So, in San Francisco, folks cooked up Critical Mass. The idea is that you get a whole mega crapload of people to all show up and ride their bikes through town, taking a lane of traffic like they are entitled to, and whatnot. This way you can remind folks that we're not supposed to be stuffed onto sidewalks and bike trails and that we've got the same right to be there as the cars do. Maybe more, because we're not part of the problem.

But this is on city streets. And they've got critical mass everywhere now, almost to the point of cliché. Los Angeles has a bigger problem than most other towns. See, they built Los Angeles as a motorist paradise. No downtown, no mass transit, nothing. And the growing pains are starting to show now that there's pretty much no new places to put any highways and no point in adding any more lanes to the same old highways. So they've got massive nasty horrible gridlock all the time on their highways. We've gotten in traffic jams in the middle of the night while visiting. And it's going so slow that you might as well just walk. I mean, seriously. Your average speed rarely goes about 15mph, which is totally within the realm of what you can do on a bike.

So a great bunch of Los Angeles's Finest Crazies decided to drive the point home, and even had a guy on a tall bike to take areal shots in the second video:

Congrats, Los Angeles. Your traffic has gotten so bad from your half-assed attempt at a mass transit system in a city built around the car that it is now faster to BIKE than DRIVE. My motorcyclist co-workers like that they can ride between lines of cars when it's going 5 mph. I guess we can, too.