What started as a group of students going on a bike ride for their friend’s birthday has blossomed into the Tucson community event known as Tuesday Night Bike Rides.

The event started back in June 2007 when a cycling enthusiast wanted to go for a ride with his friends before he headed out to the bars for his birthday. The group enjoyed their ride and decided to make it a weekly thing. Each week more people were invited, until eventually it became a community event.

The current leader of the ride, Collin Forbes started attending in November 2007.

“I read about it in the paper after they’d gotten into some trouble with the cops,“ Forbes said.

Interested by the publicity the ride received, Forbes decided to attend the following Tuesday, and has been going ever since. After several people were ticketed for running red lights, and disobeying other traffic laws one night in 2010, Forbes and a group of friends decided to take on a leadership role.

They began planning and guiding the rides, eventually adding themes to every ride. For a while there was a rotation of ride leaders between Forbes and three or four other people. As time passed Forbes’ group of leaders fizzled out. Now he leads, plans, and guides the rides all by himself.

Forbes has a lot of fun making themes for the rides.

“I like to keep the theme secret, most people don’t know the theme of the ride until they're on it. We’ve done rides where it’s entirely right hand turns, as well as rides that were entirely left hand turns. This week’s ride was spirals, if you noticed we looped around a lot,” Forbes said.

Rides average between nine and a half to 12 miles. On rare occasion there is a 17 mile ride to a place called Sun Circle. Forbes like to call that ride “Stonehenge.”

Tuesday Night Bike Riders meet each week in front of Old Main under the flag pole at the UA at 8:30 p.m.