Photo: I Don't Think They're Coming Back

While on walkabout along Yonge Street in North York a couple of weeks past, I couldn't help but notice this bicycle locked up outside one of the entrances to Finch Station--although "locked up" is kind of unnecessary at this point, when you consider how hard-packed that stuff must be. It makes me wonder just who these more-or-less abandoned bicycles you find around the city belong to, and how it happens that they're left where they're left.

It also demonstrates the effect which the removal of Igor Kenk has had on the city's bicycle ecosystem. Time was that a bike like this would've been stolen by one of Igor's flunkies long before it had a chance to get buried.

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Photo: I Don't Think Anyone's Coming Back for These

Regretfully, another interruption--I was down with the sickness, which I choose to believe were retroactive symptoms of something I will get at LoneStarCon3 in San Antonio. I'm back now, though, with another photo. Along the Bay Street entrances to Union Station, particularly underneath the elevated tracks, you'll find an array of bike locks for the use of those who pedal for part of their journey. However, some of those journeys seem to have taken a surprisingly long time. How long does it take for a bike to get that rusted and dust-covered in open air, anyway?

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Photo: I Don't Think They're Coming Back for It

There are a lot of bicycles in Kensington Market. Unsurprising, really--that's just how Kensington Market is, the same way there are a lot of cars in Scarborough. I have to wonder, though, if some of them aren't left as statements running parallel to displays like the Community Vehicular Restoration Project. Some of the bikes I found locked up against fences and signposts have been there long enough for the local vegetation to grow around and through them, the leafy answer to a tree growing around a chain-link fence. So either someone's been planting kudzu along Augusta Avenue, or whoever belongs to that bike isn't getting much use out of it, the way it seems to me.

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Photo: Through the Spokes

Hey, I'm the one who took this photograph, and even then I needed a moment to figure out just what the hell it is. What it is is a simple shot through the wheels of the many, many Bixi bikes parked at the station at Front and Yonge in front of the Dominion Public Building, just waiting for people to ride them away to wherever.

Perhaps it would've been cooler if I hadn't explained it at all, though. I suppose I'll never know.

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Photo: Snowed-In Bixi

On this colder-than-usual May day, I thought it might be instructive to remind everyone in Toronto of what we're leaving behind. While winter seemed to drag on forever this past year--when I landed on November 30th it was snowing, and then December felt like an endless 1 or 2 degrees above freezing with pattering rain--we did get a few significant dumps. I took this shot of the Bixi station at Telus House in early February, and shock of shocks, not many people are using a bike-sharing service in the middle of a blizzard. I have seen people use it since, though, so that's something.

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Brain, Meet Helmet

I've been riding bicycles for most of my life. I can still vaguely remember cycling around my neighborhood in Milton after I had no more need for training wheels. When I worked at a gas station in Barrie, my bike got me there and back every day I was on the clock. Today, if I feel the need to visit the United States, it's by bike that I get there. I can remember riding bicycles for a long, long time - but what I can't remember is a time when I didn't wear a helmet while doing so. When I was in Montreal a couple of years ago and wanted to give Bixi a try, I found I just couldn't make myself get on that bike without a helmet - the fact that I'd have no idea where I was going in a strange city didn't help matters much, either.

Recently, I've been coming to realize that my experience in that regard is not exactly universal. Part of this is because that under Ontario law, all cyclists under the age of eighteen are required to wear a helmet - but for the last fifteen years, helmets have been mandatory by law for all cyclists in British Columbia. Doesn't stop 'em, though. It's not unusual to see someone zipping down the Dunsmuir bikeway with just some hair between their skull and the sky.

The letter columns in recent issues of the Georgia Straight have seen something of a back-and-forth regarding helmet use, and the Globe and Mail makes reference to Vancouver drivers "whinging on talk radio about bicyclists... who ride without helmets" in the context of the city's gradual transportation culture shift. Helmetless riding is something I noticed frequently in Toronto, though at least there people aren't breaking the law when they do it.

No, they're only running the risk of breaking their own heads. I ride with a helmet not because it's the law - to be honest, I had no idea helmets were mandatory in BC until this writing - but because I am not a moron. Incidentally, yes, I am totally intentionally implying that if you ride a bike without a helmet, you are a moron.

Bicycle and bicycle helmet: two great tastes that taste great together. Note: this weblog does not recommend licking bicycles without first washing them thoroughly.

For me, it's simple arithmetic. Bicycles are potentially unstable frames that frequently share road space with speeding hunks of metal, the drivers of whom have been demonstrated time and again to just not register the presence of bicycles on the road, and if you hit something or get hit there's a good chance of your braincase absorbing the punishment. Personally, I think of my brain as important - realistically, since my brain is what I am; everything else are just mechanisms to allow the brain to interact with the world. I kind of want my brain to keep working for as long as it can. So when I'm on my bike I wear a helmet, so that if I take a spill or get rammed or whatever, there is something before that crunchy bone to absorb the punishment of impact.

I don't understand why more people don't see this sort of attitude in the same light as anti-seatbelt attitudes. It's the same damn thing, just expressed differently - people are making a choice to proceed with limited or no regard to their personal safety. I've seen letters in the Georgia Straight arguing that mandatory helmet laws discourage people from bicycling, but honestly, if a person could be discouraged from biking by having to wear a helmet, that smacks of utter laziness to me - and lazy people, I think, would not be able to stick with the program.

