Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by BalloonBiker on June 29, 2010 at 5:38am

It's always fun to get to see how big the ride is anyway. I've always enjoyed when the ride goes over an overpass when a portion of the ride is still below.

I'm not the biggest fan of circling intersections, but if others want to do that, I suppose we could go for it. It might be effective to circle a park or something. Humboldt park would be a good place for this...actually there are so many huge parks in Chicago this might not be too hard to do.

Permalink Reply by Steven Lane on June 29, 2010 at 9:50am

Circling a park works pretty well, I was in front of ride that circled bug house square. The ride completely stopped when the front came full circle and essentially "T-boned" the middle of the group. I yelled to the people in the middle informing them they were now the front of the ride, and they followed my lead. I assume the first half of the ride had to wait for the second half to clear before moving?

Howard is right. It is hard to get the group moving again after you spin them like a top, but I've noticed in these situations many riders don't really want to stop for bike mosh pit, and it's pretty easy to get the attention of these folks and have them help you create the momentum needed to pull the ride along.

People like circling intersections, but the police are probably going to make this increasingly more difficult to do. Also, circling an intersection loses it's group hug factor once the ride is bigger than 300. Perhaps circling small parks or a few city blocks is a better option? I also like how circling a big space allows you to see how long the ride is.

~steven

Permalink Reply by Davo on June 29, 2010 at 10:27am

Thats kind of what I was getting at, circleling a block or two so the mass "t-bones", I just didn't know how to word it. I think that doing that a couple of times on these larger masses would help close some of the gaps.

Steven Lane said:

Circling a park works pretty well, I was in front of ride that circled bug house square. The ride completely stopped when the front came full circle and essentially "T-boned" the middle of the group. I yelled to the people in the middle informing them they were now the front of the ride, and they followed my lead. I assume the first half of the ride had to wait for the second half to clear before moving?

Howard is right. It is hard to get the group moving again after you spin them like a top, but I've noticed in these situations many riders don't really want to stop for bike mosh pit, and it's pretty easy to get the attention of these folks and have them help you create the momentum needed to pull the ride along.

People like circling intersections, but the police are probably going to make this increasingly more difficult to do. Also, circling an intersection loses it's group hug factor once the ride is bigger than 300. Perhaps circling small parks or a few city blocks is a better option? I also like how circling a big space allows you to see how long the ride is.

~steven

Permalink Reply by Davo on June 30, 2010 at 4:19am

Yea I wondered what the hell we were doing going up on Upper Wacker but thought it was awesome when we passed the sign. I think that didn't do much since it was neer the begining of mass. Still that was pretty sweet

H3N3 said:

Good post from Steven.

We actually did have one such on this past ride-- as the ride headed east on 18th, it made a little trip through the neighborhood to the south (to pass a particular school) and came back out on 18th a few blocks later. When the riders saw the mass crossing 18th a few blocks ahead many shortcutted instead of following the route. I don't know why we didn't have much net benefit of that down the road-- I stopped about a mile later and saw that the ride was as strung out as ever.

I've seen this happen other times as well, sometimes not so wonderfully-- example-- the detour east of Michigan to pass the "Marry Me" sign two summers ago-- the mass saw that the riders were ultimately going to exit back out to Michigan and continue northbound, so a bulk of riders didn't make the turn-- it was disappointing that a good 1/3rd of that mass never passed the "Marry Me" sign.