wyliepoon
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Bike Toronto-style
TheStar.com | GTA | A true bicycle culture remains elusive
A true bicycle culture remains elusive
ANDREW WALLACE/TORONTO STAR
May 18, 2008 04:30 AM
Murray Whyte
Staff Reporter
They shuttle swiftly along a thin strip of pavement, legs pumping, in a thin-but-steady stream. Beside them, four lanes of car-clogged Lakeshore Drive; just beyond a concrete barrier, six more lanes of stop-and-go Gardiner Expressway.
If recent statistics gathered by a pair of urban transportation gurus from Rutgers University are to be believed, they are the less than one-in-a-hundred citizens of our city who routinely use their bike as something more than a joyriding, fair-weather cruiser.
They are, as the current coinage of cycling taxonomy would have it, the utility riders, for whom cycling is survival, not sport – a daily fact, not a weekend diversion.
On the city's waterfront bike path west of downtown one chilly rush-hour morning last week, simple logic would seem to defy their scarcity: A string of bright red brake lights, hundreds long, chart their path to the skyscrapers in the near distance as they whip past the gridlock with speedy, silent ease.
With rising gas prices, ever-worse congestion and a growing environmental conscience, it would be reasonable to guess that their numbers should be growing, and rapidly. If cycle shops in the city are any indication, they are: Most refuse to promise anything less than three weeks for a simple tune-up as casual riders dust off their neglected rigs and get them road-ready.
But this is the perfect picture of the urban cycle commute: A dedicated route surrounded by green space, a gentle off-lake breeze. A few hundred metres north, on city streets fraught with urban hazards, reality sets in.
Cyclists are shoved into the collective chaos of the urban transportation scene – trucks and cars, buses and streetcars, potholes and streetcar tracks, and most dreaded of all, the sudden swing opening of a car door. It becomes clear that the lakeside idyll of the bike commute is a tiny exception to a massive, and often painful, rule.
This is the most significant barrier to Toronto truly becoming a bike city. Mass movements tend not to be engendered by death-defying activity. "You don't buy a car if there's no roads," grumbles Adrian Heaps. "You don't ride a bike if there's no infrastructure for it. And we don't have anywhere near enough."
Heaps, the Toronto city councillor who chairs the bike committee, laments the numbers. As of 2003, Toronto had about 251 kilometres of bike lanes, and of that, only 76 was deemed cyclist-only – not shared with cars. Ottawa, a fraction of this city's size, had 822, according to Cycling Trends and Policies in Canadian Cities, a paper published in 2005 by John Pucher and Ralph Buehler, two urban transport experts at Rutgers University.
Sadly – for Toronto, at least – their Toronto figures are not that badly out of date. Our numbers have only grown by seven or eight km a year, as any cycling activist will be more than happy to tell you.
"We're way behind European cities. We're behind a lot of Canadian cities," says Heaps, who took over the city's cycling committee last year. What he found was a bureaucratic quagmire of almost laughable proportions: Year after year, the cycling committee had a $5.5-million budget, but only managed to spend a tiny portion of it.
"Everything was so tangled in bureaucracy, by the time the approvals came in, it was November and too cold to paint (bike lanes)," says Heaps. The futility was exasperating. "You can't ask for more money if you don't spend what you've got."
So Heaps cut the committee by two-thirds and took over the approval process himself. The result will be 51 km more bike lanes this year, 75 in 2009 and 92 in 2010. Still, the city's goal of 500 km by 2011 seems optimistic. "We're doing better than before," Heaps says, "but it's not where we should be."
THAT'S TRUE BOTH on the ground, and in the hearts and minds of Toronto's cycling community, which has always embraced life on two wheels with little help from – and often in spite of – civic officialdom. In the snow-free months, major arteries like King, Queen and Bloor streets flow freely with utility cyclists – suits and secretaries, vintage-clad hipsters, speed racers in clingy, all-body Lycra.
Sometimes, even the most agile rider goes down, the unwilling recipient of a door prize – the driver's-side door, unintentionally flung open too close for the rider to evade – or the right hook, where a right-turning vehicle curls quickly around the corner and into the path of an onrushing cyclist. According to a 2003 city study, there were 2,572 collisions between cars and bikes during a two-year period. And those are just the ones reported to the police.