My opinion this is simple - if you get in an accident while you're on a bicycle, and you weren't wearing a helmet, MSP should not cover your medical bills; because, at least in my opinion, the fact that you made a conscious decision to ride a bike while not wearing a helmet demonstrates that you do not care about your personal safety. If you don't care enough to take even the most basic precaution to protect yourself, you have no right to expect society to take up the slack.

All I Ask Is a Good Bike and a Post to Lock it To

Over the past seventy years, parking spaces have become so ubiquitous throughout the West that nobody gives them a second thought anymore; their presence is taken as a given now, on par with electricity or running water, in great part a result of building codes that mandated a given number of parking spaces depending on the size and nature of the building. Bicycles can't claim nearly the same degree of infrastructural support. While the tide has been changing in the last couple of decades - witness the proliferation of official urban cycling programs, dedicated bicycle lanes, and bicycle racks on city buses across the country - the relationship is still an unequal one.

Nevertheless, I never really had cause to think about this until Friday, when I rode my bike south to Point Roberts, Washington - a small chunk of the United States surrounded by water on three sides and Canada on the fourth. This was the first time I'd ever taken my wheels into a new country, and it felt rather odd crossing the border that way instead of in a car or through an airport. Now, Point Roberts isn't exactly what you'd call a metropolis; less than 1,500 people live on a peninsula that still retains much of the towering forest that once covered the primeval Lower Mainland. It's the sort of town that lives and dies on the tourist trade, in this case tourists from Metro Vancouver looking for cheap gas and American brand-name goods that aren't for sale in the lands of the maple leaf. You can even rent bikes there, for tooling around on your own terms.

There just wasn't much support that I could see, even given the size of the town. I'm not talking bike lanes here; the only road in Point Roberts I could honestly call "busy" was Tyee Drive, and it has a paved shoulder that does double duty as bike lane and sidewalk - incidentally, no sidewalks in Point Roberts either, so far as I noticed. No, I'm talking about bike racks. Aside from one at the International Marketplace, and a couple bolted to the front wall of the Point Roberts Public Library, I couldn't find anything to lock my bike to - not even at any of the small restaurants or cafes where I really wanted to sit down, relax for a bit, and spend my money. There were hardly even street signs around that I could lock it to for a few minutes - and even then, that's not something I like doing.

Ultimately, the lack of infrastructure meant I didn't spend quite as much time in the Point as I'd imagined - riding around gets tiring after a while, and it had been something on the order of forty kilometers from my apartment to the border. I really knew I was back in Canada once the stores started boasting bike racks again.

A full-up bicycle stand outside a White Spot restaurant in Tsawwassen, British Columbia.

I know Point Roberts isn't exactly a high-crime location, but even so a bicycle is not the sort of thing that should be left standing on its own out of its owner's sight, not if you don't want it to mysteriously pedal away. While major cities have begun to pursue a more bike-friendly posture, this isn't something that should just be limited to major cities; if anything, bikes are an even more sensible way to get around in small communities, where things are close together. The general trajectory for fuel prices has been upward; making it as easy to get around on two wheels as four should be something every community can invest in.

Hornby for Structural Weaknesses

Before I moved out west I'd thought that things were different in Vancouver, that cycling was an appreciated and well-respected part of the urban fabric. What I'm learning now is that, like so many things viewed from a distance, the truth ain't necessarily so. The Vision Vancouver-dominated city government, fresh from the installation of separated bike lanes on Dunsmuir Street through downtown, recently started work on similar lanes along Hornby Street, a north-south, one-way road, on a six-month trial basis; nevertheless, the fact that city crews were at work almost immediately after the vote suggests that there wasn't really much of a chance that it wouldn't go ahead, regardless of what arguments rose up against the project.

It seems that in certain circles, no time has been wasted in firing fusilades at City Hall over this. A narrative's already begun to take shape in the media, and one of the things I see again and again takes me back to Toronto and the flap surrounding the glacial construction of the 510 St. Clair streetcar's right of way - the damage to local businesses. Yesterday, The Province reported on city councillor Suzanne Anton's opposition to the "Bike lanes make me Hornby" T-shirts being produced by Vision Vancouver to mark the start of construction, repeating concerns "that construction of the bike lane and permanent loss of parking will impact them."

Hornby at Dunsmuir, June 2010

According to what I've seen, the installation of this lane requires the removal of parking on one side of the street - that's reducing parking by half, for all you math majors out there. Local merchants do have a right to be concerned about how this construction will affect them; business is uncertain enough day to day without urban renewal programs thrown into the mix.

What no one seems to be talking about, though, is what these concerns expose, and it's equally valid in Vancouver, Toronto, and any other major city - an economic dependence on automotive traffic. The assumption I'm seeing again and again is that no matter where you seem to be, people brought in by foot or bicycle or public transit just aren't enough to sustain businesses, that cars are absolutely necessary for an area's well-being.

