Nearly 10,000 bikers conquered the Hungarian capital on Saturday by cruising along the city’s major thoroughfares and crossing its beautiful bridges before gathering on the sprawling grounds of City Park – all continuing the tradition of the annual springtime I Bike Budapest event, attracting masses of cyclists who pedal to draw attention to the growing need for better bike routes citywide. However, some attendees decided to join the event with alternative human-powered vehicles instead of bikes, including a pair on a skateboard and a scooter who created a cheerful film of this occasion.

Despite less-than-perfect weather conditions, thousands of cyclists joined forces last weekend during I Bike Budapest to traverse the Magyar metropolis on two-wheelers and highlight the city’s often-unsatisfactory road conditions regularly faced by those traveling on bikes. This year’s event – organized to coincide with Earth Day on April 22nd – kicked off at downtown’s Szabadság Square, before some 10,000 bikers headed out onto some of the city’s major roads that were closed to auto traffic, including Pest’s Danube Quay, Petőfi Bridge, Bartók Béla Road, Szent Gellért Quay, the Castle Hill Tunnel, the Chain Bridge, and Andrássy Avenue, with the tour de force ending at a giant meadow in City Park, where participants celebrated their achievement with a mass bike-lifting moment.

This year’s I Bike Budapest event attracted a colorful crowd, and some of the attendees decided to join the parade with rolling vehicles of varied kinds, including a skateboard and a scooter. One of our readers, Árpád Pintér, skated along the entire length of the procession along with a scooter-riding companion, filming the moving jamboree and providing We Love Budapest with the link to his lighthearted video.

The creative mini-movie shows the pair cruising amid crowds of cyclists and pushing past varied urban scenes, including a wedding and a group of obscured passersby wearing gold-colored masks. Here’s the short video showing the surreal scenes:

Anyone who missed Saturday’s cheerful parade and who would like to contribute to raising awareness of the need for better biking conditions in the city can join the first “Record Week of Bicycles” freshly launched by the I Bike Budapest organizers, the Hungarian Cyclists’ Club (Magyar Kerékpárosklub). This weeklong initiative invites the city’s companies, schools, and communities to only use bicycles as a method of transportation in the upcoming days, and to bring a record-breaking number of human-powered two-wheelers onto the city’s streets. Anyone can join this program through April 29th on the event’s official Facebook page, where the list of participating organizations will also be published.