Bikes versus cars is stupid. Assholes drives cars, assholes also ride bikes. I don’t understand why so many people can’t understand this.

I rode CM in PDX last night, and had a great time. Everyone thought it was dead, but it wasn’t. My post this morning to the PDX CM list:

I think we started at the park with apolice car, and they had asked the group to ride to the river where the bicycle poliewhere. For a bt we had two police cars and five bicycle police. They were very helpful with both the cars and the bikes corking at times when a light turned mid group.

At one point the group started blowing through lights that were already red and there was a brief incident with a motorist but the group was apologetic and nothing came of it. The police asked us to stop running lights, and shortly after they all left. Something was said about it not being a good use of police resources.

After we rode the max up to the zoo, and down, without escort or incident.

I felt like there were a couple in the group that wanted to use the mass to control the streets, but there were also a couple that were leading that were very reasonable and concerned about safety.

The mass was called because it was getting late and many riders didn’t have lights.

Some who had ridden CM elsewhere were uncomfortable with the police presence. I felt the police were very reasonable with the group and thought that having a few police bikes mixed throughout the ride showed great cooperation, almost like they were part of the ride rather than an escort. Nobody was cited for anything or given official warnings. Someone asked them about corking and they were alright with it.

I think the interaction comes down to everyone being reasonable. Don’t abuse the mass to control the streets, but definitely ride diferently to keep the mass safe.

At least one person randomly joined the mass, one person asked me where it started and said they would come next month, and at least a dozen asked if it was CM and then cheered us on.

So all in all, I think it was very positive.

Not to be outdone, SEA CM had a fun bike/car incident. Some asshole in a car in a hurry started hitting bikes, some asshole on a bike started smashing windows and shit. It’s really awesome how lame the news reports are. Ryan McElroy has an good witness account. King 5 has a terrible, fucking inexcusable piece of writing. The Oregonian follows suit. Scott appears to be summarizing events, along with a reasonable take on it all.
Bikes vs Cars aside, let’s talk about news. I work for a company involved in online advertising indirectly. I hear a lot about how a lot of advertising is moving online, away from traditional media like newspaper and television. I haven’t bought a news paper in a very, very long time, and I only read one if I’m alone in a restaurant and one happens to be sitting there.

Blog posts and other online sites that are well linked, that is, that reference their news sources are the future. If you read these articles, they’re all written as fact, or at least as what is “apparent”. Ryan says he offered to be interviewed but nobody did. Who knows why, but the point is that you can’t trust news sources. Not that you can trust a single person more, but you can trust a mass of sources.

It’s an interesting analogy to open source communities which is interesting, as I’ve been talking about them recently. Communities are self policing, pretty naturally. Media is not, apparently. If we assume everyone is going to serve their self-interests, then what are these groups self interests? I’ll let you answer that one for yourself.