Seattle Critical Mass Needs to End

For the record, this Seattlest is a daily bike commuter who knows and appreciates the rights and responsibilities of biking in an urban environment. We also have a friend who was beaten by cops a couple years ago during a Critical Mass demonstration. While this post isn’t specifically about Friday’s incident at Seattle's Critical Mass on Capitol Hill, the event (and one just as scary in New York City) moved us to share these thoughts.

With a dire need for improved bicycle infrastructure in Seattle coupled with an upswing in the number of bike commuters of late, Critical Mass is no longer the best, or really an effective, way to draw attention to our cause. We think events like those that took place on Friday night (smaller versions of similar events during the ride are much more common than you think) actually hurt the mission of CM: raising awareness of bike riders’ rights to the road.

Critical Mass needs to change. Dramatically. It no longer speaks for our point of view as a regular bike rider in this city and, we think, does not speak for the general bike riding constituency of Seattle.

In our experience, there is at least one flare-up between drivers and riders, if not more, during each ride. Although most of them amount to nothing more than some yelling back and forth, each one pushes the two sides slightly further apart in the long run and makes the idea of riding a bike on city streets slightly more terrifying than it already is.









But every time there is a bigger incident during a Critical Mass ride that catches the attention of the whole city--which seems to happen every year or two--the media jumps all over it and the bikes vs. cars debate flares up again.