The impact is often brutal, bone-breaking. At times, it has been fatal. Worst of all, it's entirely preventable, say experts, with the wide implementation of bike-only lanes.
Because we don't have them – in any great number at least – we have something else: A deep enmity between cyclists and drivers that, on the cyclists' side, has in some cases flared into militance.
Witness Critical Mass, the monthly protest ride by some of the city's hardest hard-core riders – bike couriers, anti-car activists, devoted gearheads. Gathering at Bloor and Spadina the last Friday of every month, riders wilfully take the space they believe is theirs – usually the entire breadth of the road.
"We don't block traffic. We ARE traffic," reads one of the few lines on its sparse website. "Those rides can get a little more aggressive, or confrontational," says Jode Roberts, a kinder, gentler kind of cycling activist. He's a co-founder of Bells on Bloor, a friendly annual ride that happens today on Bloor St. from High Park to Avenue Road.
"We wanted to have a fun family event that people could feel comfortable bringing their kids to," he says. "There's a culture of fear around cycling at the moment, and we need to dispel that."
No one at Critical Mass responded to attempts at contact. But they get plenty of attention – the wrong kind, says Matt Blackett.
"We need to go beyond the same old story – `we have to push cars off the road,'" says Blackett, one of the founders of the Public Space Committee and the editor of Spacing magazine, a quarterly dedicated to urban sustainability and aesthetics.
Once, in a display of apparent frustration at their below-the-law, the Critical Mass group rode through the Eaton Centre, slaloming through mall shoppers fast enough to evade security. "That kind of thing defeats the purpose," says Blackett.
But is also speaks to a deep-rooted malaise in the city's chaotic, unofficial cycling culture. "If you don't want militants," Blackett says, "then do what you said you were going to do. If they had built what they were supposed to, there would be nothing to be upset about."
JOHN LAWSON locks his Rocky Mountain bike to the rack at the Aurora GO Station every morning. He catches the 6:30 a.m. train to his office in downtown Toronto. "But the bike is my transportation of choice," he says. If he can't use it to get right to his office, this is the next best thing.
Lawson is still the rarest of breeds here – the suburban utility rider. Eight other bikes are locked up beside his. All around, hundreds of cars cram the parking lot.
In Aurora, Wellington Road stretches west from Highway 404, six lanes of broad pavement, built for speed. This is the domain of the car. There is no sharing. For the moment, at least, there's nothing and no one to share with.
Up here, the roads widen and acres of parking lot stretching in front of various "supercentres" – a multi-faceted Wal-Mart the size of several city blocks; outsized clusters of various big-box stores – are the norm. But in a few years, even downtown's most militant cyclists might feel strangely at home here.
York Region recently released its first-ever cycling and pedestrian master plan. It won a significant award from the Canadian Institute of Planning for their work with sustainable transportation. Faced with massive growth in such places as Markham, Stouffville and Aurora, the planning department seized on a seeming oxymoron: To promote cycling and walking as transport modes, not just recreation.
They also walked the talk. York Region has committed 260 km of bike lanes – more than Toronto's total – in the next five years, with another 198 within five years past that. "The goal is to promote sustainable modes of transportation before any others," says York Region's director of infrastructure Paul May.
IT BEGS THE QUESTION: How did we get so far away from it in the first place? Metrolinx, which used to be called the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority, produced a report in February called Active Transportation, which describes anything human powered – walking, biking, skateboarding, rollerblading.
It urges cities to embrace cycling – and anything else without engines – for everything from health and economic reasons to social improvement. In a section called "social barriers," the report encourages people to abandon the contemporary habit of driving children to school.
It mentions an event called International Walk to School Day as a good initiative. "One may question, however," the report chides with chilly institutional restraint, "why walking to school should be considered an activity that requires international awareness and promotion."
We are not alone in our devotion to the car. Cities all over the world have embraced it as cheap, convenient transportation when low-priced oil was king. It isn't anymore. But we're not breaking the habit.
"We're like the Amish who drive cars around here," said Heaps. But strong-arming a cycling agenda in a council laden with suburban interests is a dangerous political manoeuvre.
"I have the votes on council to ram bike lanes down everyone's throats," Heaps says. "But I'd rather not do that. For one thing, it would be a bloodbath, and for another, I'd rather have people embrace it because they see the value."
