By Ellen Drury Santa Monica
The Daily Press recently featured a piece regarding an unlicensed, uninsured parade of speeding vehicles that takes up our city streets one Friday night each month (“Friday night bikes,” Feb. 2, page 1). Far from being a leisurely ride through the “village,” this bratty pack of bullies poses a consistent and obvious threat to public safety. How they have been allowed to continue a choreographed paramilitary bullying of senior citizens and mothers — forcing them out of legal crosswalks, running red light after red light, snarling intersections for half-mile stretches and doing so while blasting music from amped speakers at well over 100 decibels — without attracting our police’s scrutiny is a modern mystery.
They ride in a parade permit-required size formation. They ignore traffic and public safety laws. They menace drivers and pedestrians alike, and do so with a dangerously contagious sociopathy.
Truly astounding, is the number of parents with young kids in tandem — many without helmets — all teaching their kids they can break the law any time they feel like it, by dint of being part of a gang. More importantly, they are passing their absurd sense of personal entitlement on to their youngsters, while paying lip service in their homes to obeying the law and observing the rights of others.
The clock has already begun ticking towards that one defining moment, when they block the wrong driver, filled with a week full of tension, sitting behind the wheel, just trying to get home.
Can’t wait until a senior citizen falls in a crosswalk in the middle of the racing pack. Can’t wait to see the city try to get out of those responsibilities, now that they know of their complicity in assisting this unruly mob’s continued terrorizing of motorists and pedestrians.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on February 15, 2007. Read the original PDF.