A Critical Mess

Bicyclists attack drivers; city leaders stand idly by

By Alisa Farenzena
From the May 2007 Print Edition

            As a native San Franciscan, I am lucky to live in one of the most beautiful places in the world.  Yet I must cringe almost every time my city makes national headlines.  We are used to being a laughingstock, from performing marriage ceremonies for gay couples despite state law, to having a member of our Board of Supervisors go on cable TV and oppose our country’s need for a military — recently, we have seen our city leaders oust the JROTC from our schools and even ban plastic grocery bags.         

            When one of these “only in San Francisco” stories involves violence, however, it is no laughing matter. Critical Mass, an anarchist bicycle ride in the city that occurs on the last Friday of every month, produced two violent attacks in March.
            On April 4, San Francisco Chronicle writers Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross broke the story of one of the two incidents that occurred during the March 30 ride:  Susan Ferrando of Redwood City, who had children in her vehicle, was accosted by cyclists who proceeded to shatter the rear window of her minivan, causing $5,300 in damage.  This is a rather expensive penalty for the crime of visiting Japantown to celebrate her 11-year-old daughter’s birthday.

            Matier and Ross broke the story of the other March incident in the April 8 Chronicle:  A female cyclist blocked driver Dennis Webb’s limousine and proceeded to dismount, unwrap a lollypop, and begin licking it. When Webb got out to try to reason with her, a “male rider also pulled in front of his limo.”  Webb tried to talk with the second cyclist, pulled his bike out of the way, and “then got back in his limo in hopes of going around the riders,” but a third cyclist, Gabriel Nugent, “smacked into the front driver’s side of his car, then punched the hood with a u-shape bicycle lock, denting it.”  After this, Webb grabbed Nugent’s bicycle to prevent him from leaving before the police arrived.

        This was not the end of the incident.  As bad as it already was, the situation escalated, as “other cyclists surrounded the limo driver and one knocked his cell phone to the ground.”  Next, “someone slashed the limo’s tire.”  Also, “an unidentified bicyclist reached into the front seat of Webb’s limo and stole his keys from the ignition, then rode off.”

        In view of these attacks, it is easy to see the hypocrisy in the bumper stickers so common on Bay Area bicyclists’ messenger bags demanding that drivers “share the road” and “coexist” with bicyclists.  These people do not want to share the road — they want to own it.  They are willing to resort to physical violence, property damage, and theft in order to assert their right to be the sole users of the streets.

        At least Webb received some recourse, as Nugent was arrested, and “is scheduled to appear in court May 11,” according to the April 8 article.  Ferrando was not as lucky.  As the angry mob of cyclists yelled at both the police and her minivan, and the little girls in the vehicle cried, all Sergeant Ed Callejas could do was apologize to her and suggest that she “write a letter to the mayor,” according to the article of April 4.

        That same day, Mayor Gavin Newsom could be seen on the TV news saying, “It’s a terrible incident and I don’t want to overreact to it.”  He acknowledged that the attack was “egregious and aggressive,” but also demonstrated his fear to act.  He alluded to how former Mayor Willie Brown had tried to crack down on Critical Mass ten years ago, claiming that a large amount of police presence “created more problems.”

        What Newsom fails to realize is that it was not too much police presence that created problems, but rather not enough.  For his many faults, Brown had actually tried to do the right thing, but he had not gone far enough.  He could have quelled the bicycle insurrection if he had used a coordinated effort of not only the police, but also the California Highway Patrol and the National Guard, both of which then-Governor Ronald Reagan called in to restore order at UC Berkeley in 1969.  This is the scale of force that Brown needed to use a decade ago.

        At the time, an article in the August 11, 1997, edition of Time magazine explained how Brown the deal broker had been stymied by “Critical Mass, a leaderless mob that refers to itself as an idea rather than an organization,” because it had “no one for him to cut a deal with.”

        Actually, it seems that there should be somebody to cut a deal with, although it is unlikely that we’re talking about the type of people worth negotiating with; prosecuting them or hitting them with a bill for the police costs would be more effective.  Although no one tells the cyclists to show up at Justin Herman Plaza on the last Friday of the month, someone there does announce the route of the evening’s ride.  Finding this person may indicate who the leaders are.

        Newsom has not found this person either, so he’s trying to negotiate with the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, the leftist organization that started Critical Mass (called Commute Clot at first) in 1992 by suggesting that its members gather once a month for the evening commute.  The effort is futile, as most say that the Coalition couldn’t control Critical Mass even if it wanted to.

        Furthermore, Newsom is succeeding only in worsening the tensions between drivers and cyclists in the city, to no benefit of his own.

        The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition endorsed Green Party candidate Matt Gonzalez, not Newsom, in the 2003 mayoral race.  Critical Mass riders even swarmed a vehicle delivering Newsom house signs during that campaign.

        Since becoming mayor, Newsom has been trying to make nice with the city’s radical bicyclists by giving them everything they want.

        He appointed the Coalition’s director, Leah Shahum, to the Municipal Transportation Agency board of directors, which has been trying to shift more and more of the burden of paying for public transit onto drivers instead of the people who actually use the services.

        He also approved a plan in 2005 to “make the streets of San Francisco more bicycle-friendly” at the expense of parking and traffic lanes, according to a report last year in the June 4 edition of the Chronicle.  The city refrained from doing the required state environmental review of this plan, so a Superior Court judge had to issue an injunction pausing its implementation, but not before “the city eliminated street parking and a traffic lane for vehicles” in one location in May 2006 despite a pending lawsuit, according to the Chronicle report.

        Most recently, he has brokered a deal between bike advocates, including the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, and more mainstream interests to ban cars “from a stretch of Golden Gate Park’s main road on Saturdays for six months of the year,” according to an April 14 report in the Chronicle.  This deal came despite the fact that Newsom had vetoed a similar plan last year in accordance with the will of the voters.  He didn’t close as much roadway as the cyclists wanted, but he still bowed under these advocates’ pressure, voters be damned.

        Yet the angry rides continue, as none of this is enough to appease the militant bicyclists — nothing is.  These are people who like to characterize Newsom, one of the most liberal mayors in the country, as a Republican.  It is astonishing that he has wasted so much time and effort trying to court a group of voters this irrational.  Even if catering to these people did win them over, it still wouldn’t be necessary; he was elected without their help in 2003 and he will win re-election without their help this year.

        It should be noted that not every bicycle rider in San Francisco is militant.  On April 13, a group of law-abiding cyclists rode through the city in an event called Critical Manners, according to an article in the April 14 Chronicle.  The cyclists rode single file in the “bike lane, stopping at every light and stop sign.”  Unfortunately, there were only 16 of them, whereas the violent March 30 Critical Mass ride had an estimated 1,000 to 3,000 participants.

        The April 27 Critical Mass was less eventful than the March ride.  There were “a handful of incidents,” but police stepped in to defuse them before violence could break out again, according to TV news reports that night.  About double the usual number of police officers were assigned to patrol the ride, which attracted an estimated 2,000 cyclists.

        This situation has been going on for 15 years and is unlikely to change under San Francisco’s current leadership.  Allowing one group of people to disobey all rules of the road and rewarding them by making life more difficult for their perceived enemy, the automobile driver, is not the way to solve the problem.  The problem can be solved only by restoring the rule of law, but this can be done only with enough force to successfully enforce the law or with a steep fee to pay for police costs so that the Massers can legally run red lights as in any city-sanctioned parade.

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