33. Critical Mass

Outside, I head down Oxford Road, past the hospitals and universities, to the city centre.

Like many others across the globe, Manchester Critical Mass takes place on the last Friday of every month. That’s today.

Riders gather outside the city’s Central Library at 6 pm. I find the spot easily, just off St Peter’s Square. The Library is a magnificent round building. I’d quite like to go inside and check out the books, but I’m here to ride.

I arrive at the same time as a guy pulling a sound system in a trailer. I check I’m in the right place and we chat. More people gradually arrive as I eat food, watch, and exchange pleasantries. A week into my ride, a week spent making connections with other people passionate about cycling, and my usual shyness has gone. Of course, social interaction is made easier when you’re confident that everyone here is happy to talk, and loves cycling.

Critical Mass reclaims cycling’s right to the city. It appeals to people trying to change the world. I’m handed a flyer advertising an upcoming carnival organised by the Campaign Against Climate Change. The UK Government, it says, is just not doing enough to cut carbon emissions and reduce the threat of climate catastrophe. Other people are promoting the camp for climate action taking place later in the year. Last year’s camp had shut down Drax power station, the UK’s single biggest carbon emitter. This summer’s camp would take place next to Heathrow, the world’s busiest airport, and campaign against air travel. A Manchester contingent would be there. Another flyer informs me that, as last year, people would be cycling to the climate camp. Group bike rides to high profile events have become common in the world of environmental campaigning for a better, fairer, safer world. The bike’s the right vehicle on which to make pilgrimages for the sake of humanity.

To a cacophony of whistles, bells and yelps, we pull out onto the ride. I’ve no idea where we’re going, and it feels great. I’m ecstatic to be here, and to be following someone else’s route for a change. For the first time on my ride, I belong to a big group of cyclists, riding together, in solidarity.

Two guys ride unicycles. They look the part, but tell me that it’s their first time. They’ve a friend on a regular bike. Whenever there’s a need to stop, they ride up either side of him, maintaining their balance by placing a hand on his shoulders. His presence means they don’t need to dismount and remount within the confines of the bunch. One of them plans to ride the End to End in September, aiming for 60 miles a day. He’ll carry his gear in a rucksack.

Quite a few people are riding fixed or single-speeds. I chat to a doctor on a fixie. His gear, 48×16, seems a bit big to me, but he’s lean, looks fit, and Manchester – perhaps surprisingly – is really quite flat. He’s lived in Manchester ten years, but it’s his first time on Critical Mass too. He found out about it via the Web. Someone’s been working hard, promoting this ride.

I talk to a guy about Love Your Bike. Organised by Manchester Friends of the Earth with the support of the City Council, this campaign has come up with some fantastic marketing to promote cycling in the city. Transport for London is spending huge amounts on cycling in the capital, but here in the north enthusiastic volunteers on a shoestring budget are taking the lead.

My favourite Love Your Bike image is of a (sub)standard cycle lane at the road edge, but the ordinary bike symbol is replaced with the words ‘Fast Lane’, and the adjacent carriageway carries the words ‘Fat Lane’. I recall the fat cooling towers of the coal-fired power station at Rugeley this morning. Cars too are driven by fossil fuels, and squat on – whilst using up and wearing out – our precious planet. We know the quick, skinny bike is perfectly geared to today’s urban conditions, but we need to find new ways of getting that message across, if we’re to break entrenched but misguided notions about the relative merits of cars and bikes. Love Your Bike does that. Bikes are slim. Like wind turbines. Spinning, circular motion, natural – the way ahead.

Critical Mass is an assertion of our right to ride. It asserts, perfectly reasonably, ‘we’re not stopping traffic. We ARE traffic!’. At one point during the ride, I find myself right at the back of the Mass. We’re being closely followed by a police car. Its driver is maintaining a relatively respectful distance from us, and is I assume seeking to protect rather than threaten the ride. Nonetheless, it feels slightly unnerving. The guy riding alongside me looks anxious. I try to reassure him.

‘Have you heard about that guy who got done for riding on the road?’ he asks.

‘Sure, you mean Daniel Cadden?’.

‘That’s me’, says Daniel.

I hope my surprise doesn’t show. Reading about Daniel’s case in the press, I’d assumed him to be a feisty, perhaps even ferocious, figure. I’d certainly not imagined the slightly nervous looking, mild-mannered young man beside me now. He seems unassuming, almost timid. Yet like Rosa Parks on a Montgomery bus in December 1955, this man refused to move from a place he knew he had a right to be.

