Lansing Bike Party: From protest to party

By now a community institution, the Lansing Bike Party has been exploring the Lansing area on wheels each Friday during the warm months for 15 years.

The group’s sociable, slow rides to various destinations around town range from 10 to 20 miles, with a mid-ride stop for food and beverages.

The rides are full of camaraderie and laughter, but the origin of the event was as serious as they come.

The rides started in April 2009 in response to an op-ed by Zack Colman in the MSU student newspaper, The State News.

The column not only dripped with hostility toward bike riders but portrayed a basic ignorance of bicyclists’ right to be on the road. Sample quotes include “I hope you’re wearing a helmet, because I might run you over” and “I cannot drive my car on the sidewalk, so why must you ride your bicycle where I drive?”

The Friday after it appeared, about 100 bike riders protested the column at MSU’s Beaumont Tower and briefly blocked the section of Grand River Avenue in front of The State News offices, demanding a retraction. They got no response, bike advocate Tim Potter said.

Potter is the sustainable transportation manager at the MSU Bikes Service Center.

“So, we said, ‘OK, we’re just going to keep riding every Friday to drive home the point that bikes are allowed on the road,’” Potter said.

The rides started from the MSU campus for the first few years, then moved to the Lansing Bike Co-op.

The concept of a bike party goes back to the 1990s, when Critical Mass rides in hundreds of cities across the United States (and around the world) adopted the tactic of “safety in numbers” to assert the right of cyclists to use the roads.

“Slowly but surely, they all started going from protest rides and started becoming bike parties, with people — a lot of people — just enjoying the ride, lighting up their bikes, ringing bells,” Potter said.

Lansing Bike Party participants can go just for the ride or stay on for the social (food and drink) period.

Riders should be equipped with lights for the ride back, which is usually around dusk.