First the Oxford St incident it was a friend of mine who got caught initially in that incident a driver coming from the North tried to ram through the ride then when my friend corked him he got out of his car and physically lifted him out of the way both he and his wife were totally hyped out and punched various riders then ironically called the police.

Adam

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I got into one confrontation with a cab driver determined to push through the mass on Shaftsbury Avenue/Charring Cross - he was not going to stop and kept edging cab more and more into me and my bike - I had to pull back and have some strong words, etc with him while he pushed through everyone else looking more and more like he was going to blow his top. That was the only one I saw that eve but I was purposely just trying to take it easy that night and go with the flow as last month was more stress than fun for me.

Richard

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Thanks to the cyclists who helped me by doing a magnificent job of straighting my mangled back wheel that a kindly cabbie not so lovingly rammed. I had a nice chilled out ride and felt very calm and relaxed,unlike aforementioned cabbie,stressed,high blood pressure. Once again thanks guys,I appricate your show of unity.

Anon

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To be honest...a little disappointed, largely cos I lost the mass after Piccadilly Circus somehow!

Maybe it's the heat but the drivers were particularly aggressive and the police weren't really any better.

We zipped round Lambeth Bridge, Parliament Square, Whitehall - where some idiot bus tried to pull in to us from the right, got corked and ended up blocking the traffic coming the opposite way.

The Mall was a pleasure as always though there was a bit of waiting around outside the palace rather than cracking on! Good work to the soundsystem playing Jackson music though!

Up to Hyde Park Corner (passing some temporary police search thing setup) and taking Park Lane which I always like! At Marble Arch ANOTHER temporary police search thing was being setup - is/was there some big political event I'm unaware of?

Then it all started going horribly wrong. Going down Oxford St has ALWAYS been a bad idea for CM - there's only buses and taxis on there anyway, and it's so narrow that we either spilled onto the other side of the road or just got really spread out. Trying to cork the side roads caused huge amounts of frustration, presumably cos we were taking so long to get down. Then about half way between Marble Arch and Oxford Circus was a particularly rough incident with a driver. I was approx the same place as Doug, judging by his video - I can also put a face to the name now! :)

From what I saw, a tall young male, and his girlfriend had both attempted to go past a cork and were now in the 'yellow box' (dont know if there actually was one). They'd both got out of the car and were having a confrontation with a particular cyclist - either the guy that was corking them or had possibly spoken to them? It was getting ugly as the guy was grabbing the bike and not letting it go, despite the cyclist wanting to move on. The guy from the car also seemed to be taking off his shirt to have a good fight...

Another chap, who I think was a pedestrian had stepped in to try and calm things down and eventually we could get past with not much harm done.

At Oxford Circus the first few corked it but then two police cars turned up, for us I guess? They seemed to try and take control of it, i was already on Regent St and as far as I knew was in the middle of the mass at this point.

We headed down to Picc Circus in ones and twos rather than a mass, and a police van and car hit the sirens to both go past us. I didn't see clearly but it looked a LOT like the police van 'nudged' a couple of bikes to get them out of the way!!! Anyone see anything?

I followed some cyclists head up Shaftesbury but we were weaving through traffic now as there was only a handful, tried to doubleback to Piccadilly but couldn't see anyone...boo.

So what is the situation with the police - I know the House of Lords ruled we are a "legal, customary procession" so CM itself isn't illegal, but are we actually allowed to jump lights, cork traffic? Unfortunately I suspect not but would be glad to hear if anyone knows to the contrary!!

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CMers:

Did my first and last CM-London a few nights ago - I am from Chicago and am here only for a few weeks. I had a great time - in Chicago we do not go past any sites as illustrious as the Houses of Parliament or Buckingham Palace - ironically both seats of power and privilege which are killing our planet and denying people the land they need to live on. However, there were some significant differences of another, non-architectural, nature. In Chicago, we all immediately bike both sides of the street as soon as we enter one, effectively taking over both lanes. In the London CM we stuck to our own lane, allowing the traffic on the other side to continue unaffected - which I found actually a bit dangerous as I was driving near the middle of the streets.

Also, there is a bit more interaction between riders and pedestrians. We regularly scream "Happy Friday!" and many other things of our spontaneous creation, and people in the streets ordinarily know who we are and shout that back at us, or honk in support of us, and kids often line our paths when they see us to do a "high 5" type of clap with the riders as we go past. The London ride was a bit more sedate. Maybe most of the people out there in a city like London were themselves tourists and not familiar with you. Having said that, I also heard (but did not observe) the violence between some riders and drivers, which I know troubled some of the bikers who had seen it (they told me about it during the ride).

