What's A Protest Without a Bicycle?

There's a disco ball speckling light across the high ceiling of the Times Up! HQ on Houston Street but it hardly has the feel of a ballroom or even a bike shop. "Were you arrested?" reads an easel board inside. "Have you been debriefed?" For the bulk of August, Times Up!, a pro-cycling organization, was using the space to organize "Bike National Convention" and fix busted old cycles, which were then given to medics and legal observers and loaned to out-of-towner protesters. But since Friday, about 400 cyclists have been arrested, and the space is now an embassy of sorts. "These are our people," says Bill Sims, who founded the group 18 years ago, through sagging eyelids and taut vocal chords. "We need to help them get their bikes back, we need to help get charges dropped and we need to get a class-action lawsuit going."

"The cops are singling out cyclists," says a similarly exhausted Matthew Roth. "These are spite arrests." He's just spent 23 hours at the toxic bus depot-cum- jail at Pier 57 and is now the group's impromptu media coordinator. He confesses that he's never organized a press conference.

Police had promised a crackdown on Friday's unpermitted Critical Mass ride, but an unprecedented 5000-plus showed up anyway. Critical Mass happens the last Friday of every month in cities throughout the world, and in NYC, cops have historically been accommodating--Roth can only remember seven arrests over the last four years. The swarm of cyclists, usually in the hundreds, unapologetically holds up traffic along an improvised route to make a point about air pollution and congestion and US dependence on oil, yelling to pissed off drivers: "We're not blocking traffic, we ARE traffic!" and, "If you were riding a bike, you'd be home by now!"

Two hundred and eighty cyclists were arrested during Friday's Critical Mass. Cops divided the ride using the Fuji/NYPD blimp and what's proving to be the simplest but most effective of all their shiny new weapons of mass subjection: orange plastic netting. About 150 riders were penned in on 35th Street, west of 9th Avenue, and dozens more were arrested on 2nd Avenue in front of St. Mark's Church, where the ride concluded.

Eighty, including Roth and two legal observers, were arrested during "Bike Bloc" on Sunday. According to Roth, all was well up 6th Avenue past 23rd; the group of about 250 was stopping at red lights, but in Midtown cops were waving them through. That turned out to be "a scheduled trap," he says. Undercovers on multicolored Vespa-like scooters "rammed" into them and pushed them off their bikes, according to riders, who were then surrounded and cuffed. Roth was charged on six counts, including reckless endangerment.

There was to be another Bike Bloc on Tuesday as part of the A31 day of direct action, which I was told would convene at Union Square at 4pm (the same time as the Johnny Cash "Man in Black" protest and the FOX News Shut-Up-a-Thon organized by Code Pink).

"Are going to ride?" asks a rollerblader whom I'd approached for intel. I shook my head. "Well, then I shouldn't even be talking to you," he says. He lightens up after I offer that I rode in Friday's Mass and point out the difficulties of filing a story under arrest. But others are just as cagey. "I'm watching that undercover over there," says one cyclist, pointing to a man in sunglasses. I take mine off. One man giving away buttons to riders is friendlier. "I'd ride but the cops have my bike," he's shouting. "If you get to Pier 57, don't sleep on the floor!"

Finally, a group of about 100 cyclists coalesces, and Roth unfurls a freshly painted banner: Riding a Bicycle Is NOT a Crime. After they pedal off, Sims talks to the media and onlookers left behind. "We are trying to find out from the city if they've changed the rules for cyclists," he says. "If cyclists are breaking laws, they should be getting ticketed, not arrested." The space on Houston Street, he says, will be hosting legal meetings every Tuesday and Thursday. "You can also get a loaner bike until you get your bike back," he tells the group. Reports come in that 20 or so of the Bike Bloc cyclists are already being arrested, and suddenly we notice that police have surrounded our own gathering. A legal person advises that we disperse. "Do we have a formal plan?" a woman in pigtails asks Sims. "Disband and Run," he says.

Jennifer Block

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