After much work I personally found that Friday's Critical Mass was really good. The Portland Police were interacting with the mass prior to the ride and their was a guy from the City of Portland that had a table set up giving out free bike swag and the new bike maps that were updated last month. We rode over the Broadway bridge taking one lane and respectfully leaving one lane mainly for the buses and emergency vehicles with us with no problems. Then we rode up past S.C.R.A.P., said hi to C.C.C. on Alberta with a bike lift, some ZooBombers and their mini-bikes felt at home on the steep down hill on 33rd ... but most unexpected of all was what happened on the SE 39th street circle ... motorcycle officers 'facilitated' the quick and safe navigation of Critical Mass through this traffic device.

Why is Critical Mass in Portland like this. For many reasons. Most importantly, Portland has a large and active bicycle culture. Plus myself ( Jasun Wurster ) and a few other riders have been meeting over the past few months with the Police ... thanks to Tom Potter.

So here is the real gist of this post. Critical Mass is a leaderless group of individuals; the reason for the meetings are to provide a way to communicate, set expectations, express concerns and work on future solutions between Critical Mass and the City of Portland, which includes the Police. Granted, we all can not bombard the Police at once with our individual thoughts. So Alex came up with a very creative solution ... keep the meetings small and rotate different riders to the meetings each month in order to better represent Portland's version Critical Mass.

The meetings are normally held 2 weeks after Critical Mass and if you have any thing that wants to be brought up about prior Critical Masses or want to attend the meetings please speak up.

Personally, I feel, this is an exciting time for Critical Mass. We have a receptive city government that is actively working with us. Are there still issues that need to be addressed ... you know it! But this is a great opportunity to for Critical Mass and the Police to work these out. Now all we need is some more riders ... especially ones that want to attend a few of the monthly meetings.

- posted by Jasun to CM mail list 5/1/2005
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/pdxcriticalmass