Collision of Wills in San Francisco

Cars get no love at this end of California. Take this month: First the toll for crossing the Golden Gate Bridge was nearly doubled, to $5. Then an anti-car Web site had to beg sympathizers to stop gluing “I Kill Children” fliers onto bumpers in the East Bay. Then, as part of its Sept. 11 moment of silence, San Francisco mandated a four-minute blackout of green traffic lights.

And more dings and arrows are coming down the pike this week. On Friday, radical bicyclists will convene here to celebrate a decade of wheeled uprisings on these city streets.

It’s the 10th birthday party of Critical Mass, the in-your-face bike movement whose last-Friday-of-the-month mass rides have spread from the Bay Area to displace and hassle motorists worldwide. Thousands of cyclists are expected to gather downtown for the anniversary swarm into afternoon rush-hour traffic.

“Everybody is pretty excited and looking forward to a fun celebration,” said Chris Carlsson, a 45-year-old San Francisco graphic artist and Critical Mass co-founder. “Although I don’t know how enthused the city is going to be.”

Neither does the city, as it turns out. On one hand, demonstrations are a way of life here. On the other, Critical Mass has a history of complicating the city’s famously delicate traffic situation; the movement’s leaderless, grass-roots structure verges on anarchy, and routes are withheld until the last minute. Even the least eventful rides swamp evening commutes with a surging sea of small Lycra shorts and big plastic helmets and shring-shringing bike bells.

“Three hundred people rode last month, even with Burning Man,” said a twentysomething “masser” who complained that the ride made her late to the annual counterculture art rave. This ride, cyclists predict, will be bigger by far, though probably smaller than the headline-making 1997 ride that drew more than 5,000 cyclists and ended in violence. Also, like most things in San Francisco, it has a left-versus-lefter political component. In this case, the Critical Mass anniversary coincides with a separate municipal anti-car action, San Francisco’s first Car-Free Day.

Based on a French experiment that caught on in Europe, that event would bar car traffic from part of the city during business hours, encouraging alternative forms of transit. Unlike car-free days in Europe, San Francisco’s observance won’t really free much of the city from traffic for a full day. At the behest of the affected merchants, it instead will clear only four blocks of Montgomery Street downtown from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.--a compromise that backers say will promote future cooperation and that Critical Mass riders say has made the event pointless.

“If you’re going to have a car-free day, it ought to last all day,” said Kay Hoskins, a 36-year-old event planner and regular Critical Mass rider. “My guess is that when 2 o’clock rolls around, a bunch of people are going to just stay out there in the street, no matter what the police say. I’ve talked to people who will be going down there. I might just be one of them.”

Such only-in-San-Francisco political theater underscores the city’s almost un-Californian ambivalence about cars. If California had an anti-car-culture capital, it would be this city.

About 485,000 motor vehicles a day roll in and out of San Francisco, but they get little of the respect accorded to those in, say, L.A. Populist revolts against freeways--both proposed and existing--date to the 1950s; in the last one, the city voted to do without the Central Freeway, damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The scarcity of real estate--and of political will to build parking garages--has squeezed parking capacity to the point that, at any moment, hundreds of drivers are circling in a vain search for a meter. Front lawns have been paved over by garage-deprived vehicle owners. Cheap tricks have arisen to facilitate the hoarding of curb space, from strategically placed traffic cones and fake “No Parking” signs to the practice of covering fire hydrants with upside-down metal trash cans and then parking next to them as if they weren’t there.

Other adaptive behaviors, meanwhile, have stuffed the city with scooters, skaters, skateboards, Italian motorcycles, motorized wheelchairs, Segways and countless other wheeled gizmos. And each has its lobbyists.

Thus, in the last decade, narrow city streets have been narrowed further to triple the space allotted to bike paths. Street signs have been installed, scolding that bicycles have as much right to the road as do cars. Anti-car lobbies have forced the city to extend crossing times at crosswalks and to close chunks of Golden Gate Park to motor vehicles on weekends. A pedestrian campaign against the new Segway has City Hall scrambling even before the storied invention has hit the market. Ridership on public transit is six times the state average. Politicians hoping to get elected make it a point to say nothing nice, ever, about SUVs.