What Heaps is talking about is changing culture. In the transportation endgame, with oil shattering its record high and humanity exploding and urbanizing at its fastest rate in human history, changing the culture is, unenviably, both a necessary and near-impossible task.
Still, it has been achieved in cities like Amsterdam, where 27 per cent of the city of the population relies on a bike as their main mode of transportation. In Copenhagen, cycling's shining beacon of civility and progress, where dedicated bike lanes are institutionalized, organized, and everywhere, the number is more than 30 per cent.
Roberts has seen it first hand. "They've created a culture where people feel safe on their bikes," says Roberts. "That takes time, and it's not easy. We've catered to the car for a long time. But I really believe we're at the tipping point for bike culture in this city. This summer, you'll see the pressure for that go up."
Heaps is not one for pressure. But a gentle push is all it takes to start the momentum rolling.
"Look, we're not asking people to do the Tour de France," he says. "We're asking them to once in a while to think about getting to work in a different way. We have to remove the mindset that this is recreation. Start thinking of it as a parallel transit system – and take it seriously."
*****
Link to article
Bike Toronto-style
TheStar.com | GTA | Cycling's union movement
Cycling's union movement
Email Story Email story
May 18, 2008 04:30 AM
Leslie Scrivener
Staff Reporter
Biking on the streets of Toronto are mad-eyed couriers, spidery-legged racers and baby-toting moms and dads. Some cyclists sit upright, some lean into the wind; some wear helmets and others spurn them; some resent any red light that impedes them and some are scared witless in traffic. There are earnest commuters with trousers tucked into their socks, kids who cycle to school and weekend pleasure riders.
Can this array of independent-minded bike riders find common cause in a single club?
The Toronto Cyclists Union created a buzz long before its launch at City Hall this Tuesday. It's modelled on the Canadian Automobile Association and if the CAA can be an advocate and offer benefits to its disparate car-driving members, the bike union hopes to do the same for Toronto cyclists.
There are already dozens of bike organizations in Toronto – from Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists (ARC), a lobbyist and cyclists' rights group, to Wenches with Wrenches, a free, women-run bike repair workshop. Cycling advocates tend to be a fractured community, with different objectives and different members – and the task of bringing them together in a unified voice may have worn out the union's founder, Dave Meslin. He spent nearly a year researching bike unions across the United States and created a model he thought would suit Toronto – one that's co-operative, not competing with the rest of the field.
The cycling union is different from other bike groups because it's member-driven, Meslin says. Its goal is to speak up for cyclists from Etobicoke to Scarborough and challenge City Hall.
"Cyclists don't feel safe on the streets and if they know there is a group fighting for safer conditions for them, I think they will join," says Meslin.
The union aims to hold city councillors, many of whom may be surprised at how many cyclists they have in their wards, accountable. "We've got this incredible bike plan that council passed in 2001– it's visionary," says Yvonne Bambrick, one of the co-ordinators of the cycling union. "We want to work with folks in different wards and get the plan in place."
To help achieve this, they're marshalling 44 "ward captains" representing each of the city's wards to be a link between local cyclists and the city council. "To make sure their voices are heard," says Meslin. "In the end, councillors respond to voters."
Through this ward program, they hope to represent the wider city – not just the Type A white males in the downtown core. One of their ideas is a cycling-with-newcomers program hooked up with the settlement agency CultureLink to encourage cycling among new immigrants. "We're looking to be a unified voice, a nice, pragmatic, sensible voice," says Bambrick.
The union proposes to create a cyclists' roadside assistance plan, similar to the one offered by the CAA. Insurance, an online dating service for cyclists and a trailer-lending program for moving larger loads by bike may all be offered later.
In the meantime, they're starting a lock removal program – similar to the CAA's service of retrieving keys locked in cars. (Members have to prove the bike is theirs or register their bikes with the police to be eligible.) They're also offering cycling maps for members travelling to other cities, family-friendly social rides – a fund-raising ride up the Humber River Valley and down the Don Valley is planned, and celebrations every time a new bike lane is opened. "We're good at complaining and getting critical," says Meslin. "But how about a ribbon-cutting ceremony and a cake and patting the councillor on the back and encouraging him to do more?"
Meslin, 33, planned the union without pay while doing chores in exchange for room and board. One of the founders of Spacing magazine, where he's no longer involved, he's also stepped away from the leadership of the bike union. "I get excited about starting up, research and bringing in the right people. Once that's in place, my role evaporates."
