Ride of Silence

I rode in the local Ride Of Silence on the 20th. Here's a link to local coverage: http://tinyurl.com/rideofsilence09news14

You can see me, in the video of riders, very briefly ride by with my VA Tech jersey on.

I hope you all had the opportunity to participate in this type of Ride in your locale. I think it's very important to try and raise awareness of motorists. One nagging question about the Ride is this: when we're riding en mass through the streets, and somebody on the sidewalk or in their yard yells out "hey what are you doing" or "what is this for" we really can't yell back "it's the Ride of Silence to honor cyclists who have been injured or killed by Motorists!"

That's unfortunate. Because I think many of the people who see a few hundred cyclists, escorted by Police --thank you Greensboro Police Department-- riding down the street are genuinely interested in what it's all about. I heard some guy tell the kid beside him on the sidewalk "that's that critical mass thing." Wrong. It's not at all like critical mass. I hope the Ride Of Silence never gets the bad press that Critical Mass rides seem to pick up. I've ridden in three of Ride Of Silence events. I think next year I'll make it a point to curl off from the group and provide a little education to interested onlookers. I might even suggest to our local organizing group that we provide some little cards that we could hand off to people, not pepper the streets like a ticker-tape parade, but individually hand them to people who show interest. We even had a group of three kids that fell in line and rode with us for a mile or so. It was two kids on BMX-style bikes with another kid riding on the rear pegs of one bike. None of them had helmets, but at least they were interested. Again, most of us kept quiet even though they asked repeatedly what this was all about. We rode right by a huge "celebration in the park" in the downtown area where one of the local news shows was celebrating a "birthday" and had a bunch of tents and stuff about two blocks from our start/finish point. There were numerous opportunities to promote the Ride if we had something to hand out, since we weren't supposed to talk once the Ride started. One other option might be to ride around the local ballpark. Our local team had a home game on Wednesday night, started at 7:05, and the park is just a few blocks from the start/finish point. That's my very small gripe. We may have missed some opportunities to make a greater impact. Overall I really enjoyed the Ride and certainly enjoyed seeing all the cyclists out on such a wonderful evening. The temps were just right, with not much wind. The route was great, and the Police made it go very smoothly for us.

If you get the opportunity to participate next year, please do. The more cyclists seen on the road, the better our steel-clad bretheren will be acclimated to moving in concert with cyclists, rather than in opposition.