Photo by Sheldon Hambrick

This year San Jose Bike Party hit the eight year mark of “Building Community Through Bicycling” and we will be completing our 99th Ride later this week.

Our Raven bikes that were launched in 2013 are still riding strong keeping our regroups cleaner than we found them & also giving us the ability to help out in other cleanup events sponsored by the city of San Jose.  To compliment our Raven bikes for trash and recycling, we launched our TravelJohn™ program that provides disposable urination devices as well as privacy tents at the regroups where bathrooms are not present.  This program was launched through a generous donation by TravelJohn™ and is self sustaining through ongoing donations.

Food trucks and live DJ’s were provided for each of our rides this year, and we continue to expand out genre’s of music represented.  The Live DJ’s and mobile dance floor are provided by Guerillaz in Da Mixx, a music bike club supporting all of our activities with a single sound source for a more cohesive experience at our Regroups.

In July we had a special event at the San Jose Flea Market that is likely to become a new tradition.  We had a shorter ride that night and many activities at the regroup including performances by SJ Taiko, live DJ’s & Fire spinners, as well as races of all kinds sponsored by SJ Fixed.

We also participated in the first Viva Calle event in San Jose, adopting a corner and providing Music for our designated section of Viva Calle.

We continued our long standing traditions of our Bike the Limits and Ladies Rides this year, and also hosted other family friendly rides such as SJ Kidz Bike Party and Groovin’ on a Sunday rides.  We also participated with our biggest team ever of over 30 volunteers for the Big Bike Build event sponsored by Turning Wheels for Kids.

To educate our newcomers and remind our loyal riders we created diagrams to show #HowWeRide as a group, and also translated our 6 basic rules into Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog, & Vietnamese.  These were distributed on our social media outlets, which continue to grow and are a key way that we attract new riders of all kinds.

In the fall, we decided to launch a new program aimed at putting lights on the bikes of at risk riders in San Jose, with the hopes of preventing more bike on car collisions and deaths.  This program, #LightMeUp, is being funded by donations, with 100% of these proceeds going towards light purchases.

As we get ready for our last ride of the year, we want to thank the City of San Jose for its continued support, our volunteers, and most of all, you, the the bike partiers who come out to share the fun and make new friends.

SJ Bike Party is 100% volunteer run.  We continue to get a steady flow of new volunteers and we are endeavoring to improve our overall experience.  This last year we formalized our ROADRUNNER route team, as well as Social Media team to share the workload among more volunteers.  We sincerely hope that you will come join us in the new year and help to keep San Jose Bike Party rolling for the foreseeable future.