Like Meslin, everyone involved in the union is a volunteer. The union is housed at the Centre for Social Innovation on Spadina Ave. and has a desk in the centre's workspace.
That's still tiny compared with the biking scene in Chicago, where the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation has 6,100 members (up 29 per cent in the last five years), 40 full-time employees, about 1,000 volunteers, 2,000 miles of bikeways in the metropolitan region and a $3-million budget. Its staff works on such issues as biking in the suburbs and in the Latino and black communities, and planning special events, including the Bank of America Bike the Drive, which draws 20,000 cyclists for a car-free ride along the city's lakeshore. The federation is funded by members' dues, starting at $30 a year, plus grants and consulting work. Dues in Toronto will start around $25.
"Bicycling as a form of transportation is picking up nationally, at both the policy level and from elected officials. People are wanting to see cities become more bike friendly," says federation spokesperson Margo O'Hara. Furthermore, people are fed up with traffic congestion and high gas prices; they worry about their contribution to global warming, feeling "eco-guilt," she says.
Here in Toronto, Meslin admits it's nothing short of a miracle that the union has come to be. `We've been talking about this for years."
He and other cycling advocates say the bike union's arrival in Toronto's busy cycling scene is more collaborative than competitive. "The union can be more outspoken," says Fred Sztabinski of the Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation, a coalition of about 50 organizations. "We can talk about policy."
With 51 kilometres of new bikeways planned for Toronto this year, there's an air of optimism, unusual in the cycling community as the City of Toronto's Bike Month begins May 26. (Another sign of change, it used to be Bike Week.) "The pace is quickening, and there are degrees of political will," says Meslin. "Things are getting together."
Will the union be effective – to ensure that bike lanes are built, plowed in the winter and pothole free – among other tasks?
"They'll need to show a little more backbone," says Darren Stehr, a cycling advocate and member of ARC. To succeed, the union needs "a clear win", like a proper ban on cars parked in bike lanes, he says.
"The union is a fantastic idea as long as they hold politicians to account. They have to keep the pressure up."
Bike Toronto-style
TheStar.com | GTA | A true bicycle culture remains elusive
A true bicycle culture remains elusive
ANDREW WALLACE/TORONTO STAR
May 18, 2008 04:30 AM
Murray Whyte
Staff Reporter
They shuttle swiftly along a thin strip of pavement, legs pumping, in a thin-but-steady stream. Beside them, four lanes of car-clogged Lakeshore Drive; just beyond a concrete barrier, six more lanes of stop-and-go Gardiner Expressway.
If recent statistics gathered by a pair of urban transportation gurus from Rutgers University are to be believed, they are the less than one-in-a-hundred citizens of our city who routinely use their bike as something more than a joyriding, fair-weather cruiser.
They are, as the current coinage of cycling taxonomy would have it, the utility riders, for whom cycling is survival, not sport – a daily fact, not a weekend diversion.
On the city's waterfront bike path west of downtown one chilly rush-hour morning last week, simple logic would seem to defy their scarcity: A string of bright red brake lights, hundreds long, chart their path to the skyscrapers in the near distance as they whip past the gridlock with speedy, silent ease.
With rising gas prices, ever-worse congestion and a growing environmental conscience, it would be reasonable to guess that their numbers should be growing, and rapidly. If cycle shops in the city are any indication, they are: Most refuse to promise anything less than three weeks for a simple tune-up as casual riders dust off their neglected rigs and get them road-ready.
But this is the perfect picture of the urban cycle commute: A dedicated route surrounded by green space, a gentle off-lake breeze. A few hundred metres north, on city streets fraught with urban hazards, reality sets in.
Cyclists are shoved into the collective chaos of the urban transportation scene – trucks and cars, buses and streetcars, potholes and streetcar tracks, and most dreaded of all, the sudden swing opening of a car door. It becomes clear that the lakeside idyll of the bike commute is a tiny exception to a massive, and often painful, rule.
This is the most significant barrier to Toronto truly becoming a bike city. Mass movements tend not to be engendered by death-defying activity. "You don't buy a car if there's no roads," grumbles Adrian Heaps. "You don't ride a bike if there's no infrastructure for it. And we don't have anywhere near enough."