It is in this climate that Critical Masses, Car-Free Days and other anti-car actions have come to flourish and--this year, at least--to collide. Local alternative transit advocates say they were planning their own Car-Free Day for next year when San Francisco Supervisor Sophie Maxwell picked up the concept from the visiting former mayor of Bogota, Enrique Penalosa, and made it her pet project.

“When they told me the date, I suggested they wait, because Critical Mass could end up getting all the attention,” said Marilyn Smulyan, who sits on one of the city’s transit committees. “But I was told the supervisor wanted to do it this year.”

Maxwell said that easing into the car-free idea with a small, experimental project seemed preferable to pushing for a big event whose logistics might undermine it. And although she had hoped to schedule it for the previous week to coincide with Europe’s car-free observances, she couldn’t because City Hall staffers were just coming back from a three-week recess. There would have been too little time for planning, and “we just wanted to get something started,” she said.

And, she added, the city is prepared should Critical Mass attempt a disruption. “We’re very concerned,” she said. “The police are going to be there.”

Critical Mass’ Carlsson says that if the authorities end up pushing people back onto the sidewalks, “they will essentially have had a bogus event.” In any case, he said, “stodgy, moribund, government entities” can’t compare to the excitement of Critical Mass.

Founded after the Gulf War, the movement rose from the belief that, as Carlsson puts it, “we’re living in a world rushing toward insane destruction and barbarism driven by the oligarchy.” He and his friends saw “car-free behavior” as a way to subvert the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels and the general forces of globalization.

But, he said, they also sensed that “guilt-tripping and scaring people” might not be the best way to wean them from Big Oil. Their solution was a consciousness-raising “party on bikes” that “would infect people with an idea of what the world could be like” if they were to “refuse to participate in the nexus of power.” Forty-eight people--about four times more than the organizers expected--showed up on the last Friday of September 1992 for that first ride.

Since then, the Masses have grown to the far-less political thousands, and spread from Albuquerque to Zurich--317 cities at last count. Not all have been as successful as San Francisco’s. Los Angeles, for example, has three Critical Mass groups--downtown, in Los Feliz and on the Westside--but Ron Milam, executive director of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, says only a few dozen bicyclists regularly show up. The biggest L.A. turnout, he said, was during the 2000 Democratic National Convention, when police arrested and jailed 71 Critical Mass riders for two days. The charges were dropped, and civil class actions are pending against Los Angeles County and the LAPD.

The 1997 police clash in San Francisco--which occurred after months of tension between Mayor Willie Brown and the bike lobby--also ended in mass arrests and charges that later were dropped. Brown has since been more attentive to bicyclists, and disruption and publicity have diminished, though attendance at most rides continues to average between 500 and 1,000 cyclists.

Meanwhile, Critical Mass has claimed credit for transit progress (although more conventional transit lobbyists say its contribution has been overblown). One city report this year found that the number of San Franciscans who commute by bicycle had doubled since 1990, a development that Carlsson attributes to hard-won municipal traffic improvements.

“There is this sense that you can’t ride here because of the hills, which is bunk, and this sense that it’s scary to ride because the streets aren’t safe enough, which is true,” he said. “But under the pressure of mass seizure once a month, this city has made some changes. There are now bike lanes all over town that didn’t exist before.”

This is why Critical Mass has kept up the pressure, though the movement is far less ideological than it used to be. Some riders still come to demonstrate, but for most, a Mass is more a street scene, delightful to behold, if not to be caught in. Families ride next to drag queens; hippies pedal next to yuppies. Tourists gawk from sidewalks. Halloween massers have coursed through the city in costume; Deadhead massers rode in tie dye after the death of Jerry Garcia.

It is an intimate, even old-fashioned spectacle, and San Franciscans have come to cherish their bike movement even as it honks them off. On Friday, as the dominant paradigm gets yet another monthly subversion, the bicyclists plan to demonstrate that the mixed feelings are mutual--they’ll be handing out random anniversary gifts.