Bikes, Lasers, & Techno Music

The Bay Area's "Bike Party" phenomenon has now arrived in Menlo Park with Peninsula Bike Party.

Bike Parties are large monthly night-time group bike rides that follow a pre-determined route with scheduled "party stops" (re-group locations), typically from 8 to 11 pm on Friday nights. The number of riders is usually a few hundred, but San Jose Bike Party has seen up to 4000 riders!

The San Jose Bike Party, which was partly inspired by Los Angeles's Midnight Ridazz, started out with just 25 riders in Oct 2007 with the mission of "building community through bicycling". Over time the ride grew in popularity and now attracts over 1,000 riders every month, and has spun off another group called Bike Soiree, which maintains an online calendar of its own night-time rides that meet nearly every week. 

The San Jose Bike Party has so inspired bike parties in other parts of the Bay Area: the East Bay Bike Party (began May 2010), the San Francisco Bike Party (began Jan 2011), and the Peninsula Bike Party (began July 2011). Bike Party rides typically feature music bikes, whose owners have built sound systems onto trailers that they tow throughout the ride. Organizers also determine a "theme" for each ride to encourage riders to dress up and/or decorate their bikes. Organizers also make sure riders follow all traffic laws and stay inside one lane so that the ride doesn't block vehicles. 

Peninsula Bike Party aims to fill the "critical bike party gap" that existed between San Francisco and San Jose. It meets every 4th Friday of every month at 7:30 pm at various locations on the Peninsula, and always accesible using Caltrain. Rides are currently posted on a Facebook group page, but the group's organizers say they want to create their own website soon to make the ride accessible to more people.

40 riders joined the ride on Friday night, which met at The Oval at Stanford University. The ride was a "Tour of Bicycle Boulevards and Bike Bridges" and managed to visit four of them - the Wilkie Way and Bryant St bridges that connect Palo Alto with Mountain View, and the Willow/Waverley and San Mateo Dr bridges that connect Menlo Park with Palo Alto.

The ride visited the boarded-up and partially demolished Sears at the San Antonio Shopping Center in Mountain View, and the skate park in Burgess Park in Menlo Park. Those ramps in the skate park are sure tough on a road bike! After that, the ride cruised down Menlo Park's sleepy Santa Cruz Avenue around 10:30 pm.

Bike Party!