Friday I had the experience of participating in Critical Mass. If you’re not already aware, Critical Mass is a grassroots movement that began in San Francisco with the intent to demonstrate that bikes are part of traffic and that motorists need to share the road. I take it further to be a means of encouraging people to consider biking to work to reduce carbon emissions. They do this by gathering en masse and riding bikes through downtown. In our case, downtown Orlando.
Let’s think about how empathy is engendered, shall we? I think empathy and concern are born of seeing how another person might just as easily be you, or vice versa. It starts with seeing someone in circumstances unfamiliar to you and relating to how that someone must deal with them by doing the best that they can. When do we begin to feel concern for others? I think, similarly, it has to do with a point where we see that someone is really trying their best and that the world seems like it might be getting the best of them. Do these conditions apply to Orlando Critical Mass?
On Friday afternoon, at maybe around a quarter to six, a hundred and fifty bikes or so were gathered near the science center. I heard a pop, and then a high-pitched whooooosh, and then everyone went, “Awwwww!” as they realized that someone’s tire tube had just blown. The guy and the bike in question was right in front of me. My friend and I noted with some disdain that it looked like he was not only preparing to leave, but also seemed intent on making his friend leave too, in an unspoken and misguided demand for solidarity. My friend and I determined that should tragedy befall one of us, the other would carry on. This means she agreed to leave me behind, alone, if my tire should pop. Hm…
But someone came to his rescue. Another cyclist had a repair kit at the ready and a spare tube, and once he’d fixed it all up, the announcement was made that we would soon begin. Squinting into the afternoon sun, we were reminded to have a safe ride, and off we went. Bikes of all shapes and sizes took to the street. Tattoos seemed mandatory; socks were optional. There were trick bikes, double decker bikes, classic ten speeds, cruisers, and fixed gears. everyone rode in a huge pack, probably at least a quarter mile long and ten or fifteen bikes wide. I’m sure it was quite a spectacle. Lots of people stared, some asked questions, others honked. Some of the honking was friendly, some not.
Let’s talk about the “not.” At times, crossing major thoroughfares, we ran not one but two cycles of the traffic light. We consistently took up three or four lanes of traffic. We turned left on red, a hundred plus of us. Oddly enough, unbeknownst to me, my own mom was in her car waiting for us to finish turning left against the light in front of her. Do you think she felt a warm compassion for cyclists who are crowded off the road or squeezed by motorists or occasionally hit? She did not. Did it make her feel like cyclists are just communting like the rest of us and have the same right to use the road as a car? Not really. What I think it made her feel is “here’s a bunch of punk assholes who are breaking the law six ways to Sunday and now I’ve missed the light again. I hope someone gets a ticket.” The persuasive power of our spectacle and any point we may have been making was lost on her because she knew that we were not doing our best to be part of traffic, we were hijacking it. She knew that if she were in our shoes, she’d be stopping at red lights, not running them with a look of blank oblivion, or worse, smirking mischief, on her face.
Did our ride make police officers feel more duty bound to protect cyclists as they move about the roadways? Apparently not. One cyclist near me was saying how he’d gotten a ticketed for running a stop sign on some lazy residential street downtown on a Saturday morning. Sounds like vengeful nitpicking to me, so how are we doing getting people to see bikes as a viable alternative to car commuting and as fulll-fledged members of city traffic rather than nuisances? The cop that escorted us down Robinson on Firday did so to make sure that we stayed in the right lane, and he wasn’t that nice about it, either. “Stay in the right lane. There is no reason for you to take up all three lanes. You do not have the right to ignore traffic signals. If you run a red light, you will be cited.”
It sounds to me like Critical Mass is defeating its own purpose. By the time the group had crossed Colonial again and was headed back into Winter Park, the pack had been broken up by forced obedience to the traffic lights and many of us continued to obey the signals for the remainder of the ride. If Critical Mass is supposed to effect change, it can’t be an obnoxious obstacle to the regular flow of traffic. You don’t make people feel sympathetic to your cause by alienating them and infringing on their rights.
With that said, it was really fun and I will definitely be there next month. I might be a little late arriving at Stardust, though. You know how traffic can be on a Friday afternoon, red lights and such.
