Well, first off, I live in Brooklyn and have zero interest in going to the Bike Expo for any reason, certainly not to pick up something that can easily be put into the mail with free shipping. I think the expos are usually downtown, and parking is a nightmare. Public transportation to there is a huge pain in the ass. Not that any of this matters. LMAO I am not paying these people $112.00 plus their moronic mailing fee to participate in a ride with no refunds for inclement weather, potentially dangerous, or at least inconvenient, rider-bottlenecks, and for what? To ride alongside ten thousand weekend warriors, encased in wall-to-wall, mostly inexperienced riders, who half the time don't look where they're going?
I paid the first few years I did it, way back in the late '80's and early nineties. I think it was a lot more reasonable back then, but I'm not sure. Then I started just showing up and riding, hoping not to be thrown off the ride. In all the years I showed up without any sort of ride pack, nobody even looked at me funny. I have heard security in the ride is a lot tighter in the past 10 years, so I haven't tried crashing the ride (lol unfortunate and unintentional pun) in a while.
I may do it this year, weather permitting. I mean, what's the worst thing they can do, throw me off the...um streets? Is that even legal? This is still the United States, and I'm not sure there is a legal precedent to tell me that I cannot ride on public streets just because they rented them. If stopped, I can simply say that I am not "participating in the ride" and just make up some excuse about going somewhere else and using the street I am busted on "coincidentally." I assume the worst they could do is toss an unpaid rider off the...what? Off the public street? I suppose if they are renting it, cops may toss me off. But if I do crash the ride, I would only leave the route if a police officer demanded it. If some ride marshal or administrator yelled at me to leave, I would ignore them, and tell them to call the cops to throw me off. Then I can just ride somewhere else to get however many miles I want in.
Unless there are fines or possible lol criminal charges if I am caught "trespassing?" Which I seriously doubt. I assume I could only get in any real trouble if I am causing trouble or committing a crime, I am not sure what they could actually do to me if I decide to crash the ride.
Then again, I literally have this same conversation with myself every year, and have not crashed the ride in over ten years, since I heard that they started cracking down on people like me who stopped paying the entrance fees sometime in the '90s. I will probably just grouse about it being stupid and a violation of my civil liberties to be banished from 40 miles of PUBLIC streets for the day, and just ride somewhere else that day.