Critical Mass, Happy 15th Birthday! September 28, 2007

Critical Mass celebrates 15 years of free-form bicycle advocacy today! Founded originally as “Commute Clot” in San Francisco when a few bicycle messengers wanted to ride home safely in numbers, it quickly grew from 48 riders, doubling each month.

Spread as a viral meme, Critical Mass began in Rochester when Mark Anderson, a post-doc in English, took up the cause in 1998 and began plastering the University of Rochester with xeroxed posters. Aggression toward automobiles, however, left it feeling less like a celebration of cycling and more like a protest, and participation began to plateau and then decline. Eventually, Mark left Rochester to teach at Hobart & Smith in Geneva NY, and Critical Mass Rochester fell apart.

Then in October 2004, Tobin Fricke, a graduate student in physics fresh from Berkeley, began reorganizing and reviving the rides. Though work now takes him to Pasadena, the rides here continue, approaching 70 riders in summer.

Continue the meme. Join in. Happy Birthday, Critical Mass!

Official Website: http://ROCwiki.org/Critical_Mass