bike - Critical Mass
Photograph by Noah Scalinon Flickr.
Rides are typically 20 – 25 miles in length and usually have 2,000 - 2,500 riders, with a peak of 4,300 in October bike Electric bicycle laws 2009. the leaderless structure of Critical Mass makes it impossible to assign it any one specific goal.
In order for the event to function, the only requirement is a sufficient turn-out to create a critical mass of riders dense enough to occupy a piece of road to the exclusion of drivers of motorized vehicles and pedestrians. Altercations with police and motorists have occurred.
Although uncommon, protesters are sometimes present at Critical Mass events to oppose the group s methods. Some bicycling advocacy groups have expressed concern that the subversive nature of Critical Mass and altercations with motorists could weaken public support for bicyclists. In San Francisco, an event known as Critical Manners was created as a response to Critical Mass. Bike Party rides on the third Friday of the month with a different starting point and route each time.
It is estimated that there are Critical Mass-type rides in more than 325 cities to date. The Corks sometimes take advantage of their time corking to distribute flyers. Critics argue that the practice of corking roads in order to pass through red lights as a group is contrary to Critical Mass claim that we are traffic , since ordinary traffic (including bicycle traffic) does not usually have the right to go through intersections once the traffic signal has changed to red.
The ride aims to build a community of cyclists and prove that bikes can co-exist with cars. Critical Manners rides through the city on the second Friday of the month, with riders encouraged to obey all traffic laws such as stopping at red lights and signaling. In 2007 there were conversations about starting Critical Manners in Portland, Oregon. An alternative ride named RideCivil formed in Seattle in late 2007. On August 14, 2009 there was a Critical Manners ride in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Critical Mass rides have inspired a number of other bicycle movements, that range from political movements to the Critical Tits ride during the yearly Burning Man festival. San Jose is the home to the massive San Jose Bike Party.
In that film, American human powered vehicle and pedicabs designer George Bliss noted that, in China, both motorists and bicyclists had an understood method of negotiating intersections without signals. Critical Mass is sometimes called an organized coincidence , with no leadership or membership.
This tactic consists of a few riders blocking traffic from side roads so that the mass can freely proceed through red lights without interruption. The term xerocracy was coined to describe a process by which the route for a Critical Mass can be decided: anyone who has an opinion makes their own map and distributes it to the cyclists participating in the Mass.
The term masser is sometimes applied to a frequent participant. Critical Mass differs from many other social movements in its rhizomal (rather than hierarchical) structure. In fact, the purpose of Critical Mass is not formalized beyond the direct action of meeting at a set location and time and traveling as a group through city or town streets on bikes. Critical Mass rides have been perceived as protest activities.
That term from the movie was applied to the ride, By the time of the fourth ride, the number of cyclists had increased to around 100 and participation continued to grow dramatically, reaching about 1,000 riders, on average. The name was soon adopted as a generic label by participants in similar but independent mass rides that were either initiated in various locations around the world at around the same time, or had already existed before 1992 under other names. Still other rides decide the route by consensus.
Corking allows the mass to engage in a variety of activities, such as forming a cyclone, lifting their bikes in a tradition known as a Bike Lift (in Chicago this is referred to as a Chicago hold-up), or to perform a die-in where riders lie on the ground with their bikes to symbolise cyclist deaths and injuries caused by automobiles, very popular in Montreal. Additionally, the movement is free from the structural costs associated with a centralized, hierarchical organization.
Critical Mass is a bicycling event typically held on the last Friday of every month in over 300 cities around the world. A 2006 New Yorker magazine article described Critical Mass activity in New York City as monthly political-protest rides , and characterized Critical Mass as a part of a social movement; Critical Mass rides vary greatly in many respects, including frequency and number of participants.
The routes of some rides are decided spontaneously by whomever is currently at the front of the ride, others are decided prior to the ride by a popular vote of suggested routes often drawn up on photocopied flyers. Authorities in New York, California and Oregon have expressed concern with the difficulty of coordinating with the riders, due to the lack of leadership. Because Critical Mass takes place without an official route or sanction, participants in some cities have sometimes practiced a tactic known as corking in order to maintain the cohesion of the group.
Traffic would bunch up at these intersections until the backlog reached a critical mass , at which point that mass would move through the intersection. For example, many small cities have monthly Critical Mass rides with fewer than twenty riders which offer safety in numbers Critical Mass-like bike tours with hundreds of participants took place in Stockholm, Sweden in the early 1970s. Shortly after this, some participants in that ride went to a local bicycle shop for a screening of Ted White s documentary Return of the Scorcher, about bike culture overseas.
and other secondary artifacts. Critical Mass rides have generated considerable controversy and public opposition. Corking has sometimes led to hostility between motorists and riders, even erupting into violence and arrests of motorists and cyclists alike during Critical Mass rides. The Rand Corporation produced a white paper entitled What Next for Networks and Netwars? analyzing the tactics of the ride, as part of an evaluation of decentralized decision-making for potential military battlefield use.
