Massive Bike Party rides after Washington Post prints call for assaults on cyclists

On the 8th of July, the Washington Post published a vicious Courtland Milloy editorial encouraging motorists to run down cyclists. Cyclists on Twitter responded with the handle #BikeTerrorist, and on the evening of July 9 hundreds of riders took to the streets for the already-planned DC Bike Party.

Video-Bike Party takes Memorial Bridge

The Washington Post story appeared online on July 8, and was also printed in the July 9th print edition of the paper, giving it a lot more weight than a blog post. If the Bike Party had not been already planned, some kind of massive response would have been needed, I heard talk of a Critical Mass to the Washington Post's offices. Many at the Bike Party discussed the Washington Post's editorial, and people were furious about effectively getting a death threat from the areas most influential newspaper.

The ride was so massive that when the route went over Memorial Bridge, around the circle, and back, at one point the entire bridge was filled with bikers going both directions. Many times the streets were filled with wall to wall bikes as far as the eye could see.

Elsewhere, other web sites called out Courtland Milloy for blatent falsehoods in the story, such as the claim that most bikers in DC are yuppies whom she called "miliennials." One website published demographic data that people making between $75,000 a year and $150,000 a year were less likely to ride a bike than anyone else, with a slight rise above that income level and substantially more bike use among the poor. They also reported that Latino people were more likely to ride bikes than anyone else nationally. Elsewhere someone said anyone following the Post's advice to run down cyclists would kill more Latino riders than hipsters. I see a lot more car owners and car traffic in NW and in gentrified areas than I ever do among the rowhouses of NE.

Every time one of those condo owners does get on a bike, that's still one less car on the road, and one less chance for a pedestrian to be run down and killed. Gentrification is probably DC's single worst problem, but banning bikes would not keep a single yuppie out of say, Petworth. It takes rent control, a ban on "pop-up" renovations, and a ban on condo construction in existing neighborhoods to do that. Getting yuppies off bikes will put them in BMW's and SUV's and that's even worse than rich people in suits riding rental bikes and getting other bikers mistaken for yuppies.

One final point: Lately a lot of bicycle haters have been demanding licensing and registration for bikes. I will refuse to comply with any such law, probably most or at least most non-yuppie bikers will refuse. When DC had bike registration (but not an operators license) less than 5% of bikes were registered. Courtland Milloy remarked that the DC pigs used to routinely pull over riders of color. This was usually based on bike registration, and along with the fact that cops considered using the registration law to round up bikes at Pershing Park caused the DC Council to revoke DC's bike registration law years ago. Cops abused it, so they lost it!