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At least 45 pigs gathered in the Fireside parking lot at the Nort Park Blocks, and many others ran car engines on nearby streets as well over a hundred bicyclists gathered at the North Park Blocks for a bicycle ride tonight. Officer Dobson approached me when I arrived and asked, "Did you get one of these?" I asked what it was. "Just the rules that we play by, that's all." I told him to save the paper. A man on the sidewalk asked what this was all about. "It's about people getting together and showing people in cars how much fun bicycling is," a woman next to me replied. "Who the hell is watching the street?" he asked. "I'm 65 years old. I've been in two world wars, and I know what this is. Nothin' but a Gestapo, that's what it is." The rules, apparently, didn't follow the rules in the books. They said, for example, that a bicyclist can't pass bicycle traffic in the lane immediately to the left of the bicycle lane. Stuck to the bicycle lane, we moved slower than rush hour downtown traffic. With a strong presence of pigs on bicycles, cars, and SUV's, the ride moved single file at a snail's pace through downtown and was split up before the tail end even passed Burger King. I wasn't able to really ride until a group of us ditched the pigs after they gave a ticket. At O'Bryant Square at Washington street, Pig Hoesly and Pig Niiya decided to work on their quota. When the bicycle lane ended and about 10 of us at the tail of the mass took the right lane, these pigs merged their motorcycles into our lane, and illegally passed the bicyclists in front of me on the right. They singled one man out and gave him a ticket for $77- for, I believe, failing to use a bicycle lane. His court date is June 26th at 1 p.m. if you want to show support, although he might change the date. After that, we only found a few others who had split off from the mass.
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Anyway, the mass got split up into at least three or four different groups because there were so many cops that no one wanted to risk going through stoplights or taking up multiple lanes.
I was in a group that crossed the Hawthorne Bridge, and we didn't even go in the lane- we stayed on the sidewalk. It was really lame. We went pretty far east on Hawthorne. At one point we were just walking our bikes on the sidewalk so that the cops would have to slow down the car traffic in order to stay with us. I left the mass at about 39th and Hawthorne. During the whole thing, just in my small group of about 40 people, I saw at least 4 people get tickets.
I think that everyone should just get together in affinity groups of about 10 people each and do CM in small groups. Not necessarily on the last Friday, although that would be awesome, because it would be hard to coordinate and get people to actually do it. It could something that people could just do with some friends or something, at any point.