Interesting link: the Passage Ride site
This is a deep excavation from within the Los Angeles social bike ride scene.
Years ago, my husband and some of my friends used to go on the Passage Ride together pretty frequently--a nighttime ride across the city of Los Angeles. I did not ride bikes in LA at that time.
The ride ran weekly for a decade from 2009 through 2019. It took a haitus for a while, and still exists now, in a slightly different format - you can get on the mailing list and come along if you're in LA. There is a website which preserves the ride routes and photographs from the original run.
The site is an incredible record of a unique way of relating to Los Angeles. You can see every single route they ever did and a handful of photographs from each one. Here's a good example. The route map and photos are accompanied by a couple paragraphs of meandering thought on the route's vague... theme? topic? name? I like it, haha. Some of them have photos of people biking through super strange, concrete geography... under a bridge? In a tunnel? I am sometimes lucky enough to go on rides with different groups in LA that also relate to the city in this way. Going places you're not "supposed" to go is the best.
My husband tells me that the Passage Ride is harder now than it was back when he did it during the original run. I've been on a couple of the newer ones, and it definitely kicked my ass a bit, but I'm stronger now than I was the last time I tried it... so who knows. It's funny to me that the About page has so many questions on it about how hard the ride was. Based on the couple ones I've done since 2022, the current state of the ride is definitely, like, what most human beings would consider extremely hard... but not what most Big Time Urban Cycle Freaks would consider hard. You should check it out if you can do the speed ranges described on the Completism page listed above.