Critical Mass – A mass of individuals critical to starting a movement.

Every last Friday of the month, hundreds to thousands of bike riders from all over Los Angeles congregate on the corner of Western and Wilshire to partake in an epic ride to the west side and back, a total distance of about 30 miles. This ride is known as Critical Mass. 

Started by just a couple dozen riders in San Francisco years back, the movement quickly spread and is now an event that takes place in every major city in the US. Numbers have escalated from just a couple dozen to thousands of bike riders on average. In fact, Los Angeles’s Critical Mass at one point was the largest bike ride in the history of the US. 

So what is all this commotion about? What are these crazy bikers trying to say anyway? While it has been perceived as some sort of political protest by outsiders, most participants see it simply as a celebration for the joy of biking. 

A really cool aspect of Critical Mass is that up until recently, it had no leadership structure. It’s literally just a bunch of cyclists who meet at a specified location and go wherever they want, collectively acting as a single unit. It’s kind of like a school of fish, or a flock of birds, in which the direction of the group is decided mainly by whoever is in front at the time of the decision making, and everybody else just follows. 

A few years ago however, LAPD decided to step in and take matters into their own hands. The LA Critical Mass ride is now guided by the police department’s cars, motorcycles, and bicyclists who lead the route that they themselves pre-determine. The LAPD’s involvement has garnered both positive and negative feedback from the ride’s participants. While the ride no longer has the natural, spontaneous feel it had before, the LAPD ensure that the group of riders remain safe from motor vehicles by blocking off roads and intersections. It’s really quite a site to see hundreds of stopped cars whose drivers are staring in amazement at something they never even knew existed. The even cooler thing is that these car drivers usually are not angry at this strange obstruction in their path, since they know that this is an event organized by the LAPD.

However, a very sad incident occurred just last week during Critical Mass. We were near UCLA biking down a huge hill and multiple people lost control of their speed and struck a wall at the bottom. While most of the riders rode away fine, one teenage boy was not so lucky and passed away before paramedics could arrive at the scene. He was not wearing a helmet and was most likely riding a fixed gear bike with no brakes. However, this last piece of evidence has not been officially confirmed. 

With this sad day in the history of Critical Mass, it is likely that LAPD will become stricter in enforcing safety regulations for the ride’s participants. However, it is unlikely that the ride will be forced to an end. What the LAPD does will have no bearing on the continuation of Critical Mass, since its beginnings were from individual riders who had no hierarchal structure.