Once a year the Sydney Critical Mass ride goes over the harbour bridge. The bridge ride is always the biggest one, with a bunch of people who might not normally do Critical Mass deciding to go along to have a look.

Riding across the bridge has the consequence of upsetting a handful of journalists by slowing down their trip back to their cosy litle suburban existance on the north shore. So it becomes open season on cyclists in all the quality newspapers like the Telegraph (here and here), which sets off all the usual characters and all the usual arguments on various discussion forums on the net and puts everyone on edge for a few weeks until the next scandal comes along and people move along.

I've never participated in Critical Mass, but I was considering it this time around. The instigating reason for this was something that Treadly blogged the other day. Since reading that, I've been stewing about the sheer amount of "public" space that is given, without question, to private cars that are usually carrying a single occupant. The city of Sydney would be a much nicer place without the tens of thousands of cars clogging it up and filling the air with fumes. We wouldn't have a constant state of costly roadworks being undertaken as well as millions of dollars spent on cross city tunnels. I'm not usually anti-car, I fall much more into a "live and let live" camp, but this week I've found myself feeling excessively cranky. I thought I might head out to CM as my own little protest about reclaiming public space. I didn't end up doing it, partly because I had some work things that were tricky to get away from, but more so because my reasons for going out there aren't really what Critical Mass is about.

Which poses the question, what the hell IS Critical Mass about ?

Climate change ? anti-car ? anti public transport (they get just as disrupted) ? Freeing David Hicks ? The right for cyclists to ride on the roads as traffic ? Or more bike paths ?

While Lela was there to assert her right to ride on the road, Chris Mosley (who has been tagged by the Telegraph as the official spokesperson) seems to want $96 million spent on cycling facilities.

A protest is most effective when it has a clear message. Critical Mass doesn't seem to have one. With no message, there isn't a good media angle, so the best option for them is to attack cyclists (not that I think that is acceptable, but in the spirit of being constructive I'm keeping to myself the fate I would like to see befall Anita Quigley and Andrew Carswell). With no message, and a skewed one delivered by the media, most motorists go away thinking "bloody cyclists, just holding up the traffic to be a pest". Most of them will get over it, a few will add it to the list of why they hate cyclists.

From the media coverage, and comments by people involved, the purpose of Critical Mass is cars off the road, and more bike lanes (without going into the climate change and Iraq and oil and David Hicks and workplace relations reasons brought out by people who seem to go to every protest and get confused about which one they are at).

I don't want that necessarily. I want to be able to ride with my 15 month old son on the back of the bike and not be screamed at in a quiet back street in Erskineville by an impatient idiot. I want peopple to be able to ride home from work and not have people screaming at them to "get on the footpath". I want to share the road and be seen as a legitimate road user. I want to be able to go on a group ride on a Sunday morning and not have eggs thrown at riders.

Critical Mass doesn't seem to achieve that, in fact it seems to make it worse. I think the idea of a cyclist protest is a good one, but my feeling is that with a lack of focus, Critical Mass isn't achieving much to help us, other than (as Lela points out) an opportunity to have a bit of fun.