I'll admit that the way North American cities have been built over the last seventy years certainly encourage that sort of dependence - but, with the problems of an unstable twenty-first century staring right at us, what are we doing about it? We should be taking these issues as canaries in the coal mine of new urban problems. What if future oil shocks make private automobile ownership a prospect too expensive for the average person - would this result in unprepared businesses folding in droves, sparking an economic catastrophe even worse than what we just went through?

Perhaps - perhaps the situation will have changed by then. But we can't just lean back and ignore the problems until they're at our doorstep - at that point we won't have the luxury of time to even begin solving them.

Wheels of Liberty

Politics tends to bring out the unusual in people. Whether it's a young, dynamic reformer eager to unlock the halls of power and bring a fresh perspective to leadership or a quixotic campaign based around, say, the hidden health benefits of colloidal silver, you don't have to look very hard to hear politicians, or hopeful politicians, say rather odd things. I've been trying to hold my tongue on that account since January. It'll always happen, though, because one of the greatest things a politician can have is recognition, and for some there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Take, as the latest example, Mr. Dan Maes, who is carrying the Republican banner in the 2010 Colorado gubernatorial (that is, for governor) election, and who seems to be positioning himself as the Tea Party candidate. Yesterday the Denver Post reported on Maes' "warning" that Denver was at risk of being converted "into a United Nations community," whatever that is - and why? Well, because of B-Cycle, Denver's four-month-old, Bixi-like bicycle sharing program.

Wait, what?

Apparently, Maes sees international conspiracies hidden within Denver B-Cycle's magic bikes. It's because Denver is a member of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, you see - whether it is or not I can't easily tell, but the truth would have little effect here. Apparently, encouraging the people of Denver to ride bicycles more, as current Mayor John Hickenlooper has done, is in Maes' world something that "could threaten our personal freedoms."

Not that he, you know, explains why this is the case. From what I can see, this is a statement that's supposed to stand on its own, and it's supposed to be obvious that biking = less freedom. I may have failed math all through elementary school, but even I know that that equation on its own does not add up.

Pictured: A modern-day instrument of the United Nations' sinister bicycle-based takeover of stuff.

Things like this remind me that, despite the great similarities that come from sharing a continent for centuries, there do remain significant divergences between Canadian and American culture. What I get out of Maes' comments on the bike issue - one which, by the way, he only mentions once on his website, and that in criticizing the spending of stimulus funds on bike lanes - is a reflection to the sense of fear that has been present in the United States, whether hidden or in plain view, for years.

After all, it's been a long time since the US was unquestionably the top dog, standing atop the broken corpse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Its victory in the Cold War has led it to an anemic economy, political polarization, and a time of great worry as to whether it will stay on top. The United States has been compared to the Roman Empire for decades, but the nature of that state's fall seems to reverberate loudly today.

Even beyond that, it could be a simple issue of conservatism. For decades society, particularly American society, has been based around car ownership as one of the great goals for everyone. The Denver Post, in its article on Maes, also reported that Hickenlooper took some flak from automotive dealers for openly speculating about how Denver could "wean ourselves off automobiles." I don't necessarily buy that part of it, though. Conservatives are supposed to be about individual rights and freedoms - at least, that's how I always thought they tried to position themselves. A bicycle-sharing system provides people with more choices as to how to get around. How is a greater freedom of choice injurious to freedom?

None of it makes sense to me. Maybe it's for the best. Maybe I wouldn't want to understand.

I've Got Bicycling on the Brain

For more than a century, bicycles have been a popular way of getting around. They're liberating in the same way that many people believe that cars are liberating, but are more honest - not only are bicycles zero-emission vehicles, when you get to where you're going it's because you earned it with your own sweat and exertion. Today, more and more cities are recognizing bicycles as a key component of a healthy urban transportation network. Bixi, a municipal bike-sharing system pioneered in Montreal, has now spread as far afield as London and Melbourne and is set to start rolling in Toronto in 2011.

I'm glad to see it happen. I've been riding bicycles for more than twenty years, and when I lived in Barrie those two wheels were my only option when I wanted to go somewhere on my own schedule. When I visited Montreal last year to attend Anticipation, I had the opportunity to try out Bixi for myself, and discover the city from a new perspective. I came very, very close, but in the end I couldn't bring myself to swipe my credit card and take one of those bikes out for a roll. Why? Simple, really - I didn't have my bicycle helmet.

Though I do have photos of myself as a kid riding a bike without a helmet, back in those freewheeling 1980s, I don't remember ever settling on the saddle without one strapped around my chin. To me it was as vital as a sturdy lock or inflated tires - and that's not only because Ontario required all bicycle riders under the age of 18 to wear helmets starting in 1995. The reason I wear a helmet is, fundamentally, because I'm not a tremendous fucking dumbass.

It seems as if my view is not shared particularly widely. I've recently been reading an article from Washington City Paper, originally published in March 2009, which asks why so many DC cyclists eschew helmets when they cost so little and can prevent serious damage to the single most important part of one's body. Excuses range from perceptions of helmets as "corny" to the ridiculous, with one man claiming "he can't wear a helmet because he wears headphones when he rides." Well, if you're going to be a tremendous dumbass, you might as well go all the way.

