Monday, April 30

What is BRO? Sam Pederson Clues Us In

By Scot McElwaney
www.bmxonline.com

What is BRO?
BRO stands for "BMX Riders Organization." We're a committee of bike riders coming together to change the current situation and make public facilities available for BMX riders.

Sam Pederson has a lot of repsonsibility on his shoulders with the BMX Riders Organization.

How did BRO get started?
BRO was started by a group of adult BMX riders in the San Francisco Bay area that were tired of getting kicked out of public skateparks. The situation revolved around Alameda skatepark, a local Bay Area park.

This park was built by bike riders; they donated thousands of dollars and invested three years of their life. In the end they were shut out by the city. It all started with an e-mail rant: "I'm pissed off about this, I'm pissed off about that." So instead of complaining about it, we decided to get together.

How are you trying to unify riders?
We set up a Web site, a database, and we have an e-mail list. Right now we're doing most of it over the Web because that's the easiest. We're trying to get anyone who is in this struggle together. Our thinking is, "We're trying to fight our fight in the Bay Area, there are people in the East Coast that are trying to do something, so can we put our heads together and get it done quicker?"

It's taken off since we started it. We now have chapters in Oregon and Utah, and there's a guy in Hawaii that I'm helping out. It's starting to spring up around the country because people are tired of getting run out, tired of getting ticketed, and tired of getting messed with.

How would someone go about setting up a local chapter?
Just get in touch with us. We're really loosely based; we don't believe in making rules for other people. We do have a few basic guidelines as far as conduct we feel that BRO representatives should adhere to. You can't cuss out the city council, you can't threaten anyone, but other than that we're very loosely organized. We believe that everyone should have as much freedom as possible to do their own thing.

What we can do is offer the Web space and offer a community for people that are dealing with their local situation to get together. What I've found is that it works out like a support group because you can go to a [local] meeting and it's really bad and the next day you get on e-mail and pull up a message from someone that got access to their local park. So there can be good news to counter your bad news.

I think that the other benefit to having a local chapter is that when I was first making calls to find out why bikes were getting shut out, I was talking to people and saying, "My name's Sam Pederson and I'm a bike rider." And people just blow me off. Now I call and say, "I'm Sam from the BMX Riders Organization." They still want to blow me off, but now they pay a little more attention. So now you're part of a bigger, national group.

We're trying to give the bike-riding community a little more of a voice. One of the things that [cities] say is that BMXers aren't organized, BMXers don't have any official organizations or groups. So we're trying to bring everyone together.

How long ago did BRO start?
Almost a year ago ... it was about nine months ago.

Did the Web site happen at the same time?
It was really cool, actually. We had one meeting and everyone was throwing around ideas for what we wanted to do. Actually, the first thing that came up involved the Vans Skatepark in Milipitas, Calif., near San Jose. When they first opened up they said that they were going to have bike night, but we kept getting the run around. Then eventually they said that they weren't going to allow bikes at all. So we got a petition and eventually they caved in.

During that time we started talking about the public skateparks and thinking that it was way more important to us to be able to ride these free "public" facilities. But actually Dennis Dowling (of BMXweb.com) does the Web site. He's from San Francisco, and he was one of the BRO founders.

Cochran-Amazon is one of the many "public" parks that bikes are not allowed at in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I've heard that one of BRO's priorities is to make BMX more available to underprivileged kids. Is that something you strive for?
Yeah, because Vans charges $14 for a two-hour session and the kids that really need it can't afford that. So they go out and ride the public parks, because they see it in the magazines and it's a skatepark and bikes have been riding skateparks forever. So what happens is they get a ticket. When someone like me gets a ticket, they can afford it because they have a job, but an underprivileged kid can't afford it. On top of that, they're going to go home and their parents are going to bitch them out and put them on restriction -- all for riding their bike. We don't want to see that happen, especially not to the kids that need it the most, because riding a bike will keep them out of trouble.

How did you hook up with SPAUSA (Skatepark Association of the USA)?
We started talking to Heidi (Lemmon, President of the SPAUSA) by e-mail and she's been the most supportive of any person out there. She's doing this because she feels it's right. She's going to bat for the bikers because she feels it's right, and she's gotten a lot of flack from the skateboarding community for that. But she's a strong woman and she's helped us out more than anyone. As soon as we hooked up with her we found out that we had a lot in common -- our ideas and beliefs. She has helped us out in a lot of ways.

What do you see as the biggest obstacle?
I think that the biggest thing right now is simply education. We're going to have to get everyone out to these meetings and start educating the city that we need public facilities and that it's not right to shut us out. Right now, we get the typical ignorant response of, "a skatepark ... that's for skateboarders." The root word is "skate," and they don't realize that bike riders have been riding skateparks as long as skateboarders have. And it goes beyond that. We have photos on the Web site of people riding pools on Schwinn StingRays. It's been around and we're not going anywhere. On top of that, there are sports with fewer participants that have public facilities.

Who have been your biggest supporters?
Ben Ward, Shad Johnson and Jamie McParland of BRO Oregon; Kent Dahlgren and the Grindline crew; Dan Rivers of BRO Utah; Jeff Hutchins, Evan Gage, Mat Hoffman, Guillermo; and Tony, Jymi Shores, Mike Donelin, Ride BMX,BMX Online; and most of all, Heidi Lemmon.

And I just want to add that BRO's focus isn't just on skateparks. We're also concerned about dirt jumps. Trails are plowed all the time, so we're offering petitions on our Web site. You can get permission from the city to build trails, and that will keep them from getting plowed. We're also concerned about flatlanders who are always getting kicked out of spots. We're just all about everyone. BRO isn't just one thing.

Learn more about BRO by checking out their Web site at BMXRiders.org.