About Corking

Why corking? The expense of a police detail may be prohibitive for the ride organizers; there may in fact be no organization beyond a ride announcement on social media; bureaucratic red tape may be inconvenient or expensive; and “corking” fosters a sense of empowerment over car culture with riders who are comfortable riding on streets as long as they are in a herd.

The lack of formal organization and legality has some serious disadvantages. A ride with corking is, from a legal point of view, an unauthorized parade. Riders can be held at fault in insurance claims in crashes that involve violations of traffic law, and ride leaders — if it can be determined who is responsible — can be held at fault and sued for promoting illegal behavior that leads to crashes. Insurance does not cover the organizers or riders, as it does on rides which are run by established sponsoring organizations which instruct riders to obey the law.

Attitudes on rides with corking range from who-cares, or in-your-face antagonistic (typical of Critical Mass rides) to party-like, often with blaring music system pulled on a trailer behind a bicycle, to friendly and convivial (as on the Jingle Ride held every December in Cambridge and Boston, where riders dress up in Santa Claus, reindeer, Cat in the Hat etc. costumes, engage with bystanders and stop at a few points along the route to sing schlock Christmas songs — Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer and the like).

It might be, in time, that ride marshaling duties could be assigned with less red tape, but for now, “corking” reflects unwritten, unspoken and generally uncharitable understandings between ride organizers and their followers, the police and the non-participating general public.