I also missed the ticketing of a biker who went through a red light. That probably explains why the bikers stopped for the longest time at the light that was right before we entered Trafalgar Square (forgive me, don't know London well enough to know what street we were on, but did recognize Trafalgar Square ahead!). Why did we stop there for several turnings of the lights, could not figure it out? That dynamic would certainly affect the risk one takes - if it happens occasionally rather than always, it would be even more likely to temper risk-taking (psychologists tell us that when punishments or rewards take on a non-predictable schedule, they generally discourage (with punishments) or encourage (with rewards) behaviors more than when the schedules are predictable). In a situation like that, what is there to do - other than perhaps the hundred closest bikers taking part in lodging protests of some sort and assisting the stopped biker in solidarity.

In Chicago our very own cyclist police (we have a sizable chunk of cops who patrol parts of Chicago on their bikes), usually a good dozen, tend to join our ride - this can be a real pain in the arse for those of us who want this to be OUR ride - and a strange trade-off occurs in which they monitor us in exchange for us not having a hard time crossing red lights - but that does mean our behaviors while riding are under scrutiny. We have considered solving this partially by breaking up into smaller CMs of a few hundred each, so that if we started with 2000 we might slowly develop 6 or 7 CMs all over Chicago which would be cool - but so far we have not been able to act on this (there is reluctance of a Mass not following the "leader," irony of ironies for what is supposed to be a leaderless event).

Another activity that produces coherence in our CM in Chicago is our fanzine. I have contributed too - a few months ago I sent in Gorz' Social Ideology of the Motor Car (if you have not read it yet, one of the finest political tracts ever written - you can read it at http://www.bikereader.com/contributors/misc/gorz.html). This month's fanzine (called The Derailleur - you can catch it at http://chicagocriticalmass.org/taxonomy/term/3030) has a biking competition I put in, so I am expecting a lot of bikers from Chicago emailing me with the answers! Prize: one of Derrick Jensen's excellent books - if you have not read him, do so at once - one of the finest environmental writers around - check out derrickjensen.org - I would recommend in particular The Culture of Make Believe and his excellent two-volume Endgame).

But I had some great conversations, one of them witih a non-biker, a busker from Spain who was so good musically but got moved on by the shitty South Bank authorities much to his and my frustration (are they police acting in what they see as the interests of the shops and businesses?) - he was good enough to do Glastonbury, that much is certain. Of the bikers, almost all those I chatted with were first-timers, which is always good news. Don't know if the aggressive moments will turn them off for next time. Something tells me we got chopped off in half somewhere. Why else would I have been in the middle and all of a sudden at the front approaching the Palace on Pall Mall? My guess is a few hundred headed on toward Kensington before we stopped ourselves. It must have been when all those people stopped at that light near Trafalgar Square - I was in the middle there and then suddenly with another new rider on our own near the front going past the ICA Gallery. The others must have been far ahead!

I was discussing this with another biker - the fact that in Chicago we get thousands regularly but the London Mass was much smaller. And yet for someone like me from Chicago I am very impressed by how many bikers one sees in London and Kingston (where I am staying). Bikers EVERYWHERE! Look at the bike parking place near Waterloo Station where I got off the train from Kingston - there must have been 500 bikes! (one never sees more than a dozen parked together in Chicago). In Chicago bikers are still kind of ODD, even though we certainly have our share of people like me who go to work on our bikes - we have good bike lanes actually thanks to our mayor Daley who is very bike-friendly, but you don't see bikers that often - thus when we do see each other, we are more likely to say hello to each other, and feel like a member of a community. Thus, put together more gripes and greater cohesion and that might explain more motivation to turn up at a CM. But in a city like London where bikers already feel their presence, maybe there is less of a feeling of desperation to stand up for biking as a viable alternative form of transportation - it is simply slightly more mainstream already. But maybe that explanation of mine holds no water. Given the fact that we humans and all life are teetering over the edge of extinction, I don't see why bikers would feel any less reason to take a stand in favor of less toxic means of getting around. Could it simply be there are too many Londoners who bike and the city is too big? Maybe it would be easier to get 500 bikers in Barnes or Kensington and Chelsea or the City to do their own thing rather than expect all of them to turn up at one spot in South Bank? Would be curious to know what your theories are.

All in all, though, I had a FANTASTIC time! Thanks for the experience. I have great stories to take home with me and it was an honor and a pleasure to be one body in the last London CM!

Danny