Apparently, attitudes such as these are crashing full-force into the law in Melbourne, Australia. Yesterday The Age of Melbourne reported on the city's new Bixi-derived bike sharing system, Melbourne Bike Share, and its tribulations - apparently, despite investing $5.5-million AUD ($5.1-million CAD) in to the system's development, not even 70 trips per day are made with the system's six hundred bikes.

A Bixi station in downtown Montreal, August 2009

Why such a low takeup, when similar systems have seen great popularity elsewhere? The fact that it's the middle of winter in Melbourne right now? No - it's helmets, apparently. Whereas the use of bicycle helmets for over-18 riders in Ontario has been up to the adult's discretion since 1995, the state of Victoria - of which Melbourne is the capital, for all you geography majors - has mandated that all cyclists wear helmets, and that since 1990. As the explanation goes, Melburnians are unwilling to hop onto a Melbourne Bike Share bike because they can't be arsed to wear a helmet.

It's ridiculous. Try as I might, I cannot see bicyclists who eschew helmets as anything other than reckless fools. I know that there are arguments. One of them goes like this: "Oh, but there are so many accidents that a helmet wouldn't do anything to protect yourself from!" I damn well know that. My major bicycle accident involved a collision with a stationary object that wasn't even on the road at all. That doesn't mean I shouldn't have been wearing a helmet.

The brain is an amazing machine, an incredible machine, but the brain is likewise a fragile machine, and while it can still work after sustaining damage it's rarely at optimum capability. I realize that I am my brain. Those 1200-odd cubic centimeters enclose my memories and experiences, hopes and dreams, personality and consciousness. Even the fingers I've used to type out this post are nothing but remotely-controlled mechanisms that allow me to interact with the world.

I'm not sure how we should proceed from this. Personally, in some greyer moments, I've toyed with the notion that we should let consenting adults who choose to ride without helmets suffer the consequences of their decisions. That is, if you get into an accident and you're not wearing a bicycle helmet, your health insurance should not cover it. I know that it's vengeful, and that this would result in thoughtless dumbasses bankrupting themselves and their families to cover medical expenses arising from helmetless accidents, but-- I just don't know. Riding without a helmet is as foolhardy as riding in a car without wearing a seatbelt. From what I understand it took a long, hard campaign of memetic engineering to change the popular attitude. We may need a similar campaign to firmly establish the helmet-safety meme in our society. If that can be combined with shareable helmets as part of bike share systems - perhaps something involving a disposable outer lining, maybe - we could make a lot of progress toward a safer, healthier transportation system.

Ultimately, I believe it comes down to laziness and a sense of invincibility. In Melbourne they claim that no one is riding because everyone must wear a helmet - and yet in Vancouver, where helmets have been mandatory for all cyclists since 1996, bicycle use is exploding - from the dedicated lanes on Dunsmuir Street to the successful lane test on the Burrard Street Bridge, and the racks on the buses which always seemed to be carrying at least one bike along.

I won't ride without my helmet. I'm not about to put my brain into my own hands.

Sunlight on the Bicycle Racks

The Toronto Sun is, for better or for worse, one of those things that's hard to ignore. Its design department sees to that. Yesterday a Sun box grabbed my attention rather forcefully with the headline "BUS BUST," which in true Sun style combines criticism of the TTC and sex appeal in just seven letters. Pictured were two buses on the 84 Sheppard East route, accompanied by a bullet list about how no one's using the bicycle racks on the buses and that they're a waste of money and are stupid and have a stupid face. (My comment: few people using bicycle racks on a North York bus route? Shock! Horror! Maybe if there were some more bike lanes up there...)

Appropriately enough for the Sun, the story's real headline - "Bus fleet's bike racks rarely used" - is rather bloodless, since if you're in a position to be reading it they've got your money. The crux of the Sun's argument is this - that the $2-million it cost to outfit the TTC's modern bus fleet with folding bicycle racks "wasn't worth it," and that it demonstrates "how the transit authority is out of touch with reality."

Presumably, in the Sun's world, the bike racks on this Hamilton Street Railway bus were not a waste of money - because only the TTC is capable of wasting money.

I'll admit that the bike racks aren't used as much as they could be. I've noticed a tendency in Toronto, particularly in recent months, for bicycle riders to dispense with the TTC altogether. But that does not mean they are a waste. The truth is that cities across North America are in the process of, or already have, installed bike racks on their bus fleet. Beyond that, the mere presence of the option is valuable in and of itself. If the TTC had stood fast against bike racks, as the Sun appears to be lamenting, in that parallel universe would it now be criticizing the TTC for being less responsive to its riders than Guelph Transit? This isn't about the possibilities of a choice that people haven't rushed to make - this is more of a flimsy excuse for the Sun to, once again, bash the TTC. Given its own politics, the implication is clear, and disturbing - transit is a "left-wing" concern and conservative-minded folk shouldn't spare two thoughts for it.

In my mind, the real issue with this article is a lack of scientific thinking. If the Sun really wanted to see whether bike rack use in Toronto is behind the curve, there's a simple way to find out - go to the TTC's neighbor agencies and compare usage there. Or, considering it's a GTAH-based paper, shouldn't it also be criticizing the installation of bike racks by GO Transit, Durham Region Transit, Mississauga Transit, the Hamilton Street Railway, even Milton Transit? York Region Transit and Barrie Transit are the only operators from Oshawa to St. Catharines that do not have bike racks on their buses.

