There is a bizzaro land where cyclists ride free the last Friday of every month. Where cycling is supported AND promoted by the Mayor. Where there are no police helicopters or marauding scooters. Where the media does not blame cyclists if they are hit by a car. It is a place where bicyclists one day a month fill the streets and cars have to wait, and amazingly, despite all the bicycling, nobody dies ties in a traffic jam, emergency vehicles are not grounded, the city does not burn down, and the capitalist system does not collapse.

Many readers are probably already aware that San Francisco is the home of Critical Mass, born there in 1992, and that today Critical Mass enjoys the full support of the San Francisco government including The Mayor. This past Friday I had the luck to be in San Francisco for a best friend's wedding and was able to join the June ride.

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Freewheels

I have read reports that attendance is regularly over a thousand at Critical Mass in San Francisco. For me, as crowds get larger estimating numbers becomes harder. The ride started out of its traditional launching point, Embarcadero and Market St, which is on the water, and rode up Market. Several blocks up I paused to take some photos of the departing crowd. It was huge to be sure. Over and over throughout the evening I tried to gage how big the ride was. It was without a doubt at least 600 people. There was a point where the ride was split in two, and both halves were larger than most NYC rides. Seeing that I estimated the ride was at least 800 people. Perhaps it was more than a thousand! It was very hard to tell.

I can't give you a street by street tour of the ride, as this was only my third time to San Francisco ever. But I can tell you the San Francisco cyclists are not daunted by a few hills. I thought for sure the ride would stick to low lands to avoid hills. Au contraire mon fraire! Critical Massers in San Francisco are not just out for a leisure ride. They maybe riding with a child, they may be only casual riders, but they are not wimps. We criss-crossed the city from the coastal side to the mission and back again, we road up into the Height district and then road down and then up and then down and then up and down and up.

The Police presence is almost a side comedy in San Francisco. Most of the ride was unattended by Police. There was one occasion where we passed a squad car and four officers who were standing on a curb. They were parked on a side street off the drag we were riding. It may have been a complete accident that we passed them. On ocassion an officer on a Motorcycle would appear as we were crossing an intersection. They would observe the traffic and seemed to make sure that cars did not try to do anything crazy like cut into the ride or drive over a curb, or any other stupid thing cars are want to do. I know this all sounds crazy, cops holding traffic for cyclists. I could hear the groans of discontent coming all the way from Detroit. I almost shed a tear for an angry woman in a SUV who lamented out her window, "I'm already 15 minutes late!". Sad really. *sniffle*.

There was one altercation with the Police, as the ride has its brazen side. :) We passed through a large two way concrete tunnel at one point, which with the howling masses was like a haunted fun-house. Each direction was separate from the other, so when the pack reached the other side, everyone decided to u-turn at the intersection and loop back into the tunnel. We had cyclists going in both directions looping as if on a covered velodrome! Really a great time! But the Police not surprisingly where not into this level of brashness. So they came through with a van with high-powered speakers and blasted their siren in the tunnel. I thought this was a bit over the top, and actually quite dangerous to people's sense of hearing. The siren was purposefully blisteringly loud, and it had the desired effect, people scrambled out of the tunnel. The problem was there were cars backing up the exit of the tunnel and there were cyclists everywhere. So it was slow going for people to exit on one side. At a point the siren became too much to take and I simply stopped exiting and plugged my ears until the cops passed...which pretty much defeated their exercise. It would have made more sense and been much safer if the Police had used it siren a little, then told people to clear the tunnel, and then only used the siren again and only intermittently if cyclists were not moving along. However, as soon as the tunnel was cleared and we were moving on, the Police again disappeared into thin air. From a NYC perspective it is so surreal!

One thing I missed on the San Francisco ride was the cheers and chants of the NYC ride. There was plenty of great music and theater on the SF ride, several sound bikes and a guy with a siren and megaphone, who would pull up behind cars with his siren going, only then to reveal himself as a cyclist and not a cop. Try that in NYC! But San Franians are a bit mellower. My girlfriend and I tried to start up a "More Bikes, Less Cars" chant but we got no followers, and I think I was the only person who did a bike lift during the ride as we sat in traffic in China Town. If someone from SF happens to read this and has an image of that lift I would love a copy, it was a pretty poorly executed lift. The weight and balance of the hybrid rental bike I was using caught me a lift off guard! :) There was some general yelling on the ride but nothing compared to the noise the NYC ride makes. Must be the frustration here.

The San Francisco ride was not always the great success it is today. In its early years it had its own share of run-ins with the Police, including arrests. The history of Critical Mass in SF, and behavior the NYPD has stooped to bodes well for NYC I think. The Police ticketing seems desperate, and dooring people and driving recklessly is not going to win them anything. Yes the NYC Critical Mass ride is embattled. But Bikeblog reported again that June's ride was attended by about 300 people. There seems to be a hard core set of dedicated riders that are not simply going to let the NYPD and Bloomberg win. I wonder what will happen if the NYPD continues to persist with making groundless summons, filling the courts with this non-sense. There is some strategy to be worked out for NYC Critical Mass to retake momentum from Police, but SF shows that the ride can work, that Police and government efforts to close the ride can be defeated, and ultimately the ride can happen as intended and the city will not go up in flames.