Fancy dress at last! Elaine was an angel and having already been a sailor (July 2007) I was a pirate for our first ever fancy-dress Critical Mass bike ride in Granada on 1 February.
Unlike Barcelona, Granada is poorly-equipped for bikes - and this is a shame, because in this small, compact, and mostly flat city, bikes should be the first choice for everyone. They used to be: we've seen the photos of the streets in the 1920s.
But, like almost everywhere else in Europe (the UK included), the car remains king. To make things worse, here in Andalucia motorists can do whatever they want with total impunity. The police do nothing to stop them speeding along narrow streets, driving while using mobile phones, parking in bus bays, on pavements, on zebra crossings...The Masa Critica is a monthly mobile party, to demonstrate the efficiency and usefulness of the true vehicle of the future: the bike. The city's pedestrians were very supportive (especially kids, who love bikes, and older people, who remember a time when cars were rarer and streets were safer).
Even many of the drivers, sitting in their plastic seats, going nowhere at all in the nightly traffic jam, showed their support as we zipped past them: one wonders how much longer they can tolerate the boring, dangerous nightmare they have helped to create.
Here in Granada there really are no excuses: one can easily cycle from one end of the city to the other in 30 minutes, and there are frequent urban and inter-urban buses to everywhere else.
And in fact in Granada - as in the UK - there are already more bikes than cars. It's time to bring them out of the garages and off the balconies and onto the streets!
More video (spot Elaine's angel wings!), pics and information (in Spanish) at Granada Via Verde. GG
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