The Last Friday Each Month at 5:30pm
Community Bike Ride
...a convivial event for cyclists of all ages and abilities
What is a Critical Mass Bike Ride?
Critical Mass is an event held on the last Friday of every month at 5:30pm in communtiies around the world where bicyclists and other self-propelled commuters take to the streets en masse.
While the ride was originally founded with the idea of drawing attention to how unfriendly the city was to bicyclists, the leaderless structure of Critical Mass makes it impossible to assign it any one specific goal. In fact, the purpose of Critical Mass is not formalized beyond the direct action of meeting at a set location and time and traveling as a group through city or town streets. Participants have differing purposes for the event, such as celebrating their choice of the bicycle for transportation, and enjoying car-free social time on city streets.
The first ride took place on Friday, September 25, 1992 in San Francisco. At that time, the event was known as Commute Clot and was composed of a couple of dozen cyclists who had received flyers on Market Street. Shortly after this, some participants in that ride went to a local bicycle shop for a screening of Ted White's documentary Return of the Scorcher, about bike culture overseas. In that film, American human powered vehicle and pedicab designer George Bliss noted that, in China, both motorists and bicyclists had an understood method of negotiating intersections without signals. Traffic would "bunch up" at these intersections until the backlog reached a "critical mass", at which point that mass would move through the intersection. That term from the movie was applied to the ride, and the name caught on.
Our monthly ride encourages bicycle commuting and motor vehicle awareness in a peaceful and friendly way.
Critical Mass is open to all, and it welcomes all riders to join in a celebration of riding bicycles. Why? Because bikes are fun!