about the long bus ride she's about to be forced to take. Our attempt to spend a week on a riverboat was thwarted by the "hundred year flood" that devastated the region. Is there a metaphor in that?

It’s a bit ironic in the home of the dotcom boom a decade ago, and at the epicenter of the Critical Mass bicycling phenomenon, no one has put together a decent website for our town. We decided it was overdue. One reason is because the culture of Critical Mass hasn’t been well transmitted from old-timers to newbies, and we hope to remedy that a bit here. Critical Mass started about 17 years ago, and it’s wonderful and mysterious that it has been such an ongoing event, never missing a month all these years. And of course it has spread to over 400 cities around the world.

Since the conflicts with the City and police in 1997, a tacit truce has dominated the formerly fractious relationship. In the past decade no one has taken a lot of responsibility for orchestrating routes, producing flyers or stickers, or being super involved in corking or leading the ride. Instead, a remarkable spontaneity that has often benefitted from serendipity and good luck, has kept the ride mostly fun and interesting. Nevertheless, a noticeable repetition in the past two years has become a bit tedious.

Do we really need to ride through the Broadway and/or Stockton tunnels EVERY month? Are there really still bicyclists showing up who think it’s cool, or radical, or important, to block oncoming traffic on the opposite side of two way streets? And how boring is it to “circle up” in intersections, pointlessly blocking traffic in every direction? Why is there so little xerocracy now? Essays, arguments, news, etc. have long been absent from the ride… politics? What politics?

We have some simple “Critical Mass Do’s and Don’t’s” that we think are helpful lessons learned from many years of doing this. And we will be hosting a moderated discussion on our blog, where everything is welcome, but we will reserve the right to delete extraneous and hateful material. (If you don’t like our edits, please exercise your 1st amendment right to start your own damn blog.)

We’re committed to a flourishing of intelligent debate and dialogue, and a public process of advancing whatever “success” we can claim for the Critical Mass phenomenon to other, deeper issues too.

Join in!
–Chris Carlsson and Hugh D’Andrade, August, 2009