York Critical Mass Report

7.1.2007

Crit­i­cal Mass returned to York on Fri­day with about two dozen rid­ers brav­ing the cold to take anoth­er ran­dom ride around the city to cel­e­brate cycling. The route took them to York’s newest road, round a round­about the high­est legal num­ber of times, and into a short inter­rup­tion from York’s boys in blue.

7.1.2007

Crit­i­cal Mass returned to York on Fri­day with about two dozen rid­ers brav­ing the cold to take anoth­er ran­dom ride around the city to cel­e­brate cycling. The route took them to York’s newest road, round a round­about the high­est legal num­ber of times, and into a short inter­rup­tion from York’s boys in blue.

Despite the low­er num­bers, we had no trou­ble tak­ing even mul­ti­ple lanes of traf­fic, even with aggres­sive dri­vers accel­er­at­ing into the ‘Mass. The cops who wit­nessed this, instead of book­ing the dri­ver, decid­ed to stop the cyclists to have a nice chat with us about the high­way code, stay­ing safe on the roads and not play­ing our music too loud. Tsk, tsk! After this brief inter­lude we cycled on to the sound of toots of sup­port (believe it or not) from motorists and even cheers from pedes­tri­ans and passers-by.

At one point the ride head­ed out on Lawrence Street, and into James Street. Some­one shout­ed ‘its a dead­end’. Well, it used to be: now it con­tin­ues through to Lay­erthor­pe, cour­tesy of the new ‘link road’. Despite claims that the new road is des­per­ate­ly need­ed to relieve traf­fic con­ges­tion it was absolute­ly desert­ed apart from us and a few kids prac­tis­ing bike stunts who joined us for a while. The new road cuts across the old cycle route that went straight across the city, now with­out even a tun­nel or bridge to join up the two sec­tions of the cycle path.

After rid­ing past Sains­bury’s and out along Monkgate, we encoun­tered an old favourite of Crit­i­cal Mass, the round­about. It is legal to go 2 1/2 times around such a fea­ture; poor motorists, won­der­ing what we were doing. We then rode through the Groves (qui­et­ly!) and into town along Gilly­gate (this leaves only Lord May­or’s Walk before we’ve been every­where on the inner ring road).

There’s been a request for extra rid­ers to go to Leeds on Jan­u­ary 26th (from 5:30 in Mil­le­ni­um Square), as they were less lucky with the police last time. And with Feb­ru­ary often a bad month for oth­er Crit­i­cal Mass rides, please make an extra effort to bring your bike down to the Min­ster at 5:30pm on 2nd Feb­ru­ary for the next instal­ment of York Crit­i­cal Mass.