I enjoyed this time-lapse video of the Toronto Critical Mass, from a few years back. Has anyone done one of these at a San Francisco ride?
June Critical Mass from young elephant on Vimeo.
Critical Mass is a mass bicycle ride that takes place on the last Friday of each month in cities around the world. Everyone is invited! No one is in charge! Bring your bike!
Next San Francisco Critical Mass: March 28th, 2025, 5:30pm, at Embarcadero Plaza (foot of Market Street).
I enjoyed this time-lapse video of the Toronto Critical Mass, from a few years back. Has anyone done one of these at a San Francisco ride?
June Critical Mass from young elephant on Vimeo.
Today’s Chronicle has a story about Adam Greenfield, a local filmmaker and blogger that decided to try a year of car-free living and who documented the whole thing on his blog.
My first reaction to the story was irritation. As my friend A.S. put it, “I’m sick of ‘my year of’ projects that get turned into blogs and then mediocre books.” It’s annoying to have one person singled out for doing what so many have decided to do with less fanfare.
But I appreciate that there a thousands (alright, dozens) of Chronicle readers in the Bay Area, and many may have never encountered anyone with a story like Adam’s. Those folks can always use a little education.
And I also loved this bit:
In 2004, Greenfield came to San Francisco to get his master’s degree and discovered Critical Mass. He had never imagined a peloton of like-minded political cyclists, reclaiming the city streets in a show of force.
“That first Critical Mass ride, I saw the bike as a vision of the future,” he said.
Critical Mass is constantly denounced by those who say it hurts the cause more than it helps by inspiring so much rage in the hearts of angry motorists. But this anecdote tends to confirm a point I have making for quite a while now to anyone who will listen: the anger Critical Mass creates is outweighed by the positive vision it inspires in the hearts of its many thousands of regular participants — a vision of how life could be better, and a demonstration of how many of us there are that want to make real change.
Critical Mass has already been successful in changing the world. We can see and feel those changes in our lives as cyclists, every day. The city streets are safer and more bike-friendly now than they were 18 years ago, and that’s no accident. Those of us who ride in Critical Mass can’t take full credit, but we know we’ve been a big part of the inspiration.
When there’s an accident involving a car and a bike, many people make the common-sense assumption that risky behavior by the cyclist is probably to blame. Everyone knows that bicyclists all ride without helmets, don’t have the proper lighting, and are running red lights and stop signs with increasing frequency. If there’s an accident, it must be the cyclist’s fault, right?
That assumption is almost entirely false, a new UK study has found:
The study, carried out for the Department for Transport, found that in 2% of cases where cyclists were seriously injured in collisions with other road users police said that the rider disobeying a stop sign or traffic light was a likely contributing factor. Wearing dark clothing at night was seen as a potential cause in about 2.5% of cases, and failure to use lights was mentioned 2% of the time.
Those are some pretty tiny percentages — hardly the type of numbers that would justify a strong police bias towards the assumption of bicyclist guilt in everyday accidents. Meanwhile, the study reports that more than 25% of accidents occur when the motorist strikes the bicyclist from behind — and that figure rises to 40% for collisions that take place away from intersections.
With adult cyclists, police found the driver solely responsible in about 60%-75% of all cases, and riders solely at fault 17%-25% of the time.
This is a study of accidents in the UK, and these numbers would likely shift around some if this same study were done in California. But it’s a pretty good indication that the key to preventing bike accidents and reducing the loss of life on city streets is not to freak bicyclists out about the dangers of biking — insisting they wear hideous florescent outfits and dorky helmets, for example — but to educate motorists about the need to share the road, and build infrastructure that alerts motorists to the presence of people on bikes. Lives depend upon it!
[photo by dbking, CC attribution license — thanks!]
Streetsblog comments
December 22nd, 2009 by hughillustrationWe read the comments section so that you don’t have to.
I loved this comment on Chris’s recent streetsblog piece, so I am posting it here in its entirety. I suspect that this welcome attitude from a motorist is more common than not:
This note from a supporter of Chicago’s Critical Mass claims that city’s ride has also led to a rise in bike activism:
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