Bike west, young anarchist!
Our bikes were weighed down with our bags for the weekend as we rolled up to Bike!Bike! West 2026 but I hadn’t spent much time considering what I’d actually spend three days and change doing, beyond “riding my bike around Oakland.” This was a thing I’d spent a decade doing before I moved to Sacramento last year, and I spent the days before The Event trying to describe what it is to my curious non-bicycle friends. Was it a convention? (Could such a thing be organized by anarchists?). Was it an event? (Was it too staid?) Or was it an extravaganza? (Probably!)
In its idealized form, Bike!Bike! is “ideological bicycle-fueled la la land,” as one of my co-op coworkers put it. In practice, it’s workshops, rides, and discussions connected by biking around, in this case, the Town; attendees were (mostly) people who work and wrench at (mostly) volunteer-run bicycle shops, alongside other bike people who organize bike community events (bike party) or advocacy (protests/vigils). You can learn practical bike wrenching or talk about how to improve the chronic problems that plague any volunteer-run bicycle co-op. You can see how adaptive cycling works at BORP or pick up on how to improve our sales tags from Spokeland. Or you can just bike between these events while chatting with the guy who just bought a used bicycle lane street sweeper, or that undergrad who just graduated as a Berkeley geographer, or whoever else it happens to be.
In conversations from here to there, you collect stories of how people became bike people. For one Angeleno, the story was that they had just wanted to get outside and try bikepacking until suddenly all of their friends were cyclists; one of my friends corked for the George Floyd protests and never turned back; the Kidical Mass panelists described how they became radicalized during the Berkeley-street-that-will-remain-unnamed debacle.
They are, in short, every kind of leftist: the queer punks, the policy wonks, and the Berkeley hippies who can’t wait to explain their non-hierarchical organizational structures. And or one beautiful long weekend, we were a single roving gang, biking in groups so large that we pretended to be several cars as we moved between the various workshops and parties.
Our first group ride was on Thursday night as the record-breaking temperatures began to cool. We started in Jack London Square, remembering our socialist brethren, as our trip organizer explained their desire to have a ride like this despite their junior status as a Town resident. The stops were a mix of local civil rights and transit history, the topics fitting together almost too well in a city known for building freeways to cordon off Black neighborhoods.
Our second stop was at the abandoned 16th Street electric tram station, at the end of a block next to the 880. As we stared at the station, the organizer coyly mentioned that there were two holes in the fence, and we all filed through in what the person in front of me described as “the most orderly trespassing” they had ever seen. We held ladders for each other and warned about the bad rung and offered alcohol and vaccination advice for those who scratched themselves on sketchy metal.
We next stopped at the IKEA, holding up the chain so that we could go to the roof of the parking lot and have our views of the Salesforce phallus blocked, in part, by the MacArthur Maze. A flat temporarily derailed our group, but, luckily, we had at least 30 bike mechanics on hand… to eat lychees and test ride a tall bike while the person fixed their own flat. On our next stop, we stood over the 980, hearing about how the highway intentionally divided the Oakland’s Black community. A person wearing a yellow sweater with a beautiful silver earring pinned to it described a different future in which some—or all—of the lanes might be replaced by housing or greenspace, by places for people and not cars.
After 17 miles—according to my friend’s GPS—we ended up at Snow Park, next to a couple making out and someone whose sleep we were certainly interrupting. The trip leaders surely said something of importance; I was too distracted by a barn owl swooping overhead, as the speakers continued, my friend and I looked for the owl until it hovered over some brush, looking for the perfect rat, and making us all shut up.
