Did Critical Mass ride in Salem During the 1990s?

Back in 2014 when the movie "Aftermass" was playing one night here, a reader suggested Critical Mass had been active in Salem for a while in 1993-94.

With fliers circulating for what might be a revival of Critical Mass starting this Friday, it was interesting to see about finding evidence for that earlier activity.

A preliminary search through newspapers did not find any local coverage, so if it was happening, it must not have been very big or very disruptive.

This editorial from 1995 on Critical Mass in Corvallis would have been certain to mention any Salem instance from two or three years before, but it is silent on that.

June 26th, 1995

In hindsight the editorial is also not very promising on "working quietly with government and motorists"! The "faster and easier" solutions have not materialized and Salem has not been successful on getting "more people out of their cars."

There was very occasional later coverage of Critical Mass in other cities, picked up from wire pieces and not localized to mention anything in Salem.

August 30th and 31st, 1997

Even though there aren't a lot of stories, they are consistently resolved to a "law and order" frame rather than transportation safety or environmentalism frame. The stories shoot the messenger and do not give sufficient weight to the message. 

July 28th, 2002

The piece from 2002 really leans hard into the moderate vs. radical frame, and stresses the ostensible "responsibility" of the bike club moderate over the "confrontational" Critical Mass rider.

I would not say I had exhausted search possibilities, but at the moment it seems doubtful that Salem had any meaningful Critical Mass movement in the 90s or 00s. Anything that might have happened was such an underground expression of subculture it did not register with the newspaper — and therefore did not fulfill any advocacy/protest function.

But here we are 20 and 30 years later, and while we do have a few more bike lanes, we still lack a complete network of them, not to mention any network that meets a "family-friendly" or "all ages and abilities" standard, drivers are killing more people on foot and on bike, and City policy over that period was still very much pro-driving. 

Online supplement, Monday

Our climate crisis is so much more dire. Maybe our recent parking reforms mark a turning point, but we still have an enormous system of compulsory autoism with subsidy for driving.

Online supplement, today

A revival, or wholly new instance, of Critical Mass could be an important ingredient in a new wave of advocacy for transportation safety and for climate. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.