[BeachBiker]

There was a "clothing optional" bike ride in New York City on Friday night, that was promoted as "being in solidarity with the WNBR" but there appeared to be much that went wrong, including a near absence of female riders.

The New York ride seems to desperately need more effective organizing and communications. There was no reason given for it not being a WNBR event, and the main WNBR website was never updated to show this 2014 event, It still lists last year's ride.

Until ride day, the Twitter feed had two tweets in the last month, and the Facebook page had no recent updates. And when New York got deluged by a line of thunderstorms right around the ride assembly time, some riders arrived to find nobody on the scene, and their tweets asking where everybody was were not answered. As a result, some of those who had planned to ride, bailed out.

The ride was scheduled to start at 6-pm, and did start around 6:40, but that fact wasn't mentioned on the Twitter feed, or Facebook for hours, so delayed riders who wanted to find the ride in progress had no idea if it even was happening, until it was over.

New York has some great dedicated bike lanes, and there is a new nine minute Youtube video of Friday's group riding along one of them in the rain. I watched it and think I saw two females, both fully covered. There were also a couple of dozen guys. They reported that they rode for a couple of hours and then issued these two tweets about having police problems:

The 6th precinct just used 6 officers to disrupt our peaceful ride.Stopping more traffic then we were. Resulting in 2 arrests. Shame on them

Multiple undercover vehicles used, including a taxi cab cop car.

In the video you could see the marked police cars at the start, so they had to know the NYPD was watching them.

No reasons for the arrests were given, and it's not even worth speculating. A few years ago, one rider was arrested for riding on the sidewalk, which most local bikers know is a big no-no in NYC.

The NYC riders also have done things in the past to "tweak" the cops. There is one picture on some of their websites, and in news reports showing one of their naked male riders in the middle of a busy intersection with "F__CK Pigs" written in red paint on his back. That's NOT the way to "make friends and influence people" whose cooperation can make the ride a success.

I suspect that the NYC Ride has some real "Radical" problems that need fixing, if it is ever going to rise to the level of rides in other cities. Thankfully, there are many other rides this weekend, including London, where things, including the weather, will go much better, and hopefully there will be plenty of great pictures of riders and spectators having a great time,