Next weekend, the America’s 9/11 Ride will rumble through Arlington one final time.
The motorcycle ride — with its rolling highway closures, dire traffic predictions and police escort — has not always won over locals, despite raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for Sept. 11-related causes over the years.
The first leg of the ride travels from Shanksville, Pa. to Arlington, before continuing to its third and final 9/11 crash site in New York City.
As the Associated Press reports, the ride is ending after this year as a result of a clash between the event’s organizer and state governments, with each side pointing the finger at each other as to the reason for its demise.
Ted Sjurseth, the Virginia man who founded the ride, says Virginia and Maryland state government agencies have become uncooperative with his police escort requests and have insisted on unacceptable changes to the ride’s route. State officials, meanwhile, describe Sjurseth as, in the words of the AP, “a malcontent whose gripes are nothing new.”
A Maryland State Police spokesman added that “complaints are received every year” about the ride’s traffic impacts and that the agency does not have enough troopers to escort an uninterrupted procession more than a thousand bikers.
How do you feel about the 9/11 ride ending?