It's not that I was glad to hear that there was trouble, but maybe it wasn't so bad to miss this year's edition of the Five Boro Bike Tour. This note appeared in my in-box this week.
Dear Rider:
During some parts of the Tour on Sunday, there was a regrettable lack of communication to riders, which caused delays and inconvenienced some of you. We want to respond to your questions and complaints in detail. Over the course of many months, we made plans and decisions about how to proceed, taking into consideration construction schedules and other outside information.
Our plans worked well for most of the day. However, we now know that the plans were neither adequate nor flawlessly executed. We are sorry to those of you who endured discomfort, frustration and inconvenience from the bottlenecks, as well as for the lack of real-time information.
I know that my words cannot change the bad experience had by those of you who were in the latter part of the ride. Please know that Bike New York will do everything in its power to ensure that these situations are never repeated, even if it means reducing the number of participants in the Tour. The feedback we have received has not only been alarming but very helpful as we move forward to improve this event.
We are taking this matter seriously and hear the comments loud and clear. We don't have all the answers right now, but will continue to work in the weeks and months ahead to prevent situations like the ones you experienced from occurring again. We have learned and are still learning a great deal about Sunday’s Tour. Rest assured: We want all of our riders to have a wonderful experience on the Tour.
I rode, or rather tried to ride, the 5 borough in 2010 and it was extremely over crowded with horrible logistics. It used to be a great way to see NYC but it looks like this year may have been worse than lat too bad.
ReplyDeleteThe first few miles were slow, then the crowd got staggered and everything was more or less smooth until some bottleneck on BQE where we waited for 15-20 minutes for no apparent reason. I got that email too but honestly, with a field of that size I expected much worse. I guess set my bar really low :-). My biggest peeve were people that were clearly not fully in control of their hotel's rental bike and endangered others. This was my first 5Boro ride, enjoyed it enough, but most likely will not repeat unless my wife decides to do it.
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