Heaps, the Toronto city councillor who chairs the bike committee, laments the numbers. As of 2003, Toronto had about 251 kilometres of bike lanes, and of that, only 76 was deemed cyclist-only – not shared with cars. Ottawa, a fraction of this city's size, had 822, according to Cycling Trends and Policies in Canadian Cities, a paper published in 2005 by John Pucher and Ralph Buehler, two urban transport experts at Rutgers University.
Sadly – for Toronto, at least – their Toronto figures are not that badly out of date. Our numbers have only grown by seven or eight km a year, as any cycling activist will be more than happy to tell you.
"We're way behind European cities. We're behind a lot of Canadian cities," says Heaps, who took over the city's cycling committee last year. What he found was a bureaucratic quagmire of almost laughable proportions: Year after year, the cycling committee had a $5.5-million budget, but only managed to spend a tiny portion of it.
"Everything was so tangled in bureaucracy, by the time the approvals came in, it was November and too cold to paint (bike lanes)," says Heaps. The futility was exasperating. "You can't ask for more money if you don't spend what you've got."
So Heaps cut the committee by two-thirds and took over the approval process himself. The result will be 51 km more bike lanes this year, 75 in 2009 and 92 in 2010. Still, the city's goal of 500 km by 2011 seems optimistic. "We're doing better than before," Heaps says, "but it's not where we should be."
THAT'S TRUE BOTH on the ground, and in the hearts and minds of Toronto's cycling community, which has always embraced life on two wheels with little help from – and often in spite of – civic officialdom. In the snow-free months, major arteries like King, Queen and Bloor streets flow freely with utility cyclists – suits and secretaries, vintage-clad hipsters, speed racers in clingy, all-body Lycra.
Sometimes, even the most agile rider goes down, the unwilling recipient of a door prize – the driver's-side door, unintentionally flung open too close for the rider to evade – or the right hook, where a right-turning vehicle curls quickly around the corner and into the path of an onrushing cyclist. According to a 2003 city study, there were 2,572 collisions between cars and bikes during a two-year period. And those are just the ones reported to the police.
The impact is often brutal, bone-breaking. At times, it has been fatal. Worst of all, it's entirely preventable, say experts, with the wide implementation of bike-only lanes.
Because we don't have them – in any great number at least – we have something else: A deep enmity between cyclists and drivers that, on the cyclists' side, has in some cases flared into militance.
Witness Critical Mass, the monthly protest ride by some of the city's hardest hard-core riders – bike couriers, anti-car activists, devoted gearheads. Gathering at Bloor and Spadina the last Friday of every month, riders wilfully take the space they believe is theirs – usually the entire breadth of the road.
"We don't block traffic. We ARE traffic," reads one of the few lines on its sparse website. "Those rides can get a little more aggressive, or confrontational," says Jode Roberts, a kinder, gentler kind of cycling activist. He's a co-founder of Bells on Bloor, a friendly annual ride that happens today on Bloor St. from High Park to Avenue Road.
"We wanted to have a fun family event that people could feel comfortable bringing their kids to," he says. "There's a culture of fear around cycling at the moment, and we need to dispel that."
No one at Critical Mass responded to attempts at contact. But they get plenty of attention – the wrong kind, says Matt Blackett.
"We need to go beyond the same old story – `we have to push cars off the road,'" says Blackett, one of the founders of the Public Space Committee and the editor of Spacing magazine, a quarterly dedicated to urban sustainability and aesthetics.
Once, in a display of apparent frustration at their below-the-law, the Critical Mass group rode through the Eaton Centre, slaloming through mall shoppers fast enough to evade security. "That kind of thing defeats the purpose," says Blackett.
But is also speaks to a deep-rooted malaise in the city's chaotic, unofficial cycling culture. "If you don't want militants," Blackett says, "then do what you said you were going to do. If they had built what they were supposed to, there would be nothing to be upset about."
JOHN LAWSON locks his Rocky Mountain bike to the rack at the Aurora GO Station every morning. He catches the 6:30 a.m. train to his office in downtown Toronto. "But the bike is my transportation of choice," he says. If he can't use it to get right to his office, this is the next best thing.
Lawson is still the rarest of breeds here – the suburban utility rider. Eight other bikes are locked up beside his. All around, hundreds of cars cram the parking lot.
