The midnight ride of a lot of bike riders
Rhea Becker reports on Saturday's Back Bay Midnight Pedalers ride around Boston:
... Among the places we visited were Brookline's Cottage Farm area, the Shirley-Eustis historic mansion in Roxbury, the Charlestown Navy Yard, the Rose Kennedy Greenway. All of these were refreshingly traffic-free in the middle of the night. We ended the 32-mile extravaganza at the harbor, where we arrived in perfect timing to see the sunrise.
Meanwhile, Tim Pierce reports on Friday's Courteous Mass bike ride through Back Bay, downtown Boston and along the waterfront. Unlike Critical Mass rides, participants agreed not to run red lights or block or "cork" intersections:
... Intersections were tricky. If you don't cork the intersections, it's inevitable that a large group of riders will get split up when the light turns red. When that happened on this ride, the riders in front slowed down or stopped at the curb to let the folks behind the light catch up. It seems like the alternative would be to allow the group to split into smaller pelotons (which is easier to do if the group has agreed on a route to begin with). ...
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It seems like the
I would have assumed they had some sort of route planned in advance or have all these bike rides been like a phalanx of ants rushing down the street in columns following whoever is in the front of the line wherever he went, only deviating from the path when a pile of bikes and bodies got in the way of the original path?
Critical Mass and Courteous Mass
I've done both rides now, and they work the same way: no predetermined route, no maps, no real leader. The riders follow wherever the person in front decides to go.
The only difference is that Courteous Mass riders take up at most one lane of traffic, and stop at red lights.
Advance planning consists solely of announcing that people should meet in Copley Square on a particular day -- last Friday of the month for Critical Mass, second Friday of the month for Courteous Mass. Critical Mass officially assembles at 5:30, but I've never seen it leave before 6:15. Courteous Mass left at 6 pm last week.
Really, they just follow the
Really, they just follow the guy in front?
My entire job consists of organizing people, things, and events so they all fall into place according to a predetermined plan, I guess I just assumed that people riding hundreds of bikes through the city would have some sort of preordained vision of where they were going.
Really
These rides are pretty much the opposite of how you do things. They are follow-the-leader, or occasionally "follow someone else" if more people want to go a different direction than the leader does. I've never taken such a ride all the way to the end, so I'm not sure how they break up.
Alright so my original
Alright so my original theory stands, they are essentially behaving like ants. Ants do the same thing , they follow whoever is in front, and if for some reason ants begin to break off from the pack there is a chance more will follow and a tipping point will ensue where a new path is formed.
Actually so called "corking" is the sort of the thing that ants would probaly do in a similar situation as well seeing as in some species ants use their bodies to create smoother paths or bridges to ensure the phalanx can make it through, then pick themselves up and follow the pack.
Ants also tend not to stop due to obstacles, they go around them. Oftentimes this entails spitting off into two streams then reforming on the other side of the object.
Sounds about right
And I suspect many riders treat them the way I do -- as an unusually roundabout way to commute home after work on a Friday evening. Once I get tired of riding, and the route changes from pointing towards home to pointing away from it, I split off.
"... participants agreed not
"... participants agreed not to run red lights or block or "cork" intersections..."
Whether drivers, bikers, or pedestrians, glad to see some common courtesy is still alive and kicking