Gotta Keep Ya Shred Up

Ride At Your Own Risk from Mike Novelli on Vimeo.

Bikes v. Skateparks has never really been an issue for me because I grew up riding without a local park. The one I frequented the most was probably Vans before it closed down, and come to think of it, having a skatepark in a mall is a little weird and creepy, especially in light of this. I guess there was Greer and Alameda, but both were far enough out of the way to make me look elsewhere for more accessible places to ride. Caltrans was our little portal that took us throughout the Bay Area Peninsula, in search of new spots to ride and adventures to be had. It's funny for me to think back at how Millbrae or downtown San Jose seemed like Barcelona in terms of being untapped and new places for shredding; in reality they were no more than thirty minutes away by car. Needless to say, I've rolled with a bravado that I'll still be riding just as much even if skateparks didn't exist.

Yet as I get older, I'm realizing that it's really not okay to just roll up to a school yard, play ground, government building, etc. and act like it's okay because you're just doing bike tricks. People still get uncomfortable seeing a grown up thrashing around town on a 20 inch, despite how mainstream BMX has become. As a cop or security guard is running your information, every year it becomes harder for me to tell them with an honest face "Whoops, I didn't know I wasn't supposed to be here." But as the years of participation pile up, it seems that inevitably the risks do too, and I'm not just talking about injuries. Unfortunately, I find that I'm not listening to nearly as much Rancid compared to my earlier days enough to say "Fuck it," and move on.

Anyways, I was really surprised to watch this documentary and see city workers who don't ride actually understand how the current treatment of public skateparks is dumb and unfair for bikes. I really enjoyed the comparison of maintenance fees between a skatepark and a baseball field, not to mention how they showed how skateparks are treated as revenue generators at the cost of the participants. Perhaps this is just my opinion, but it also seemed to open the argument that current policing of skateparks are a way to penalize participants for deviating from more traditional team/competitive sports and label them as outcasts. Most impressive of all was the fact that this well put together documentary sprang from the same land who produced this. Anyways, keep ya shred up player!