In Aurora, Wellington Road stretches west from Highway 404, six lanes of broad pavement, built for speed. This is the domain of the car. There is no sharing. For the moment, at least, there's nothing and no one to share with.
Up here, the roads widen and acres of parking lot stretching in front of various "supercentres" – a multi-faceted Wal-Mart the size of several city blocks; outsized clusters of various big-box stores – are the norm. But in a few years, even downtown's most militant cyclists might feel strangely at home here.
York Region recently released its first-ever cycling and pedestrian master plan. It won a significant award from the Canadian Institute of Planning for their work with sustainable transportation. Faced with massive growth in such places as Markham, Stouffville and Aurora, the planning department seized on a seeming oxymoron: To promote cycling and walking as transport modes, not just recreation.
They also walked the talk. York Region has committed 260 km of bike lanes – more than Toronto's total – in the next five years, with another 198 within five years past that. "The goal is to promote sustainable modes of transportation before any others," says York Region's director of infrastructure Paul May.
IT BEGS THE QUESTION: How did we get so far away from it in the first place? Metrolinx, which used to be called the Greater Toronto Transportation Authority, produced a report in February called Active Transportation, which describes anything human powered – walking, biking, skateboarding, rollerblading.
It urges cities to embrace cycling – and anything else without engines – for everything from health and economic reasons to social improvement. In a section called "social barriers," the report encourages people to abandon the contemporary habit of driving children to school.
It mentions an event called International Walk to School Day as a good initiative. "One may question, however," the report chides with chilly institutional restraint, "why walking to school should be considered an activity that requires international awareness and promotion."
We are not alone in our devotion to the car. Cities all over the world have embraced it as cheap, convenient transportation when low-priced oil was king. It isn't anymore. But we're not breaking the habit.
"We're like the Amish who drive cars around here," said Heaps. But strong-arming a cycling agenda in a council laden with suburban interests is a dangerous political manoeuvre.
"I have the votes on council to ram bike lanes down everyone's throats," Heaps says. "But I'd rather not do that. For one thing, it would be a bloodbath, and for another, I'd rather have people embrace it because they see the value."
What Heaps is talking about is changing culture. In the transportation endgame, with oil shattering its record high and humanity exploding and urbanizing at its fastest rate in human history, changing the culture is, unenviably, both a necessary and near-impossible task.
Still, it has been achieved in cities like Amsterdam, where 27 per cent of the city of the population relies on a bike as their main mode of transportation. In Copenhagen, cycling's shining beacon of civility and progress, where dedicated bike lanes are institutionalized, organized, and everywhere, the number is more than 30 per cent.
Roberts has seen it first hand. "They've created a culture where people feel safe on their bikes," says Roberts. "That takes time, and it's not easy. We've catered to the car for a long time. But I really believe we're at the tipping point for bike culture in this city. This summer, you'll see the pressure for that go up."
Heaps is not one for pressure. But a gentle push is all it takes to start the momentum rolling.
"Look, we're not asking people to do the Tour de France," he says. "We're asking them to once in a while to think about getting to work in a different way. We have to remove the mindset that this is recreation. Start thinking of it as a parallel transit system – and take it seriously."
*****
Link to article
Bike Toronto-style
TheStar.com | GTA | Cycling's union movement
Cycling's union movement
Email Story Email story
May 18, 2008 04:30 AM
Leslie Scrivener
Staff Reporter
Biking on the streets of Toronto are mad-eyed couriers, spidery-legged racers and baby-toting moms and dads. Some cyclists sit upright, some lean into the wind; some wear helmets and others spurn them; some resent any red light that impedes them and some are scared witless in traffic. There are earnest commuters with trousers tucked into their socks, kids who cycle to school and weekend pleasure riders.
Can this array of independent-minded bike riders find common cause in a single club?
The Toronto Cyclists Union created a buzz long before its launch at City Hall this Tuesday. It's modelled on the Canadian Automobile Association and if the CAA can be an advocate and offer benefits to its disparate car-driving members, the bike union hopes to do the same for Toronto cyclists.
There are already dozens of bike organizations in Toronto – from Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists (ARC), a lobbyist and cyclists' rights group, to Wenches with Wrenches, a free, women-run bike repair workshop. Cycling advocates tend to be a fractured community, with different objectives and different members – and the task of bringing them together in a unified voice may have worn out the union's founder, Dave Meslin. He spent nearly a year researching bike unions across the United States and created a model he thought would suit Toronto – one that's co-operative, not competing with the rest of the field.
