Mike W. in a recent email suggested that  a reason  motorists are
menacing and killing us is that we annoy them, especially Critical Mass
riders and he further admonishes us not to ride with them, and support
the police,  and so on.
Having ridden with CM in San Francisco and Gainesville I would like to
respond.

Critical Mass is a global movement and has tens of thousands of
participants.
when I rode with them in SF( where it started in1992) over 5000 riders
showed up(July 97).It was estimated that recently   over 30,000
participated in Prague.

The thrust of the "movement"(there is no organizational structure and no
membership) is bicylsts rights advocacy
 make cycling worldwide a viable means of transportation and to end the
dominance of the "car culture" which treats bicycling as a novely at
best and generally an annoyance.

Its main means of expression are monthly mass rides which take place all
over North America and Europe.  (you can find a CM directory on the
web). Riders are not encouraged to tie up traffic or to be
confrontational with motorists but cyclists rights are asserted to their
fullest and conflict is probably inevitible.  After all,  the movement
was started by SF bicycle couriers and the core "membership"  tends to
use bicycles as transportation more than recreation.
 Mike W. says that CM reminds him  of those people in Miami who riot and
burn up their own neiborhoods.....I  think a better analogy is the civil
rights movement which had groups at all degrees of militantcy, from
Black Panthers to NAACP to those who warned Black people not  to push
white folks for fear of a backlash.

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