This Is How Riots Start
This via UltraRob on Twitter. One of New York’s ‘finest’ assaulting a cyclist during a Critical Mass thing:
Full story on the New York Times’ City Room blog.
Cyclists are a minority group (less than 5% of the population), and in other circumstances similar to this, the result’s been rioting. Maybe it’s a good job that we’re all a bunch of sandal-wearing, peace-loving, bike / tree-hugging hippies at heart, who just want to ride our bikes.
I’m somewhat ambivalent about Critical Mass, as I think it’s too antagonistic, and likely to do more harm than good in the long run by widening the sense of Us & Them. If you want more drivers to get out of their cars and onto bikes, there are probably better ways to achieve it. But there’s never an excuse for this sort of violence from the police.
Workout:
- Type: Cycle
- Date: 07/29/2008
- Time: 11:06:31
- Total Time: 1:08:00.00
- Distance: 18 miles
- Average Speed: 15.88 mph
We had an incident at our Seattle critical mass this week.
The local news reports it as “a mob of cyclist attack motorists”… but the eye witness accounts tell a different story… a guy in a car that was parked on the side of the road gunned his engine, and bolted into a crowd of cyclists running over two and then attempted to speed off. Some of the cyclist chased him down, slashed his tires (to prevent him from escaping) and then smashed his window (they also claim that was to stop him from evading police)… when the cops got there, the let the driver go and arrested two of the cyclists.
Seattle had an incident this month as well. Lots of conflicting press on who was to blame the cyclists or the car drivers. Here’s one… you can search for more.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008074874_webcriticalmass26m.html