Ora Masalah and Jogja Last Friday Night Ride

This last weekend was full of lots of cool bike stuff going on.  The only bad news was that some of the events overlapped so I couldn’t make it to everything (#watsonfellowshipproblems). Friday night I got to check out the infamous Jogja Last Friday Night Ride.  The last Friday of every month there is a huge ride through Jogja with around 1000 people attending each month.  The route changes, but it always starts by the stadium and ends by the Kraton.  Now this might sound familiar, and remind you of Critical Mass, but the organizers are quick to distinguish the two. As one of the organizers put it (I’m paraphrasing here) – we’re not trying to make a political statement, or make any demands to the government with this ride. We want this space just to be a fun space where people can come enjoy riding their bike. The political stuff is for other spaces, Jogja Last  Friday Night Ride is just to get people out riding.

And they succeed in that goal. The streets were packed, at times making it difficult to move, with tons of people riding bikes and having fun. It was one of the most inclusive bike gatherings I’ve seen. The bikes alone spanned from downhill, fixed gear, restored classic bikes, broken down classic bikes, the largest gathering of tall bikes I’d ever seen, cruisers, low-riders, step-throughs with front baskets, and many more.  The people spanned from tweens to elderly folks (although I would say the majority were closer to the teenage side), and it was cool to see so many people united by enjoying biking. The ride wasn’t characterized by antagonism towards cars, however a group of 1000 people riding through small streets is going to disturb traffic regardless.

Some of the same organizers of Friday’s ride also organized a ride on Sunday. However, this ride was an explicitly political ride as part of the Ora Masalah (No Problem) campaign. The Ora Masalah campaign really kicked off about a month ago in response to a change in policies with the new mayor of Jogja. The previous mayor was a big bike advocate and did a lot to advance both biking infrastructure and culture in the city. He made every Friday “Bike to Work” Day and all government employees had to arrive to work by bike. He also created bike boxes at intersections around the city, and took significant steps towards bike lanes. But when the new mayor came into office he stopped all of this progress. He stopped Bike to Work day, and has started paving over previous bike lanes and bike boxes.

In response to the new mayor, the bike community in Jogja began the Ora Masalah campaign.  The slogan of the campaign – No Problem – is meant to keep the campaign on a positive note to say to the mayor and the government that we don’t need you. We can do this on our own. Sunday was the national Youth Pledge Day, celebrating when in 1928 a group of youth declared Indonesia to be one motherland, one nation, and one language during Dutch colonialization (which is problematic in its own way considering that Indonesia is a nation of countless languages, and ethnicities, and the idea of an Indonesian motherland is also tricky but that is not really the point…). So a group of cyclists went for a bike ride with banners that said “I pledge by Bike, No Problem.”  The idea is that this group is going to ride on every national holiday and co-opt slogans from that holiday.  We met up, went for a ride around Jogja, stopped at the Mayor’s house to show him that the cycling community is strong and watching him, and all in all had a good time.

There are a lot of things that I can appreciate about seeing the contrast between Last Friday Night Ride and the Ora Masalah ride. I often think there are three main ways that biking can help people empower themselves (well really there are countless ways, but I’m going to divide this into three main categories): personal, political, and economic empowerment. And sometimes these things need to be explicitly worked at separately, even if in the end these are all inextricably linked.  So even if you have a fun Friday night ride, I still think it’s personally empowering to people, and can get them excited about biking just because it’s fun. Then the political and economic stuff might come later, or vice versa. But you might get more people involved at the beginning if it’s not explicitly political.

I think it’s important to have events that attract a diverse group to participate, perhaps because an event doesn’t have its politics spelled out, because I think that having a diverse group together participating makes for a more deeply democratic space. One of the organizers and I chatted for a while about the need for both radical and, as he termed it, “polite” organizing in the bike community. I think in a lot of ways it has to do with getting as many people as possible involved in bike organizing with the ultimate goal of making safer, open, and democratic streets. I think you just have to approach it from lots of different angles to make that happen because each perspective might be doing something different or better or worse, but ultimately is something we can all learn from.

Ok. So that’s my bike sermon of the day. If you have thoughts on that I would really love to hear what you have to say.