Commuters Mount Up for Bike Day : Pollution: Thousands of drivers pedal to work, but noted cyclist Mayor Riordan takes his car because of a meeting.

Neither potholes nor car fumes nor showerless workplaces could keep them from their appointed rounds on Thursday.

Thousands of car-loving Southern Californians tried pedaling to work Thursday for the first statewide Bicycle Commute Day.

One Huntington Beach woman who pedaled to her Long Beach job said she enjoyed the two-hour ride but wasn’t ready to wake up every day at 4:30 a.m. to get to work by 7:30. Nonetheless, Regina Savage said, “I had a really good time.”

The bike day event, which included a rush-hour challenge between cyclists and motorists in Pasadena (the cyclists won but only because the driver took a wrong turn), was designed to promote the benefits of zero-polluting bicycling.

In Sacramento, San Fernando Valley Assemblyman Richard Katz tested an “electrically assisted bicycle” during a bike parade at the Capitol.

Despite the show of force, cycling enthusiasts have a long uphill climb before they make the pedal-powered drive chain a serious threat to the internal combustion engine. While many employers provide showers, changing rooms and even financial incentives to employees who wheel to work, only about 1% of Angelenos do so, compared to 15% of Japanese.

On the Big Day Thursday, even the mayor who loves to bike, Richard Riordan, chose gas power over muscle power because, an aide said, he had an early meeting.

It isn’t easy to bike on streets filled with hostile and inattentive motorists--though Los Angeles once ranked 10th in Bicycling magazine’s survey of the country’s most “bicycle-friendly” cities. Bike-jackings have become a problem. And you can’t take your bike on most MTA buses. Government has increasingly recognized the importance of bicycles as a form of transportation. Caltrans last year opened a bike lane along a two-mile stretch of the Moorpark Freeway in Ventura County. Several cities, including Los Angeles, employ bike coordinators. And the MTA plans to spend more than $100 million in local sales tax funds over the next two decades to build 2,000 miles of bikeways in Los Angeles County.

Bike day was a big success in Long Beach, where 141 city workers wheeled to work, including the police chief--nearly triple the usual number, reported city employee transportation coordinator Sharron Daniels. Daniels confessed that she did not bike to work Thursday. “I do carpool,” she noted.

“It was pretty good,” said Sylvia Dellinger, a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power engineer who biked for the first time from Glendale to her Downtown office. “It gives you more energy during the workday.”

For Riley Geary, the six-mile bike commute between his Monterey Hills home to his job as a seismic analyst at Caltech in Pasadena is a warm-up to his weekends. Geary, who does not own a car, often rides at night to reach his date--in West Covina.

“It’s a bit of a long-distance relationship,” said Geary, who estimates that he bicycled about 14,000 miles last year--about as much as the average Angeleno drove.