March Critical Mass: Bikers and Bankers

Here's the opening of a blog I wrote for SFAppeal.com to coincide with a movie I shot of Critical Mass last Friday...

At Critical Mass last Friday, no one got beat up, a relief to the hundreds of riders who rode from the Embarcadero to North Beach to the Mission, then dispersed.


Friday March 27, 2009 Critical Mass from Cassidy Friedman on Vimeo.

But at least one guy may have deserved to be. He grabbed a standing woman's butt through her pants, in plain view of a dozen bicyclists. In disgust, she yelled, "really?! really?!" but the assault went unpunished, the offender rode on past Polk Street disappearing into crowd of cyclists all indifferent or unaware of what just happened in their informal peloton.

Bicyclists who usually ride in fear of getting run over, on Friday, seemed to feel a strength in their ever-growing numbers, tearing down Market Street and splitting up rivers of honking vehicles that ceded them the passage. Respecting the wheeling mob scene as a political protest, the cops guard the rear but they don't interfere.

Read the rest of the blog.