That would at least have resulted in a story with more than the vaguest whiff of journalistic value. On the other hand, though, it meant they would have had to find another avenue with which to criticize the TTC yesterday. Not that it's surprising. In my mind, to the Sun, anything that tries to establish a transportation alternative seems to be part of the "War On Cars" and therefore evil.

Bike Lanes and Car Claims

A year ago I wouldn't have imagined that bicycle lanes could become such a political lightning rod in a city like Toronto, but there you are - even after twenty years, this place keeps surprising me. Considering the degree that the project appears in the news, though, it seems to me that this may be something of a worthwhile litmus test for the mayoral candidates - how they react to it may tell us more about how they'd conduct themselves otherwise. We've learned a lot about Rocco Rossi that way, and through his speech last month at the Empire Club, which basically tells us that he thinks cars are awesome and transit is for nerds.

If you're unfamiliar with the situation, let me summarize. Jarvis Street is a rather well-used throughfare a bit east of the downtown core, running from Front Street in the south to Bloor Street in the north. It's one of the few roads in Toronto I can think of that has an odd number of lanes - five, to be precise, with the middle lane switching between southbound traffic and northbound traffic depending on the time of day. A plan approved by City Council in May 2009 would see Jarvis condensed into four lanes, two north and two south, with the rest of the space given over to bicycle lanes. As of 2009, twenty-eight thousand cars used Jarvis on an average day, and a key chunk of these are driven by residents of high-end neighborhoods like Rosedale, Lawrence Park, and Moore Park.

The elimination of Jarvis' fifth lane would, according to the articles I've seen, add something on the order of two or three to five minutes to these drivers' commute times. The horror...

For the record, I'm supportive of the Jarvis bike lane project. I've been on enough plenty of streets where I felt like by cycling along them I was taking my life into my own hands, even more so - Bayly Street in Pickering, which I traversed during my ride from Oshawa to Scarborough last September, is a sterling example of this in my mind. Plenty of roads are as hostile to two wheels as much of Los Angeles is to two legs.

It's a good thing, then, that we have Rocco Rossi to... talk as if this is an awesome thing. To put it bluntly, I don't trust Rossi at all on this. A Sunday Star article refers to a statement of his that "he’s not opposed to bike lanes in general" - but this runs completely counter to coverage of his speech at the Empire Club on January 22, where he was reported as saying that he is "prepared to look at removing existing [bike lanes]."

Ultimately, though, I think the real problem here is the act of catering to drivers above all else. Despite what some people may think, owning and running an automobile is not the be-all and end-all of existence, and cities should not be built or organized exclusively to suit their interests; unfortunately, that's pretty much what we've had for the last seventy years. It wouldn't be the first time the interests of motorists were enshrined above the interests of others in this city, either.

Take the St. Clair streetcar, for instance. What a lot of people probably don't know is that back in the day, it ran east of Yonge Street as well. This branch was known as the Mount Pleasant streetcar, and it extended north to Eglinton via Mount Pleasant Road - which, incidentally, is the same road that connects Jarvis Street with Rosedale, Moore Park, and the rest. Despite popular local suppot for the line, it was shut down in 1976 at the behest of the Metro Roads Department, acting "in response to complaints from car drivers about streetcars 'obstructing' their progress." This attitude, in my mind, is the pinnacle of self-centeredness, and I see small pieces of it every time a car zooms by a stopped streetcar with its doors open. What do I mean?

I mean that, in my mind, drivers are not the be-all and end-all. Generally, when I see a car on the road here, it's got one person in it - two at the most. The average streetcar, even on off-peak times, has closer to thirty, going up to more than a hundred with standing room only. To me, the conclusion is clear - streetcars are more important than cars. Not only that, but all else being equal, a car will beat a streetcar every time - hell, I've raced streetcars from Niagara to Yonge on my bicycle and won. Cars have enough intrinsic advantages already without having the deck stacked in their favor.

On the Waterfront: Oshawa to Toronto

As I've mentioned in earlier posts, one week ago I took my bicycle out to Oshawa and embarked on what ended up a five-municipality, forty-two-kilometer journey along the Waterfront Trail and its environs. It's the sort of trip, I think, that a normal person wouldn't do, at least all in one go. That much riding really takes it out of you, unless you're someone like Val Dodge, who appears to have such endurance that he may actually be some kind of cyborg.

Nevertheless, it was a pleasant ride, and with the aid of the photos I took along the way, keep reading for an impression of what it's like to cycle in the cool breezes along the shore of Lake Ontario, and to dodge traffic under the burning sun away from the shore of Lake Ontario.


First, of course, I had to get out there. Exhibition GO Station and Oshawa GO Station are 53.7 kilometers apart as the train rolls. In this photo, a westbound train lingers for an unusually long time - I realized later it was because of the number of people alighting for the Canadian National Exhibition - while I wait for my own eastbound train, which was delayed for ten minutes because of the volume of people boarding further down the line who were bound for the Canadian National Exhibition. It was a relatively cool morning, and I had hopes that my ride back from Oshawa would not be under a blazing sky.


