yeh, last month the ride seemed to have folks making some silly decisions r.e. hills as well.

heeheehee.. weve got to find the people in charge of this thing!

I haven't been on a ride for awhile, but a friend who did ride yesterday said it was quite a workout and he figures that you guys rode 20 miles and took about 3 hours.

Well, I guess the question is should the ride try to include everyone, or should people just do as they please? Should it be an event, or should it really just be people who happen to be at the same place on the last Friday afternoon of the month and just happen to decide to go riding?

There are valid answers on both sides. I think the answer that favors cacophony is better because by not being an organized event, people are not officially a group. By not being a group, nobody is responsible, nobody can get a ticket for going the "wrong route", etc. And it also lives up to the axiom: "Bicycles don't block traffic; bicycles ARE traffic."

This means that those people who didn't like the route should have simply gone of their own way on a route they preferred. Would others have joined you? Depends on whether they wanted to go that way.

Myself, there's no way I'd go up steep hills. I'd like to ride down the crooked part of Lombard with a bunch of people some day, though.

I don't think Lombard was a bad idea -- it was a lot of fun. The hills weren't that bad either (I ride a beat up single-speed cruiser with a frighteningly out-of-true rear wheel). Going all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge, now that was super silly -- especially when people tried to take the automotive lanes of a bridge that provides safe and convenient bicycle access. Regardless, it was cool doing a bi-county mass. The worst part of the ride, in my opinion, was riding down Mission for 9 blocks. It's such a dead street (few people/not much traffic), and so all we really accomplished was fucking up 14 Mission service (cars can take different routes, but transit can't).