Critical Mass Media
by Jacquie Phelan

I don't need to look at the daily horoscope or the Dow Jones in order to orient my day. Stars and money don't drive me; bikes do. I'm addicted to two local newspapers, and I hunt for stories and editorials about bikes, then look for how close the copy is situated to the car ads. There are other weirdoes like myself, believers in something resembling a conspiracy to prevent the social benefits of riding a bike from being broadcast by the press. It's not as crazy as it sounds. The bike industry simply can't pay for newspaper space as it did 100 years ago, but car companies can. Why would any newspaper want to irritate its biggest advertisers by highlighting "the competition?"

What gets me is how car companies have begun to take out big, glossy ads in bicycling magazines, effectively creating a sense of obligation by the magazine to the motor company.

These days, the ads would have you believe that modern cars are the solution for every imaginable modern ill, from air pollution to existential ennui to the numbing anonymity of the mass marketplace. Slogans like "answer the call of the wild" and "find your own road" want you to feel you're returning to nature by buying a new car. If you're innocent enough to buy the ad's promise of curvy roads with smooth, double yellow lanes, maybe you also think gridlock, road rage and air pollution are just theories put forth by a bunch of whiny scientists. But no, surely those three are palpable realities to sensate urbanites. The myth manages to twinkle alongside them like a hologram in a crystal ball. The fact is, there aren't too many curvy, empty roads out there anymore.

So how do we get free press coverage for two-wheeled travel? Answer: charter la fame. Beginning in 1992, bike commuters convened in downtown San Francisco on the last Friday of the month, just for safety's sake. Since many people saw one another all week, already half knew each others' routes. Someone called the gathering a 'commute clot'. Fortunately, that name died, replaced by the more arresting 'Critical Mass'. This term first appeared in a short subject film called "The Return of the Scorcher" by local legend Ted White.

The informal group rides gathered momentum and slowly emerged as a predictable happening. If it weren't so much fun, this political gesture (read: 'velorution') would never have ridden the wrong way up the one-way street of mass media. So many things are accomplished by simply showing up at Justin Herman Plaza: Manifestos are passed out along with route maps, opinions, and, lately, sheets explaining precisely how to deal with and what words to use with the press. You meet your friends. You make new friends -- pre-sorted. No need to wonder whether they like bikes or not, right? Kind of a giant mixer masquerading as a voting bloc.

The truly dedicated have been hardened to survive civic meetings, but it takes years of careful, consistent anti-boredom training. Not likely with a young, fretful bike messenger. And yet, it's a major concern for messengers and other bikers. I know I don't have what it takes to survive a transit forum, just point me toward the party. A political party, if you will.

Critical Mass managed to put important, impossible-to-glamorize cycling issues on the front burner of San Francisco politics. Reporters and cameras have to be there -- they're the ones in straight 'professional' garb. Overhead, media choppers stir up the air between skyscrapers. It's an 'organized coincidence' and a public relations coup unmatched by any other cycling advocacy event. Try as they may, the media can't convince viewers that S.F. is taken over by riot. The sheer numbers of peaceable cyclist with no 'agenda' (other than improved access and more safe routes for bikes) see to that.

The July 1997 ride was huge. Even so, the numbers of participants were underestimated by a factor of one-half, but the number of arrests were reported to be 250 when only 106 people were detained and ultimately a dozen taken in. But those details wouldn't sell newspapers, would they?

"There aren't 5,000 lunatic fringe bikers in our city. These are just ordinary people having a car-free experience," one rider told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter, adding "... and you can misquote me on that." (Now, in April, the papers are saying there were 10,000 riders, i.e., telling the truth.) What prevented this when the story was breaking?

By August, the riders were prepared to do the Mass differently: If the mayor and some motorists had a problem with the police escort and the 'corked' intersections (which enabled the Mass to cruise through in an unbroken stream regardless of the color of the traffic signal), then this time the riders would stop at all the red lights. This would effectively sever the Mass into smaller (less scary?) Masslets, but guarantee an hour-long 'period of inconvenience' instead of 10 minutes) for the same-direction motorists stuck behind them. Since then, there have been a few Masses, and all have happened without incident, save the fact that Mayor Brown now must allow for bicycle planning in all his lofty machinations for the future of San Francisco, because he knows the power of the mob even it's a perfectly well-behaved mob.

Last week Timbuk 2 messenger bags sponsored the annual Bike Coalition Christmas party and auction, which allowed the human-powered movers and shakers to meet and hang with their constituency. We ate. We competed for cool schwag, we didn't forget our checkbook, and we learned each others' names. The days of the messengers not connecting with the bureaucrats, and the commuters feeling like they're not 'real cyclists' because the don't race, are fading. The messengers ARE the message. They are the modern word-of-mouth conveyance and news medium. Thanks to them, we are finally united, even if the bike industry still can't afford the bucks for a glitzy double-truck ad (pardon the expression: that's magazine lingo for an ad using up two consecutive pages, usually costing tens of thousands of dollars). We are here, in the streets. Be sure to wave.