Oshawa GO is the end of the line for GO trains - literally, as I found out. It would soon return the way it came, with the two engines pushing their train west to Aldershot in Burlington, more than one hundred kilometers away. I know there are some people who could manage that kind of distance on a bicycle without any problems, but I am manifestly not one of them. At 11:20 AM, I mounted my bike and pedalled away.

From Oshawa GO, I had a few kilometers of road-riding ahead of me before I could join the Waterfront Trail. Leaving the station, I pulled west on Oshawa's Bloor Street West - Durham Regional Road 22 - and separated from the lanes of Highway 401 by a few meters of grassy shoulder and a chain link fence, with only a rough gravel shoulder along the road itself, my only real desire was that I wouldn't ride over a particularly sharp stone or a broken bottle.


The City of Oshawa ended far sooner than I'd expected, based on the 2008 Waterfront Trail map I used to plan my route, and I found myself cycling into the wonderful world of Whitby while still on that gravel shoulder. In Oshawa and Whitby both, much of the land south of the 401 seems to have been given over to industries or sprawling power centres like the one where Victoria Street East and Thickson Road South meet, and the speed of the vehicles and the nature of the infrastructure both told me that bicycles weren't particularly welcome there. Cycling south along Thickson, I passed through quiet and thankfully poorly-trafficked industrial zones before I swung west, onto the Trail, and left civilization behind.


There was a tranquility there that's almost impossible to find in cities. Whitby's waterfront has been left almost entirely undeveloped, and as a result there's no distant droning of cars, no rumble of industry, nothing but the wind through the grass and the chitters of the local wildlife. I passed a handful of people along this section of the trail, mostly walking dogs, but not many. A historical marker I encountered along the route told me that before the Second World War, this part of the waterfront had been "the location of choice for a federal airport, dirigible terminal base, and an airdrome," and that an airstrip had in fact been built there during the war. I couldn't see any trace of it ever having been there while I passed through.


I was wrong about leaving civilization entirely behind, though. It may have been an odd, distant smell that made me first notice it - I can't quite remember - but what I at first hoped was a pile of crushed cars in the distance appears instead to be a landfill. This sharp contrast between nature and development along the Trail wasn't the last.


Further west, in Heydenshore Kiwanis Park, this old building was fenced off and seemed left to rot. I'm not sure what it ever was or will be, but I think its presence brings an extra touch of history and charm to the trail. Only a couple of kilometers remained before the separated trail ended, and I was once again thankful for my riding gloves. Bicycling in mixed traffic makes me intensely nervous. I have no idea how all the idiot cyclists in Toronto can ride along on heavily-trafficked routes with no helmet and earbuds in their ears and have no fear.


The route of the Trail had me rejoin Victoria Street, now Victoria Street West. Beyond Gordon Street the intensity of development in Whitby begins to drop off, and it doesn't pick up again until well into Ajax. Much of this is due to the presence of the Lynde Creek conservation area between the two municipalities. When I set out I didn't expect to find so much wilderness, let alone pass through it. I rode on the gravel shoulder again, but other cyclists I observed weren't so considerate; I watched two ride past on the road itself going faster than I could easily manage, but slow enough to create a knot of grumbling traffic behind them.


Lake Ridge Road is the boundary between Whitby and Ajax, and it's where Victoria Street West ends and Bayly Street East begins. The beat-up sign welcomes travellers to "Ajax By the Lake." For a good while, though, all I saw was more gravel shoulders and the fringes of sprawling suburbia, though this barn has managed to hang on at the intersection of Bayly and Shoal Point - ten years ago, though, it was probably deep in farmland, and ten years from now the suburbs will likely have plowed it all over.


Ajax's waterfront, like Whitby's, has for the most part been preserved as parkland. The centerpiece of it is Veterans' Point Gardens, at the foot of Harwood Avenue. In keeping with the town's namesake, HMS Ajax, the gardens' design has naval echoes, built around a mast flying the flags of Canada, Ontario, and Ajax itself. At the "bow" of the gardens, I found a deployment map of the Battle of the River Plate, the first significant naval engagement of the Second World War. In retrospect, I could have taken far more photos there than I actually did. This is also the general area from which I took the photograph I posted on September 5.


This bridge spans the mouth of Duffins Creek in Ajax. Pay careful attention to that sign; I was the only one who did, it seems, as multiple people passed me on the bridge while riding their bikes. Upon reaching the other end I found the sign there was faded and unreadable, but that doesn't excuse the people who came the same way I did. The big problem is that a lot of bicyclists, it seems, just don't care, and do what they want. The view of the creek was pretty nice, though.

West of Duffins Creek, Ajax ended and Pickering began. The trail wasn't much affected by it, still winding and weaving through the calm nature of the shoreline, and the smell of the seashore was everywhere - I'm not sure what exactly the smell was, but I suspect it was seaweed or algae or something similar. A short while into Pickering, the trail detours a short way north around the perimeter of one of the most important facilities on the north shore of Lake Ontario - Pickering Nuclear Generating Station.


