It's a little like the end of the Wild West--there are enough "townfolk" out biking now that the cowboys and their rough brand of frontier justice don't speak for everyone. And with so many more bicyclists on the road, cyclists who don't obey traffic laws make it dangerous for everyone. Just biking up from downtown after lunch, I saw a cyclist stop for the light on Pine, then decide to blow through the red in front of a car coming down the cross street. Last night I had to negotiate around a guy riding the wrong way down the street, who cut in front of me to start riding on the sidewalk. Passive-aggressive Seattle has got to find a way to make sure cyclists know the rules of the road and follow them.

Hear hear, well said. I agree.

=v= There are nearly 500 Critical Masses happening every month, over 300 on this continent. That's thousands of rides over the years, the vast majority having taken place without incident. To use one bad incident as a pretext to demand an end to a long-thriving movement is faulty thinking at best, intellectual
dishonesty at worst.

Yes, this is not the only such incident, but motorist/bicyclist conflict predates Critical Mass and is an ongoing problem in other types of traffic. So long as motorists feel entitled to plow through us when they're delayed a few seconds, there will be a need for Critical Mass.
So long as they can commit vehicular assault with no worries about being held accountable for it, there will be a need for Critical Mass.

So long as they feel just peachy telling the press they were trying
"to be macho and scare people" but didn't realize the car was in gear (whoopsy doodle!) or "I thought I just knocked 2 bikes over," Critical Mass will be sorely needed.

We're not going away. In fact, the movement will be having its Sweet Sixteen birthday party in a few months. That's right, we're now old enough to drive. And wise enough not to.

I'm pretty sure Gandhi and MLK didn't allow lawbreakers to take part in their activist marches. Why does CM allow it?

Yeah, sorry, Jym, but in case you haven't noticed, the VAST MAJORITY of the public disagrees with CM and its tactics.

And if you've been around for 16 years, why haven't you been able to effect any real change, other than making more and more people loathe jerk bike riders in this city who fail to obey traffic laws and terrorize pedestrians on a daily basis? Great work!

@floop

so what you're saying is an eye for an eye; because a few motorists break the law that gives YOU the right to break the law? maybe the motorists are saying the same thing about riders like you?

what you are saying is exactly what caused the incident on friday and it's that elitist, self-important attitude which will likely get you killed one day - blowing through a red light.

"When I ride I roll through lights, take up whole lanes and generally don't obey traffic laws when it's in my interest..."

you are an asshat. there is no reason not to obey the traffic laws. i have no empathy for you.

It amazes me how much "stinkin' thinking" is going on.

Critical Mass is not a random group of bicyclists who just happened to be riding on the same street at the same time, it is an organized event. The website promoting the event lists a specific time and date and start location. That means it is organized and intentional.

The attempts to present Critical Mass as the same thing as a bunch of cars driving on the road only with bicycles is just absurd. You don't see a "Critical Drive" event every month where hundreds of motorists gather at Westlake and then drive around the city as a mob, "corking" side streets with their cars so all those drivers can stay together as a group and run red lights and stop signs in the process, do you now? No, you don't.

So no, Critical Mass is not the same as the typical car traffic. The most similar thing with cars I can think of is a funeral procession, where a large group of cars gets together to all go as a group, and the larger versions of this do have a police escort and its the police who take control of intersections and countermand the traffic signals so that the group of cars can stay together, but its not the individual drivers who are part of the procession who take it on themselves to do this.

I think Critical Mass here should be shut down. I bike to work most days, and I think Critical Mass is creating more problems for me as a bicyclist, and I see them as an obstacle to a better biking environment in Seattle.

Yo 1Digdug, you sorta forgot to mention that the old guy was running people over. Much like the Seattle incident, this looks like the motorist was every bit as much to blame or more so than the cyclists.

I know everyone views things like this with the filter of their belief system, but a woman's leg was trapped in her bike frame and the guy was running her down. If people did not force him to stop, she would have been severely injured or killed.

Edited or complete, that is clear on the video.

@Brad - those are examples where civil disobedience was the only means to a very justified end. It was the only way they could get the change that was needed because those people were not seen as equals and given no rights. Also, the violence in those examples ended up helping the causes by shedding light on them, the exact opposite of what's going on here.

@floop - I can and do share the road with cars everyday. I stop at lights, I signal, but I also take ownership of the road by moving into the middle of the lane when safety dictates (5th ave. anyone?) because I have the right to. Every once in awhile, I come across a driver not paying attention or an asshole and I yell to get their attention which generally works or get out of their way if my safety needs it. Getting places doesn't have to mean getting places first. You can stop to let that asshole driver pass and then go on your merry way with no death or law breaking necessary.
Breaking the law at all times because you think it makes you safer is just dumb. It ends up putting us all at further risk because of how it makes all bikers look to the asshole drivers.

@YourregistrationsystemiswhyIneverpost - two things, I didn't mean to imply that CM is just like traffic when I said "we are traffic too" is the reason many CM riders take part. By getting together in one big mass, some CM riders are saying, "hey, take note of how many of us there are. When you see us individually, remember that we are not just on the outlying roads. We are traffic too." It is something I DO believe.

That said, I don't want to see massive bike rides to call attention to us go away. I want to see them become truly organized. Starting at the same time every month is not enough. But massive protest has its place and taking over the streets in a sanctioned way may, with regards to this issue, may be ONE way we can affect change.

