After gathering at "Pee-Wee" Plaza, we headed west on Market Street and, for the most part, mostly headed west. Go west, young Mass!

We arrived near City Hall after squiggling through downtown and some ups and downs on the hills at Union Square and in the Tenderloin. We started riding circles around Civic Center Plaza until I got dizzy and all turned-around.

When the spinning stopped, we continued west (where else?), over to Hayes Green. This is a lovely little park on a spot that used to be a freeway overpass. There are roads on either side, but they're narrow and pretty much ideal for biking.

Alas, Hayes Green only lasts for one block. Then it's ...

... Octavia Boulevard! This is a stretch of street that also used to be an elevated freeway. Tearing down that freeway was a great victory for our movement and our city. The Boulevard in its place is designed to create livable space in a neighborhood that had been darkened and displaced by the structure.

The design features two narrow streets alongside the big open boulevard in the middle. The idea is that the narrow streets will be safe for pedestrians and bicyclists, while the cars have at it in the middle part. Unfortunately, the middle is a bit too wide open for my tastes, and while it's beautiful (and safer) when Critical Mass is on it, it's got a problem with leadfoot motorists. They see a big road and hit the gas, especially after getting up and over the crest of a hill, which gives them a wide-open vista down to a freeway onramp.

The California Highway Patrol seems to have thought that we, too, would be inspired to zoom down onto the freeway, so they blocked it off with police cars. Silly, we're going west! We hung a right on Market Street, instead.

Up Market we got to the Duboce Bikeway (across from a gas station selling the stuff for over $3/gallon). This is the site of another victory or three for our side. We've got the bikeway itself (though it is alas only one block long); we've got a beautiful mural along the bikeway; and the Market Street Railway refurbishes old streetcars right alongside the bikeway.

It wasn't designed for hundreds of bikes at once, though, so getting Critical Mass through there was kind of like threading a needle. The ride may have split here: some people continued up Market, and I'm not entirely sure they met back up with us again.

Superheroes at super-speed.

We rode the Wiggle through the lower Haight, duly-marked with bike route signs (another victory!), then west, ever west, on Fell Street, along a bike lane that connected us to the Golden Gate Panhandle (yet another victory!). There were too many of us to ride the bikeway on the Panhandle, so we just rode Fell into Golden Gate Park proper, and onto JFK Drive.

JFK Drive, unfortunately, is not the site of any recent victories. 39 years ago, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition made a little over a mile of this street carfree on Saturdays and holidays, opening it for biking (especially for kids and other novice bikers), skating, walking, and all the other things people are supposed to be able to enjoy in a park.

It is the single most popular and successful park program, and we've been trying for years to extend it to Saturdays, as well. Unfortunately, there's a museum in the park, and some of the museum people claim this hurts their business. Their own statistics show exactly the opposite: the carfree Saturdays are when their attendance is highest!

The museum people have money and friends in City Hall, so they managed to influence the Mayor to veto the "Healthy Saturdays" initiative, shortly before he hopped on a bike himself for his annual Bike To Work Day photo-op. Thus does Mayor Gavin Newsom, much like el Presidente Arbusto, embody the old saying:

On a happier note, this ride featured a number of biking superheroes, including Banana Man (at right). They're part of a Saturday morning cartoon superteam called the Ritual Coffee Club Bike Posse, but I'll say no more lest I reveal their secret headquarters and the secret elixir that gives them their powers.

Superheroes move super-fast, of course, which is why these photos are so blurry.

We took a short detour to spin around the music concourse a few times. The aforementioned museum is situated here, and the museum people have an 800-car garage built beneath it, with a dedicated entrance outside the park (so you'd think they wouldn't need to overrun JFK Drive with cars, huh?). In exchange for the garage, the concourse was mandated by voters to be a "pedestrian oasis," but the museum people have done all they could to ruin that, too. Cars cut through there all day and all night.

So the concourse clearly needs some traffic-calming, and Critical Mass was happy to provide some.

My friend and comrade Coralie was visiting from Brooklyn, and phoned back to see how our fellow Critical Massers were doing in New York City. NYC CM is suffering from a pointless police crackdown, much as SF CM did in 1997-1999. Let's hope that city wises up.

New York is more wised-up about carfree parks. While San Francisco's mayor vetoed 1.3 miles of JFK for one day, New York's mayor just passed a policy to close roads in Central Park and Prospect Park every day, each of which is longer than the 1.3 miles of JFK. And their city council is pushing for more. Maybe someday San Francisco will figure out what it takes to be a world-class city with a world-class park.

We continued on through a lovely wooded part of the park. Light was fading, so I only got this one photo to say a thousand words with:

We got as far west as we could: Ocean Beach. It was then, and only then, that we realized we had no means of making a bonfire. If we'd each brought one piece of firewood apiece, we'd be keeping toasty. Instead, we drifted back home in smaller groups -- a nice ride back through the park for some of us.

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