I'd seen it before, in photographs and from a distance, but what's always struck me about Pickering Nuclear Generating Station is how much it does not look like what you'd expect a nuclear power plant to resemble. There are no bold, brash cooling towers dominating its form, and aside from the density of power transmission cables and barbed-wire fences and bilingual signs warning that trespassers will be met by armed responders 24/7. Those domes that look vaguely similar to grain silos house the reactors, six of which are splitting atoms to create clean, zero-carbon energy. Ontario Power Generation has a small billboard at the station's entrance reading "nuclear energy = clean air," and it's right.


The western extent of Pickering Nuclear Generating Station is dominated by the OPG 7 commemorative turbine, which appears rather larger and sharper than its urban cousin, the WindShare Turbine in Toronto's Exhibition grounds. Granted, with a generating capacity of 1.8 megawatts the OPG 7 isn't a silver bullet on its own, but I still believe it's an important sort of symbol. Symbols are, always, key. The accessible land around it, beyond the barrier fence, is a public park owned and operated by Ontario Power Generation.


Just west of the power plant, at Liverpool Street in Pickering's waterfront, the separated trail ends. I proceeded north along Liverpool until I again met Bayly Street, but while the official trail route demanded that I cross the lanes of Bayly, I had no intention of obeying that noise - with my possible choices either to cross busy lanes or ride on the sidewalk, I took a third option. Bayly Street wasn't particularly friendly, and in the end I dismounted and walked on the grassy shoulder for much of it out of sheer safety concerns. There's plenty of room there to install a separated bike lane, but would Pickering actually do this? Somehow, I think no.


At 3:02 PM, after navigating around the only spot of construction I saw along the Waterfront Trail, I crossed a pedestrian bridge spanning the Rouge River and returned to the city of Toronto. It was an energizing milestone at first, until I started cycling along Lawrence Avenue East - passing Starspray Loop, which I posted on September 7 - and realized that compared to Whitby, Ajax, and Pickering, Toronto is massive. My original plan was to cycle all the way back to my apartment near Exhibition GO Station, but as it later turned out, when I crossed the Rouge River I hadn't even hit the halfway point yet.

Taking this into account with my previous long-duration ride, it seems that at my current level of fitness, my endurance lasts for about thirty-five kilometers until pain in my shoulders and the uncomfortableness of the seat makes continuing on a consistently more difficult proposition. A pit stop in Port Union for lunch didn't improve matters much. At first I revised my goal from home to Kennedy subway station, but on reaching West Hill I was coming to realize even that was a stretch. I was beginning to feel like I would collapse and get run over before making it even that far.

I chose the Oshawa-Toronto route because it provided multiple abort modes in the form of GO Transit's Lakeshore East line. Had I run into trouble in Whitby, Ajax, or Pickering, I could simply have walked my bike to the nearest GO station and taken the train the rest of the way home. Deep in Scarborough but still a long way from home, I did exactly that and cut my trip short, ending it at Guildwood GO Station, where I arrived half an hour before the next scheduled train.

Guildwood GO Station in October 2008

Even then, I managed to end my trip on a painful note. Guildwood is a three-platform station; Platform 1 is a side platform, with Platforms 2 and 3 center platforms. The tracks are elevated, so to go from one platform to another, you need to descend a set of stairs, walk through a tunnel running under the tracks, and ascend another staircase. While purchasing my ticket I saw a VIA Rail train stop at Platform 1, and I'm still sure I heard the ticket agent tell me to wait at Platform 2.

So I took my bike, carried it through the tunnel and up the stairs to Platform 2, and hunkered to wait for the train. Right around the scheduled time I heard its whistle pierce the silence, and looked up from my book to see it approaching... approaching, I realized with a wrench, on Platform 1's tracks.

Had someone told me before, I wouldn't have believed that I could move so fast while carrying a bicycle. The staircase down was the first obstacle, and even as I started on the steps I could hear the train pulling into the station itself. I'm not sure exactly what happened other than taking the stairs too fast, but I slipped and fell down quite a few, injuring my toe - I'd feared it broken at first, but this was not the case - and popping the chain off my bike, though I didn't discover this until later.

Still, there was no time to waste. On Saturdays, Lakeshore East trains arrived hourly, and loitered in stations for somewhere around forty-five seconds, if that. I made it to the tunnel, clambered up the next set of stairs fully expecting to see the train doors snap shut in my face, but somehow made it aboard and to a seat before it pulled out.

In total, my ride covered 42.06 kilometers, not counting the distance between Exhibition GO and my apartment. It was greatly worthwhile, I'll still admit, but - I need to work on improving my endurance, above all.

It's the sort of thing everyone should attempt. There are good sights along the trail, and maybe the experience will inspire some thought, now and again. Just make sure you're prepared and drink lots of water. I did that, and even then by the time I made it home I looked like a wreck.

hello ladeez I am going to go fall unconscious now

Tyrannies of Distance

There's an old anecdote that in the United States a hundred years is a long time, and in the United Kingdom a hundred miles is a long way. It seems to me that North American society has forgotten the truth of it. A lot of bad habits can become so ingrained to seem unimpeachable in far less than a hundred years, and the road and highway networks of Canada and the United States make distances seem artificially compressed.

I realized this in my bones yesterday, during the tail end of my crazy bicycle adventure. I'd taken the GO train to Oshawa GO Station, and intended to cycle back to my home near Exhibition GO Station - a distance of 53.7 kilometers by the rails. Nothing, right? I'd done forty-two kilometers before, and the only killer chunk of that was a long, steep hill on Wilson Avenue in Downsview.