The cycling union is different from other bike groups because it's member-driven, Meslin says. Its goal is to speak up for cyclists from Etobicoke to Scarborough and challenge City Hall.
"Cyclists don't feel safe on the streets and if they know there is a group fighting for safer conditions for them, I think they will join," says Meslin.
The union aims to hold city councillors, many of whom may be surprised at how many cyclists they have in their wards, accountable. "We've got this incredible bike plan that council passed in 2001– it's visionary," says Yvonne Bambrick, one of the co-ordinators of the cycling union. "We want to work with folks in different wards and get the plan in place."
To help achieve this, they're marshalling 44 "ward captains" representing each of the city's wards to be a link between local cyclists and the city council. "To make sure their voices are heard," says Meslin. "In the end, councillors respond to voters."
Through this ward program, they hope to represent the wider city – not just the Type A white males in the downtown core. One of their ideas is a cycling-with-newcomers program hooked up with the settlement agency CultureLink to encourage cycling among new immigrants. "We're looking to be a unified voice, a nice, pragmatic, sensible voice," says Bambrick.
The union proposes to create a cyclists' roadside assistance plan, similar to the one offered by the CAA. Insurance, an online dating service for cyclists and a trailer-lending program for moving larger loads by bike may all be offered later.
In the meantime, they're starting a lock removal program – similar to the CAA's service of retrieving keys locked in cars. (Members have to prove the bike is theirs or register their bikes with the police to be eligible.) They're also offering cycling maps for members travelling to other cities, family-friendly social rides – a fund-raising ride up the Humber River Valley and down the Don Valley is planned, and celebrations every time a new bike lane is opened. "We're good at complaining and getting critical," says Meslin. "But how about a ribbon-cutting ceremony and a cake and patting the councillor on the back and encouraging him to do more?"
Meslin, 33, planned the union without pay while doing chores in exchange for room and board. One of the founders of Spacing magazine, where he's no longer involved, he's also stepped away from the leadership of the bike union. "I get excited about starting up, research and bringing in the right people. Once that's in place, my role evaporates."
Like Meslin, everyone involved in the union is a volunteer. The union is housed at the Centre for Social Innovation on Spadina Ave. and has a desk in the centre's workspace.
That's still tiny compared with the biking scene in Chicago, where the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation has 6,100 members (up 29 per cent in the last five years), 40 full-time employees, about 1,000 volunteers, 2,000 miles of bikeways in the metropolitan region and a $3-million budget. Its staff works on such issues as biking in the suburbs and in the Latino and black communities, and planning special events, including the Bank of America Bike the Drive, which draws 20,000 cyclists for a car-free ride along the city's lakeshore. The federation is funded by members' dues, starting at $30 a year, plus grants and consulting work. Dues in Toronto will start around $25.
"Bicycling as a form of transportation is picking up nationally, at both the policy level and from elected officials. People are wanting to see cities become more bike friendly," says federation spokesperson Margo O'Hara. Furthermore, people are fed up with traffic congestion and high gas prices; they worry about their contribution to global warming, feeling "eco-guilt," she says.
Here in Toronto, Meslin admits it's nothing short of a miracle that the union has come to be. `We've been talking about this for years."
He and other cycling advocates say the bike union's arrival in Toronto's busy cycling scene is more collaborative than competitive. "The union can be more outspoken," says Fred Sztabinski of the Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation, a coalition of about 50 organizations. "We can talk about policy."
With 51 kilometres of new bikeways planned for Toronto this year, there's an air of optimism, unusual in the cycling community as the City of Toronto's Bike Month begins May 26. (Another sign of change, it used to be Bike Week.) "The pace is quickening, and there are degrees of political will," says Meslin. "Things are getting together."
Will the union be effective – to ensure that bike lanes are built, plowed in the winter and pothole free – among other tasks?
"They'll need to show a little more backbone," says Darren Stehr, a cycling advocate and member of ARC. To succeed, the union needs "a clear win", like a proper ban on cars parked in bike lanes, he says.
"The union is a fantastic idea as long as they hold politicians to account. They have to keep the pressure up."
