Critical Mass: Use of social media to mobilise cyclists in cities around the world

May 2nd, 2009 by Daniel Young | Filed under Blogging, Politics, Social media.

The use of social media by corporates is an interesting area and one that I intend to blog on in the future but I am also interested in the use of social media to mobilise individuals and create communities of action around particular topics and campaigns with a focus on changing stuff.

My new bike

A friend who recently returned from a holiday in California was talking about the Critical Mass meeting that he saw in San Francisco. The Critical Mass movement uses blogs, forums and wikis to mobilise bicycle riders in cities around the world to stake their claim for road rights. Critical Mass have varying levels of respect for the law – my understanding is that the San Francisco Critical Mass ride is quite confrontational to the point of disrupting traffic and closing roads.

The following information is taken from the Worldwide Critical Mass Hub:

The name “Critical Mass” is taken from Ted White’s 1992 documentary film about bicycling, “Return of the Scorcher“. In the film, George Bliss describes a typical scene in China, where cyclists often cannot cross intersections because there is automobile cross-trafic and no traffic lights. Slowly, more and more cyclists amass waiting to cross the road, and when there is a sufficient number of them — a critical mass, as Bliss called it — they are able to all move together with the force of their numbers to make cross traffic yield while they cross the road.

The origins of the Critical Mass movement:

The first Critical Mass ride was in September 1992 in San Francisco. There were 48 people. The ride increased in size by about 75% each month so that by the time 1993 came about, Critical Mass had almost 500 riders and was becoming well known among bicyclers in the city–although city officials still hadn’t registered its existence. A couple months after that people in other cities started noticing and began other Masses. Also in 1993, San Francisco police and Mayor Frank Jordan noticed us and struggled with how to deal with us. It took until June 1997, when Critical Mass was almost 5 years old, for the “new” mayor Willie Brown to make any special note of us: He proved he had no idea what we were about when he made comments that motivated the big July 1997 ride and police riot.

Here is the home page for the Sydney Critical Mass Group, which meets at 5:30pm on the last Friday of each month in Hyde Park.