Naked Bike Riding Coming To A City Near You (If They Aren’t There Already)

Imagine your surprise while walking to your local grocery store for some milk or crossing a busy thoroughfare near your city's roundabout as a slew of naked bike riders come sailing around the corner! Well, these speedy nudes just flapped by in the historic U.S. city of Philadelphia last week, as they do quite often across the world during infamous Naked Bike Rides.

The World Naked Bike Ride (WNBR)

The Philadelphia version of the ride that happened this year marks the ‘City Of Brother Love”’s 15^th such ride. But The World Naked Bike Ride or WNBR is an international, ‘clothing-optional’ event featuring a dress code motto of “bare as you dare,” where folks are prompted to meet and ride under only human-powered transport. Bicycles are the usual mode of this transport, but ‘riders’ have been known to locomote on skateboards and inline skates, all to champion fuel-consumption awareness.

Many riders adorn their bodies with body paint to create a more festive event. And not all ride completely nude.

The first ride of this kind happened in 2001 in Zaragoza Spain, with the bike ride moving on to global significance two years later when Conrad Schmidt created the WNBR. Scmidt had been instrumental in putting together naked bike rides for the group “Artists for Peace/Artists Against War (AFP/AAW),” their message to protest oil dependency while celebrating the power and individuality of human bodies.

Three years later, the organization simplified its goals to focus on championing cycling and human locomotion.

By the end of the first decade of the aughts, the WNBR had expanded to having naked bike rides in 74 cities across 17 countries.

Indecent riding

Simon Oosterman, organizing the 2005 WNBR in Auckland, holds the distinction of being the first person arrested when participating in a world naked bike ride. In the same year in the U.S. state of New Hampshire, two male WNBR riders were arrested, with six male riders arrested in Chicago that same year. During the first naked ride in Denver Colorado two years later, police surrounded a group of riders and wrote a bunch of tickets, and three years after this, two more males were arrested at West Washington University.

Generally, though, cities tolerate the ride as obligatory good clean fun. The most drastic measures taken by local police on a regular basis is working a course diversion with NBR organizers, so as to have riders avoid areas of greater population, where the possibility of large groups of children might be passing.

And although canceled this year, to date the largest WNBR event was held in Portland Oregon, boasting over 10,000 riders.

The Philly ride, which saw riders begin the 12-mile (19 kilometers) run at the city’s expansive Fairmount Park, passing various historic city landmarks, used to occur in September, but riders have been complaining of feeling chilly when the ride is held in the early fall/late summer.