The event is basically what you would expect. There are bikes, and it does take place in Reno, however, it is much more than just a bunch of people riding their bikes around town.
There is a lot of bicycle riding, but it is accompanied by any form of personal transportation you could imagine; one-wheels, electric/motorized scooters, unicycles, tandem bikes, double decker burning man bikes, and even a guy riding a Tommy Bahama beach chair strapped onto a one-wheel. The ride always starts in The Believe Plaza downtown and has a designated route, planned out by the three who organize the whole thing, and includes a stop where an event takes place. These events held at the assigned stopping point include bicycle jousting, dodgeball, or on a recent ride’s instance, a gigantic slip ‘n slide with bumping music.
The ride is much more than just biking around in a group, but organizers says sometimes there is too much fun going on.
With the amount of fun that everyone has, it's clear to see why Reno Bike Night has gained such a large following, but many were left wondering why earlier this summer it went from a weekly event to a monthly one.
After attending the last ride, I was sure that the reason had to be run-ins with the police or with the city, but Hoops told me otherwise. “Eventually the novelty of it started to wear off and it just started to feel like work a little bit more,” he said. This combined with certain safety issues was enough for the three of them to consider spacing out the rides. Hoops added that there are a lot of attendees that are safety conscious, but the ones who weren’t were distressing.
“There’s close to 100 people with varying skill levels, so some people are really familiar with etiquette and for some people it was just exciting and fun, but they were riding on the wrong side of the road into oncoming traffic,” Hoops said.
Due to these issues, they decided to regroup and make Reno Bike Night one monthly ride, occurring the last Wednesday of each month, instead of weekly rides. The idea was that this would give the three organizers more time to plan better routes and arrange better events that would take place at the stopping point. The longer amount of time between rides would hopefully also allow riders to make their personal transportation safer, as they advised all attendees to come prepared with things like bike lights.
It was clear at a recent bike night (the first one since the long break), that the event was deeply missed by riders. The Believe Plaza was packed with around 250 people, all accompanied by their personal set of wheels, bike lights and water guns (as requested by the event’s Instagram page). People were milling about and visiting with one another, with others zipping around on electric scooters and one wheels, doing wheelies on their bikes through the plaza, or attacking each other with squirt guns and water balloons. After the traditional round of laps around the inside of the plaza, the crowd set off on the designated route, with bystanders cheering and taking videos throughout the entire route in Midtown.
The long break did exactly what Hoops and his friends imagined: reinvigorated the riders and the event itself, encouraged people to come more prepared safety-wise, and left more time to plan out a fun route with a ridiculously fun event. There was virtually no one riding without lights and everyone was actively trying to stay in one pack for safety, all while having a great time together.
It’s clear by the sheer number of attendees and the excitement wrapped up within, Reno Bike Night is here to stay, with the move from weekly to monthly having nothing but a positive effect. “What's cool is when we were doing it weekly last year, the only reason we cancelled rides was because of the smoke from the wildfires,” Hoops said. “We rode all through December, and there was this night where there was like six inches of snow and we had a huge snowball fight. So, it's gonna happen every single month, and it's gonna be something special.”