Whups... the 'Why We Ride' part:

Why We Ride

This is the 162nd consecutive month that San Francisco bicyclists have gathered to ride in Critical Mass. The world has certainly changed in thirteen and a half years, but the compelling reasons that draw us together every month are still very similar. In the earliest days of Critical Mass, riding together provided a euphoric alternative to the isolated danger most daily bicyclists face. These days San Francisco bicyclists are seldom alone on the road in the large north-eastern part of the city, from Bernal Heights and Twin Peaks to the bayshore. But we still live in an atomizing culture that seeks to reduce life to a series of cash transactions. Critical Mass exemplifies a rare and exuberant repudiation of that pecuniary logic, as it re-creates every month an authentic, open-ended, passionate, temporary community.

Community—a much abused word and concept—continues to animate and attract us. In our hyper-individuated lives, where we try to choose the terms of our existence, to wrest meaning from a banal world of shopping choices, pointless jobs and vacuous cultural commodities, coming together in Critical Mass continues to defy the prevailing limits of post-modern capitalism.

With news of rapidly melting ice sheets, widespread deforestation and crashing biodiversity, and other climate catastrophes, premonitions of tsunamis, earthquakes and floods overwhelm our individual coping abilities. Alone we cannot face disasters, and it doesn’t matter if they are “natural” or “unnatural.” Pandemic disease, rapid erosion of arable lands, overstretched water supplies and droughts; the sky really IS falling! Riding bicycles is not just a quiet statement against oil wars, it’s a practical demonstration of one component of a new way to live. Together in community, bicycling is one way we are beginning to re-engineer the nuts and bolts of our lives.

The human connections made during the hundreds of Critical Mass rides are both serendipitous and essential. Perhaps more important still is the practical experience gained of a mobile, self-managed, fluid and democratic social event. Our imaginations are permanently altered by riding in Critical Mass—not just ours but also the people who witness it. And we will need all our connections and imagination to make the necessary adjustments in urban living as the perfect storms of political and ecological breakdown beset us in the years to come.

A 1996 Critical Mass cyclist characterized that time as the “golden era” of bicycling. A decade later our bucolic rides remain a euphoric antidote to the steady diet of bad news, venal and corrupt business and government, and worsening ecological catastrophes. It’s important that we recognize the deeper implications of this euphoria too—we are learning while experimenting; we are inventing new ways to coexist; we are managing complex realities from below; we are reliably re-producing webs of human pleasure and conviviality. Ultimately Critical Mass is so much more than just a monthly bike ride.

Thanks for coming—talk to strangers!

—Chris Carlsson, February 24, 2006, San Francisco