Photos: here. Videos: Critical Mass, Massers, Bicycle Accident, Golden Gate Park Cork e Tunnel Adrenaline
In the last 15 years, on the last Friday of the month, San Francisco’s bicyclists meet up to demonstrate that cities can be for bicycles, too.
The event is called Critical Mass. The main idea is easy: meet up as a group and go around in the city. But when the cyclists are 4000 or more and they ride all together, there is the chaos: a critical mass that blocks the city. The critical mass movement has no leaders. At each corner in the ride, the group decides where to go. Everything seems to be casual.
Media coverage is intense: six television trucks, five helicopters, an airplane and a fixed television cameramen at the start.
I’ve seen every type of bicycle, I think (A bird, a bmw bike, a rickshaw, bikes that can be ridden lying, an old bicycle ridden by the world famous soccer player Zola, High bicycles and double bicycles). A lot of people wear strange costumes or hats like this hammer hat and this petroleum field hat. The cops were riding, too. I made a video with a patchwork of massers: video
If you ask the massers why they are causing all this traffic, they just say: “We do not cause traffic, we are traffic”. The base idea is to go around the city riding a bike. But what can they do with red signal lights? The way they developed is what they call corking. Only the head of the big mass halts on red lights, then some massers block the intersection, staying in front of the cars. Other massers give change to the corkers, until every bike in the group is passed. Some people were asking the police to stop the corking of the massers, but most of them are happy with the massers. Sometimes a driver will start to become afraid and will start to honk their horn. If it happens, all the riders start to laugh and scream.
Sometimes, all the massers stop in an intersection. Yesterday, it was two times. The first was at an intersection with an highway. The second was when the riders met a motorcycle group. There began to develop a little tension then, because the motorcyclists started to burn their tires on the road. Then, each biker went down and started to lift the bicycles up, often with much screaming. Here is the movie.
The whole event was 4 hours long: We started at 6 p.m. from Embarcadero heading to Fisherman’s Wharf along North Beach. Then we headed to downtown and then to Golden Gate Park and finally back in the Haight neighborhood. Then two or three laps around Union Square, screaming like Indians in battlecry. At the end, we were still along Market Street heading toward Mission, where we ended tired on the grass of Dolores Park. At the end, it was 9:30 p.m.. We had ridden 20 miles. Video.
When the world famous San Francisco’s slopes descend, it is very fear-provoking. Everyone goes down very fast, screaming. You think that if one cyclist crashes, then everyone can go over the top of him. At first, I started to film the descent, but at the first down slope, I had an accident. Here is the movie of the accident. I hurt my right elbow and my left leg. My jeans were torn (I’ll not send the photos of injury). At that point I decided to put two hands on the bicycle and put away the camera, but at night there was a great descending tunnel. I filmed it here.
It’s great to think that the massers say that they want a city better for bicycling. If you hear it and you come from the metropolitan Roman Jungle, you want to laugh. By the way, next big critical mass is the 25, 26 and 27 of May: The Rome interplanetary Critical Mass.
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