@virhecules - people have been trying to keep the reins on the most agressive riders looking to settle a score at rides as long as I have gone. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn''t. As I said above, an organized ride needs to happen. This will change the culture because there won't be any interactions between a 1 ton vehicle and a mass of bikes corking it.

@jauxmama - I do NOT think that the agenda of most people riding at CM is "jacked." We have valid complaints and valid suggestions for dealing with them. A few people riding can be jacked, but most of us just want more drivers to respect us and take notice of us, want the city to improve the bike infrastructure, and want to feel safe when we ride. What is jacked about that?

Seattle drivers, for the most part, are respectful. But there are some jerks in BOTH camps that make the rest look like douche bags. It's important to not generalize the group by the actions of the radicals.

I never understood critical mass, or the militant belligerence of my fellow cyclists (granted, I'm in Toronto, not Seattle, but I imagine it's similar). How does ganging up to ride in a totally unsafe manner promote bike safety? How does being righteously indignant or stubborn prevent you from getting injured by a car?

I don't disagree that cycling infrastructure needs improvement in most cities, and motorists need to be more aware of cyclists, but there absolutely must be a better way than critical mass.

agreed.

Like five12, I'm a Toronto resident. I used to live in Cap Hill, nearby the B'way Grill and Vivace kiosk. What these two cities share (along with a slew of others I've visited or previously resided) is a bona fide disconnect between cycling road infrastructure, motor vehicle traffic by-laws, and the people who use those roads.

Having road infrastructure designed for motorized transportation, there is no provision (or, in the limited places where there is some exception to this, no continuity between sections of town) for non-motorized transportation to safely and contiguously move about. Motorists (whether they ride a bicycle or not) recognize the road as a motorized thruway, not a bicycling arterial. Pedestrians (again, whether they ride a bicycle or not) recognize sidewalks and designated paved paths as walkways, not a bicycling arterial.

A bicyclist (or person actually riding a bicycle on one of those periodic occasions) is stuck: under traffic safety by-laws written (and traffic signage posted) with only motorized vehicles in mind, they're aware that sidewalk-riding is deemed illegal in most places (unless, for example, the bike has small wheels suited for children), but by the same token, following the same rules as motorized vehicles on a thruway engineered for motorized vehicles results far too often in irate motorists who don't want cyclists on that roadway and, in some instances, will do what they must to dissuade a pedaller to step aside or press them into breaking the law (e.g., moving onto a pedestrian arterial) to avoid being run over.

Moreover, when a cyclist is at a traffic light and stopped with foot on ground, but a motorist honks to force the cyclist to move so the car can make a right turn on a red light, this defeats the legal intent of following the motor vehicle traffic by-laws as a bicyclist. It basically foists a double-standard on the cyclist: follow the motorized vehicle rules, but *not* when it slows down a motorist. When this happens, it triggers unnecessary tension, and that tension ultimately builds up as the cyclist is confronted with a cognitively dissonant message which cannot be resolved then and there.

More gravely, places where the municipality sticks in a roadway bike path as a civil engineering afterthought, smack between the flow of motorized traffic and parked cars, is a death trap for a bicyclist. For a bicycling lane to be effective *and* safe, it must be divided by a physical berm, and not sandwiched between moving cars and parked cars. Ideally, both directions of non-motorized vehicle traffic should be integrated as a two-way, two-lane unit and physically separated by said berm (or concrete divider).

So it's not surprising that nerves get frayed on all sides of this dispute, and why the occasional CM goes awry in some sense when someone loses their patience or cool -- be it fixie rider, Subaru driver, or irate foot cop, or whether it's on Aloha Street, on the Gardiner Expressway, or in Times Square. The problem, with no solutions being offered within most municipalities, is that there's no functional infrastructure to accommodate bicycling as a bona fide transportation mode choice, and there's no coupling of bicycling-tailored by-laws (or road signage) specifically geared for bicyclists to adhere. What you get, thus, is a slight tinge of anarchy where everyone (motorist, bicyclist, and pedestrian) expect (and want) order, since order at least offers safety.

The tactic of telling cyclists to simply "go away" is a failure, and it doesn't remedy this quandary. People will cycle as long as there are bicycles, just as people will drive motorized vehicles as long as they're available. There must be another way, and unfortunately, this other way takes time, effort, thought, planning, and even money. The investment of these would be well worth it to lower the tension on all fronts, and it assures that sense of order over entropy.

So long as civil engineers, city planners, and city councillors are loath to review this catch-22, this tension won't abate, and there will always be a group willing to ride each month in CM, some of whom even getting so upset as to lash back or vent their frustration en masse, even resulting in sour grapes and fisticuffs. Find a system whereby all mode choices are adequately covered by physical infrastructure, signage, by-laws, and even licensing, or the problem will unquestionably continue to fester with infection.

Start with looking at already-deployed infrastructure in places like Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Tokyo, and even Portland and Vancouver. There's plenty of published scholarly research on these and other places where traffic integration is successful. Our cities need to do this forward-thinking legwork, or else it'll continue to be frayed nerves all around.

"It needs to stop being used as a way to intentionally piss off the drivers in this city by flaunting the laws."

I believe you mean "flout", not "flaunt".

I also believe you've got it perfectly correct. Critical Mass is a display of arrogance, poor manners, and just about everything that they're supposedly trying to fight against. Shutting down traffic is not the way to get people to respect bicyclists' rights to the road.