In 2006, Daniel was cycling fast downhill, on a single-lane carriageway. He was stopped by police because cars overtaking him where crossing a solid white line in the middle of the road. Rather than stop the drivers of those cars for breaking the law, the police charged Daniel for inconsiderate cycling.

In order to reduce the risk of being squeezed, and in keeping with his high speed, Daniel had sensibly positioned himself away from the kerb, and in full view of drivers. Such positioning is advocated by anyone who knows about cycling, and is consistent with UK cycle training guidance. But it clearly signals a confident cyclist who believes her of himself to have a right to be on the road.

Daniel’s case was complicated by the provision of a cycle track running adjacent to the road on which he was riding. To someone ignorant of the needs and rights of the cyclist, Daniel should have crossed three lanes of busy traffic and dislocated his journey in order to use it.

Because he considered Daniel to be holding up the traffic, and because he considered there to be an alternative to riding on that stretch of road, the judge found Daniel guilty of the charge of ‘inconsiderate cycling’.

With the unequivocal backing of the UK’s national cyclists’ organisation, CTC, and with financial and moral support from across the cycling community, Daniel appealed, and won. Cyclists are not, thank goodness, legally obliged to use cycle tracks. As I have seen too many times since leaving Land’s End a week ago, many are neither good nor useful, some are dangerous and potentially lethal.

The judge at Daniel’s re-trial ruled that causing a short delay to other road users does not constitute ‘inconsiderate cycling’ (imagine the charge of ‘inconsiderate driving’ being applied to all those motorists whose behaviour caused short delays to others!).

Daniel is not meek. He is a cycling hero. After what must have been a harrowing experience, going to court, being found guilty, and finding himself at the centre of cyclists’ fight to defend their rights to the road, here he is on Manchester Critical Mass, again affirming his right, as a cyclist, to space. I’m struck by how Daniel was criminalised for his refusal to budge, and how Critical Mass is a collective refusal to budge, and has been similarly criminalised in various cities across the world since its emergence in San Francisco in 1992.

Daniel tells me it’s been an exhausting year, and he’s glad the experience is behind him. He obviously didn’t appreciate all the attention, but he’s been overwhelmed by the support he received from CTC, the Cyclists’ Defence Fund, and cyclists everywhere.

Cyclists were on the road before motorists, and will be on the road long after the car’s extinct, motoring disappeared into the historical records. So I’m with Daniel 100%. Across Britain, you don’t have to travel far to find some seriously deficient infrastructure which people who never cycle expect people who do cycle to use, and who get riled when we don’t. But we shall not, we shall not be moved; on Critical Mass we sing this together with the countless others who’ve struggled for and won greater social justice in the past.

The ride is very chilled. We’re having fun, smiling, mingling. This event feels right for the city. For most people the working week has finished, the pleasures of the weekend lie ahead. It’s transition time, and a bunch of cyclists pedal through the city’s streets, laughing, talking, having fun, feeling free. Around 100 people have taken to the streets of central Manchester tonight, because they love cycling and want to join with others to feel safe cycling in their city, a city made more convivial, civilised through the shared act of cycling. It feels like urban regeneration, and I find it amazing, really, how few urban authorities actively promote Critical Mass as good for the life and soul of their city, as not a liability but an asset. Critical Mass is not something the authorities need to police, it’s something the authorities need to promote.

The only sour point of the ride comes when a police officer on a mountain bike – who’d joined the ride half-way through – cuts dangerously through the mass, and almost brings a young woman down. Those of us who see the incident are astonished, but he seems completely unconcerned about the consequences of his actions. It really underlines the responsibility exercised by those of us within the Mass – we’re riding sensibly, carefully and respectfully. Other than the cop with attitude, there’s a complete lack of aggressiveness. We’re a very chilled bunch, and we don’t need him messing it up. It’s great to see police riding bikes, I’m all in favour of that, but loons like him shouldn’t be let loose on the public.

As the ride unfurls, I also get a sense of who’s who. No one organises or leads Critical Mass, but clearly some people understand how it works better than others, have more of a stake in how it goes, exert a little more control over its flows and fluctuations.

It’s gone all too soon. But for me it’s been a real boost. I’m loving my solitary ride from one end of Britain to the other, but it also makes me very happy to know I’ll never ride absolutely alone.

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