According to bikers who saw the whole thing going down, Susan Ferrando, the driver of the mini-van didn't just slowly glide towards the intersection but hit the pedal to the medal and ran over one biker. Thus all the anger directed her way. KTVU has a good story full of eyewitness accounts on the incident. Also, in a blog post on SFBG, Steven T. Jones played the bash the media card as he went after Matier & Ross for adding fuel to all this fire by only getting Ferrando's side of the story.
Since nothing in this town goes by without a comment from Gavin, the Mayor weighed in and tried to thread the needle between opposing sides. He called on Critical Mass to control the "bad actors" but didn't call for any sort of ban or crackdown, something that's kind of hard to do since nobody claims to be in charge of the thing. Not to mention the fact it didn't go so well when Willie tried it. Instead, he's trying to meet with bicycle activists to hammer out some sort of "protocol" for the thing. Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, however, said there's nothing she could really do about it, but we did see that the SF Bicycle Coalition not only condemned what happened, but are sponsoring something called "critical manners." Side note-- the bike polo sounds kind of fun.
And finally, this whole thing seems to be causing all sorts of online nastiness, as evidenced by the comments on little ole SFist but on SFGate and Craigslist and pretty much every message board out there. We did happen to note that on the totally unofficial and non-scientific poll on SFGate, 81% blamed the bikers for the incident. Which reminds us of the time we were on a bus and the entire bus cheered when a motorist who had just been yelled at by a bike messenger got out of the car and threatened to kick the biker’s ass.
So with that, we'll live you with this message-- why can't we all just get along?