Time’s Up! had a massive year in 2011. Just check out our End of Year Letter! We took more amazing photos and made more incredible videos. We continued our weekly fix-your-bike workshops, recycle-a-bike program, and regular rides and campaigns. Some highlights were our continuation of our participation in Summer Streets with a mobile dance party, another successful bike valet program at the Clearwater Music Festival, and three successful beach rides. In addition, we started a weekly radio show to reach a greater audience and document the activist movement, we staged our biggest direct action ever in Shut Down Indian Point, we worked with Occupy Wall Street on many fronts, and we developed one of the most comprehensive energy bike systems to date! We will be ringing in the New Year as we always do, with a free fun bike ride to Belvedere Castle in Central Park, where we have a dance party and watch the fire works. Join us!
Please check out the full webpages to all of these efforts and donate here so that we can keep up our important work in the New Year!
Time’s Up! Radio Hour! Starting in January of this year, Time’s Up! partnered with local on-line radio collective Radiohive.org. Hosted by volunteers Geoff and Keegan every Sunday from 9 – 10pm, we have created weekly programing all year long! We strive to document important activist news in the past week with a particular focus on the politics around public space and cycling. We also bring in special guests to discuss current events, Time’s Up! campaigns and bike rides, and introduce the world to the volunteers spearheading those campaigns. We inform people of upcoming events, tell them about ways to get involved, and encourage them to do so.
Time’s Up! at Summer Streets! In the past, we had operated a fix-you-bike stand at Summer Streets. This year, many other groups offered the same service, so we offered a service that only Time’s Up! can offer – a mobile dance party. We pulled one of three sounds bike that we now have, and hauled it up and down the car free streets. Revels joined us to dance every time we stopped, and children and adults joined the ride to experience the city the way it should be – car free! – and to experience it the funnest way possible – on a bike!
Our Beach Rides were particularly successful this year. We tried not to plan these too far ahead of time, but jump on any nice day push them as hard as we could with all of our outreach tools. This was a great plan. We executed more than three rides with more than 30 people each, most of them new riders. We showed these riders that nature is accessible from New York City by bike, and that you don’t need a car to get to the beach and have a great time. We swam, played frisbee, and sunbathed, and showed people that they can have a great time without burning fossil fuels or spending any money!
Clearwater Hudson River Revival Music Festival. This summer, we also continued our tradition of hosting free bike valet parking at the Clearwater Music Festival. Of course, we rode our bikes to get there, then we facilitated hundreds of more people being able to do the same. While cars lined up for miles to get in, cyclists could roll up to our booth, hand us their bikes, take a tag, and enjoy the festival hassle-free, making Pete Seeger’s famous environmental festival even more sustainable!
Shut Down Indian Point! After the Clearwater Music Festival, we partnered with Pete Seeger and his legendary Clearwater Sloop to execute one of our biggest direct actions yet. We rode our bikes from the Lower East Side to Grand Central in a mock-evacuation of NYC, held up banners to Shut Down Indian Point, then took the train to Indian Point itself, where we continued our bike ride, boarded the Clearwater Sloop, strung our 50 banners in its sails, and floated past Indian Point Power Plant. Shut it down, and as an alternate, sign up through Time’s Up! to use WIND.
Occupy Wall Street. As summer wound down, Occupy Wall Street ramped up. Our volunteers were integral to the movement from the beginning, working with the press and media team, offering free bike repair and bike block, and joining the Sustainability Working Group when it was founded. The Occupy Movement fit squarely into our mission, fighting for public space, preserving the right to free speech and assembly, and creating a more just, sustainable system. Working with Occupy Wall Street felt like an extension of working with Time’s Up!, and indeed, as the Occupy Movement has decentralized, Time’s Up! has continued many of it’s campaigns around NYC and beyond!
One of the most exciting projects to come out of our collaborations with Occupy Wall Street is our new Time’s Up! Energy Bikes! We have posted the story of these bikes here, and we have also put one of the most comprehensive open-source energy bike plans on line here. Time’s Up! constantly organizes direct actions against unsustainable forms of energy, but we rarely have the opportunity to display alternative sustainable forms of energy. OWS offered us just such an opportunity, and we seized it! We did an energy audit of the entire park, designed a system to meet all the energy needs, built that system and powered the park sustainably despite the sophisticated media and press teams. Now no one can ever tell us it can’t be done! This project in particular cost us a lot of money this year, and as the Occupy Wall Street fund dwindles, we wont have this kind of funding next year without your support. So if you would like to see us continue this social innovation, please donate!
We will finish up the year as we always do, with our annual New Year’s Eve bike ride to Belvedere Castle in Central Park. This is a fun group dance ride with our sound bike to one of the most beautiful natural places in New York City, which is also a great place to view the fireworks, and where we will throw the best dance party of the night, free! Join us for the ride at one of three times and locations: 9:45pm on the Brooklyn Side of the Williamsburg Bridge, 10pm under the arch in Washington Square Park, 10:20pm at 23rd and Broadway in Madison Square Park, or just join us after 11pm at Belvedere Castle in Central Park!
