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Bob Eltgroth, right, and other members of the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition pedal supplies and furniture to its new office on Saturday, Sept. 4, 2010.

The Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition had to move its office this weekend from Willow Glen to The Alameda. Desks, chairs, sofas, paper shredder, the works.

Guess how they did it.


In a pedal-pushing parade of pro-green propaganda, 30 bicycling volunteers and their cargo moved single-file through a sweet Saturday morning slice of San Jose, pulling the contents of an entire headquarters behind them on little trailers, turning heads while trying to change the world one two-wheeler at a time.

"People from our community do bike moves all the time when they're moving to a new house,'' said Corinne Winter, executive director of the 700-member advocacy group. "So we figured, why not move our office that way, too?''

Engineers and lawyers, moms and dads, little kids along for the ride, the volunteers gathered Saturday at 9:30 a.m. at the old office, which was actually Winter's small house in Willow Glen. They carefully divided the equipment and boxes among themselves, tied down the furniture, then mounted for the 3-mile zigzag across town.

Design engineer and coalition board member Greg McPheeters, 32, strapped a huge couch onto a tiny but sturdy trailer attached to his bike. "The couch is easy,'' he said. "It's one big thing. And big things are easy to move by bike. It's the small things that are hard.''

Rolling procession


At 10:17 a.m. they were off, heading for their new, 1,500-square-foot space on the fourth floor of the United Way building at 1922 The Alameda. They turned onto Willow Street, hugging the bike lane along the No. 25 bus route, and formed a lovely conga line of yellow T-shirts and titanium spokes. They wanted to make a statement about how bicycles can change the world.

Hopefully, Winter said, "members of the community will see how much we're accomplishing on our bicycles and think, 'If they can do that, I can easily take my bike to the store, or the bank, or the movies.' "

One carried an office chair and a dog crate, another had supplies stuffed into two Gordon Biersch boxes. Past the pizza joint and the patisserie, the dog-walkers and the garage sales, the procession rolled on. Past $10 haircuts and the smell of greasy-spoon sausage on the grill, past the purr of a bus and the squawking of a drive-through loudspeaker, the coalition spread its quiet message.

"I bought my trailer when the kids were little," said Menlo Park patent attorney Dave Roise, 52. "I'd ride with them to school, then take their bikes back home with me on the trailer because they'd take the bus home in the afternoon. Now, we use it for grocery shopping, parades, even to help a friend move her three-bedroom house in Palo Alto to another one a mile away."

They pedalled on, reducing life's pace to slow-motion on a soft-skinned, late-summer's day. Past storefronts emptied and used-car lots packed to the gills, both by the same recession. People looked up in wonder, from the laundromat loungers to the two guys in turbans, leaning over the open hood of a car. Their twirling spokes clickety-clicked against a symphony of sounds, from the cymbal-crash of broken glass at the recycling center to the traffic flying above them on the freeway overpass.

Passionate peddlers

"These people," Winter said of her fellow advocates, "are truly passionate. A lot of them don't own a car, so they're almost evangelical, because they realize the challenges of living without a car. But they also want to show others that -- together -- we can create a future less dependent on the automobile."

The ride was filled with YouTube moments: the brief breakdown as several cyclists dealt with shifting cargo; the time when 30 arms went out at once, each indicating the same left turn at Auzerais Avenue, with the graceful synchronicity of water ballerinas; and the victorious home stretch, with the bicycles pulling into the United Way parking lot at precisely 10:48 a.m.

Even as they scurried about, carrying boxes and bookshelves up to the new digs, the volunteers were savoring their crosstown trip and the gospel they had seeded along the way.

But they weren't the only ones smiling. There was the ice-cream vendor on Willow Street, the joggers on Race Street, the lady at the bus stop on Lincoln Avenue with the fancy purple hat, and all the other latte-lapping, hairstyling, ATM-ing occupants of this beautifully pedalled Saturday morning.

Contact Patrick May at 408-920-5689.