Bike To Work Day, 2008

For me, Bike to Work Day (BTWD) started a week earlier, when I spent an afternoon talking merchants on Castro Street into putting BTWD posters in their windows. BTWD is popular, so Castro absorbed all of my stock before I reached the other end of the Business District. When I asked for more, Shelly told me to pick them up at the BTWD bag stuffing party at the Sports Basement.

The idea is to make everybody that rides the bike to work on BTWD feel special by giving them something. For months the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition had been working to get local businesses to donate stuff for the occasion. Hobees donated buy one get one free coupons for a good meal. Sports Basement donated 20% off coupons. A lot of local organizations wanted fliers for their upcoming events to go in the bags. For SVBC, that required about two dozen people to put in a days work assembling them for other volunteers to give out in the few seconds they had as bicyclists were cruising by.

Volunteers would start with empty bags fresh from the printer, put something in it, and pass it to the next person. At the end of the line other volunteers were organizing the bags into boxes according to the orders for the various energizer stations around the valley.

The biggest single order was the one for the Mountain View Caltrain Station, 650 bags. I remember that being about eight boxes. Many stations were assigned one or two boxes. It probably depends a lot on the demand a location has. Many of the names the boxes were assigned to I recognized as bicycling activists that have been around for a long time. I'm sure they know how much traffic is likely to go by their spot.

Every time a train pulled in another dozen cyclists or so would get off with their bikes. Volunteers would pass out BTWD bags to everybody with a bike that wanted one. A lot of them would stop by the tables to see what else is going on. No charge to cyclists!

Fenwick & West had a table at the corner of California and Castro in Mountain View. Here the traffic wasn't as thick, but still a steady trickle of people riding by were being waved over and offered gratitude for not driving.

There was a time when I would have gone by half a dozen gas stations during a ride like this one, but on BTWD I only saw this one. I just wouldn't have predicted a few years ago I'd be seeing $4/gallon gas so soon.

WEBCOR sponsored the station at California Avenue's train station in Palo Alto. Larry said it was "Palo Alto's main energizer station." I was lucky to get there about when the WEBCOR cycling team was posing for their group shot with the station.

Waiting for the light to cross Oregon Expressway on the Ellen Fletcher Bicycle Boulevard is usually a solo experience. This time I got to share the experience with four other cyclists, only three of whom I could fit into my camera's field of view. The woman in the green dress turns out to be a teacher at the school on Meadow. She didn't even know it was bike to work day, she always commutes by bike. I gave her my bag because I wanted to spread the spirit.

Actually, Google had two BTWD energizer stations, the second being in the middle of their campus. Click on the two women who were gathering stats about who came from where to find out more about that one.

The guys at the Ellis Street stop mostly were giving people water. I think they were part of some accounting firm. They had sold out of bags before I got there, a good sign. Get more next year guys!

That woman with the dark backpack was another photographer. She said that she had taken pictures at fifteen energizer stations already when I met her at the Bayshore light rail station.

Carol Brouillet decided to ride to Google with her husband who works there instead of going running. Talking to her, she told me about an architect she had on her radio show recently who is working to expose some fraud associated with the 9/11 thing. She is also going in for a biopsy on her liver. It seems that she might be dealing with a case of cancer of some type.

On the way home I found this street. I remember it being two lanes in each direction with no bike lanes. Now they are adding traffic calming features to make speeding less fun. Also car traffic is going from two lanes each way to one each way, a shared turning lane, and bike lanes. Looks like riding there will be a much more comfortable experience than it was.