Jeremy Chase

I was thinking about bicycle advocacy, and how Critical Mass relates to it.. This is what I’ve come up with.

Critical Mass is bicycle advocacy if you make it so. Unfortunately, many riders are more interested in hating the cars than promoting their bikes.

In my mind advocacy is any activity that promotes, educates, or funds the cause. CM fits the description for education by showing people that many people do ride their bikes. However, if we don’t make an effort to actually educate them we are just rolling by. Personally, I always give a cogent answer to anyone who asks what we are doing. I think that should be the bare minimum.

Any CM’er lashing out at the public is hurting us all. This should be obvious, but group mentality takes over and CM turns to rubbish.

I like riding in CM, but right now, I don’t think it is anything more than people on bikes who annoy cars.

Jeremy

I just did my first Alleycat, and I am tired as heck. An Alleycat is kinda like a scavenger hunt; basically you ride your bike all over the city stopping at checkpoints. It tests your knowledge of the city since the next checkpoint is just an address, and it tests your urban riding skills. I rode my fuji fixed gear, but many people had geared bikes for the ~20 mile adventure.

Since this was my first I wasn’t sure how I’d do, but I was confident in my ability to navigate the boston landscape. I don’t have the official results, but I ended up roughly 24th out of 62 riders.

Jer

Tonight I timed my trip back; 9.5 miles in 38 min 02 seconds, for an average of 15mph. Quite a bit slower than the 18.6mph average I did the other day. The zinger is that I drove my car today.

I rode Emily’s Langster to Babson today because I wanted to see how riding a freewheel bike would work out. I think the gearing is a little too tall (48×16), but all in all it was much easier. On my way back I covered the 10.1m in 32min30 seconds, averaging 18.6mph including stops at lights, etc.

I was riding with my messenger bag, boat shoes, and I even stopped to help someone at the bottom of a hill. She was unlocking her bike right as I was getting mine, and she had a really cool old 3 speed. She had gotten a head start on me because I had to run up to another building, but I saw her pushing her bike up a hill a mile or so from Babson. I stopped to see if I could help but her left pedal was just totally missing! Oh well..

Jeremy

Last night Emily and I were going to volunteer at the Boston Bike Film Festival in Harvard Square. The following sucked big time.

Emily and I were riding over the BU bridge toward cambridge, and we were going to go left onto the bike path and ride to Harvard Sq. The traffic was really light fortunately, and she went to go left up onto
one of the island walkways. I called to her right as she was going up and she changed direction as a result. Unfortunately I was riding around the outside to go around the island she was riding up onto, and we grazed each other then she went over the handlebars.

I was totally fine(physically). She hit the ground first with the sides of both hands, then chin, upper lip, nose and front of her helmet. Her chin was bleeding pretty bad and she chipped 3 teeth. Her nose and lip were just lightly hit. We locked the bikes up and grabbed a cab to the MGH ER. They were worried about neck/brain injury mostly, but she was fine. They did x-rays and she was fine. So they just gave her 2 stitches to the bottom of her chin and bandaids for everything else. She will be totally fine, thank GOD!!!!

I literally just got home from picking the bikes back up, and her mom just picked her up to go back to CT to see her dentist for some new chompers.. it was one of the worst things I’ve ever had to experience. I love her so much!

Please wear your helmet! always!
Jeremy