It wasn't until I crossed from Pickering to Scarborough, found myself forced to switch from comfortable lakeside bicycle trails to Lawrence Avenue East - which, though an official bike route, doesn't have anything to actually make it so - that I found I was still only halfway home. Scarborough, if you're unaware, is big. Much of it was rural up until the postwar housing boom, and Scarborough is where you will find the sort of suburban developments that could just as easily be in Scottsdale.

Even before then, my ride through Pickering wasn't stress-free either, once the trail so thoughtfully dumped me onto Liverpool Street and then Bayly Street, which parallels Highway 401 and struck me as its younger sibling - wide lanes, wide grassy shoulders, few opportunities to enter or exit, and aside from a single sidewalk on the south side of the lanes, no consideration given to road users not driving cars.

The extent to which this philosophy of rambling suburbs connected by wide, howling highways and mini-expressways dominates North American development makes it even more disturbing to realize that it's only in the last sixty years that it became the law of the land. What's worse, in my opinion, is that it's actually harder to destroy than to create in this context. We would have a far more difficult time adapting our existing infrastructure to new modes of living than our predecessors had building that infrastructure in the first place.

The phrase "tyranny of distance" originates from the sprawling decentralization of Australian civilization, with metropolitan centers in the southeast, northeast, and west cut off from each other by thousands of kilometers of hostile terrain. Canada, by contrast, is centralized in its own peripheries, with the vast majority of the population brushing up against the American border because that's where the best lands that we have can be found - until, of course, they're plowed under for more developments that prize wide lanes and sparse settlement.

We think that the world is smaller than it is because of how easy we can get from place to place, either physically or by online proxy. That's nothing but an illusion. Driving for pleasure from Oshawa to Toronto might mean a relaxing bop around back roads, not to mention even more kilograms of carbon dioxide chilling in the atmosphere, but what have you accomplished? Nothing, except reinforcement of the perspective you already had - that if traffic's good, Toronto's half an hour or forty-five minutes away.

In the end, I didn't even make it that far. After five hours on the saddle I'd gone way beyond the limits of my endurance, and I diverted to Guildwood GO Station and took the train the rest of the way home.

If we want to learn the lessons that will be necessary to solve our pressing problems, if we want to exit the twenty-first century in a better state than when we entered into it, we can't keep falling back on old perspectives. There are some things that can only be meaningfully experienced with no filters. Taking a hundred miles, or even ten, on a bicycle demonstrates just how long those distances can be when they're paid for not with gasoline, but with dripping sweat and aching muscles.

They say that cars bring freedom. Personally, I prefer the freedom of the grocery store being close enough for me to walk.

PDP #96: All Along the Waterfront

Recently I decided I didn't have enough crazy adventures in my life, so this morning I woke early and brought my bicycle on a GO train to Oshawa. From there, I set out to bike back home to Toronto, following as close as I could the route of the Waterfront Trail. It went pretty well until Pickering, when it broke down with discontinuities, and in Toronto, where it disappeared entirely for a massive stretch of Scarborough. I only got as far as Guildwood GO Station before I felt like I could go no farther.

Today's photo comes from the waterfront of Ajax, third of the five municipalities I passed through, looking west. Toronto's skyline is lost in the distant smoggy horizon - that is, if it's ever visible from that perspective - but between a gap in the trees, the outline of Pickering Nuclear Generating Station is just visible.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

PDP #82: They're YEARS Ahead of Us

Though it was knocked back to the status of Canada's second city back in the 1970s, when the rise of the Parti Quebecois sent many of its corporations and Anglophones down the 401 to Toronto, Montreal is not letting that stop it from being better than Toronto. Case in point - the BIXI system. This pay-per-hour bike-sharing network launched in May of this year, and it's the sort of thing Toronto had better be copying in the near future, if not sooner.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden was singing BIXI's praises in a panel discussion about the City of the Future earlier today; it's just a shame that the weather tomorrow is set to be so damn uncooperative. I wouldn't mind giving it a go.

This particular BIXI station was near the intersection of rue Fabre and rue Jean-Talon, which to my mind was roughly reminiscent of St. Clair West without the interminable right-of-way construction. Of course, it's the Communist propaganda poster on the advertising board that just clinches the whole thing.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.

PDP #72: Red Ones Go Faster

This is my bike. It is a good bike, as it is ten years old and still rides well after I inadvertently left it outside for a winter. You may notice that it is red. This is the bicycle that now gets me around Toronto considerably faster than my own two feet, and from which I gathered the photographs for my investigation of the Rogers Road streetcar a couple of weeks ago.

The problem with conceptualizing the future is that things are changing all the time - countries, philosophies, hopes and fears. Too often there's never any solid touchstone to bridge a nigh-unfathomable future with a familiar present. When I think about things like that I take heart, because the basic framework of the modern bicycle has been effectively unchanged for more than a century.

The modern bicycle frame works. And no matter how unfathomable the future becomes, I find it relaxing to know that at the least, bicycles will probably still be recognizeable as bicycles.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In case this is not legally possible, I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law.