Take the Lane

Chicopee bike park wants your muscles

The people at the Chicopee bike park are looking for able-bodied volunteers to come out on Sunday, May 25 to help smooth out the lumps and pack the jumps for the mountain biking park. You can get details at www.kwbiking.com

You can ride to the park, but don't expect to ride the courses at the park yet. Repeat after me: Must wait until official opening in June.

Their website is fledging nicely ... I suspect that the T-shirt in the virtual store that reads on the front, "Ride bikes" and on the back ". . . because skateboarding sucks." will be the source of some comments from the area's four-wheeled wildlife.

Cycling for Cara's Hope

If you want to support a good cause and a crazy person, you can fire a pledge off to Cliff Vanclief, from the Hub Bicycle Shop in Cambridge, who is riding in a 24-hour cycle marathon for Cara's Hope Maternity Home in Cambridge.

Vanclief is a veteran mountain biker with six years of solo 24-hour endurance riding under his belt. He'll be riding alongside the teams participating in the Mansfield Outdoor Centre's 24 Hours Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous event starting tomorrow at noon. Vanclief likes riding solo because "I can control the action" and is aiming to put in 20 circuits of the 13-kilometre course.

If you want to pledge to his ride, you can drop by the Hub in Hespeler, or e-mail your intention to Vanclief at clifford@hubbicycleshop.com. He'll collect your pledge later.

Toronto, land of cycling excess

Ya gotta love Toronto (oh, c'mon, try) for its Cycling Excess.

This year, there were so many events, displays, announcements and other ephemera associated with Bike Week, that the city has officially promoted the event to Bike Month. From May 26 to June 21, the usual bicycle hunting season will be suspended in Toronto and all motorists and bicyclists will live in blissful harmony.

The month kicks off with the Group Commute, from four different start points in the city and ending at Yonge and Bloor, complete with emergency service workers and police escorts! It's sort of like Critical Mass, but the police escort the cyclists to their destination rather than to the police station.

You can get more details at http://www.toronto.ca/cycling/bikeweek/ Personally, I'm going to try to find some time to get in to T.O. for the first week just to bask in the glory of bicycle-filled streets. There will be bicycle-filled streets, won't there?

Gas prices driving bicycle sales?

An Associated Press story from Bismarck, N.D. on the weekend suggests that higher gasoline prices are driving a renewed interest in the cycling alternative. You can see the article at: http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080511/work_bikes.html

I'm always a little skeptical about such stories, just because I think it takes more than rising gasoline prices to change transportation behaviour. We've watched gas prices edge up over the past year, and we are well into the territory that for some countries, just a few years ago, led to riots in the streets. And people are still filling their SUVs at the local gas bar.

We need a cycling infrastructure and peer acceptance before the "Golden Age" of cycling returns.

But there is always hope . . .

Moron of the Week, #13

I had trouble figuring out which one was the bigger moron: the cyclist who was leading the duo into danger or the cyclist who was blindly following.

Today, 6 p.m., on Block Line Road. There's a hill on BLR that rolls down to the stop light at Strasburg Road. The adjacent wooded hill blocks line of sight for traffic approaching from the right until you are pretty much right at the intersection.

So, booting down the hill, on the sidewalk even though there's a bike lane, come two mountain bikes ridden by a 20-something couple. The light is red, but the leader doesn't touch the brakes. Did he think it would turn green as they got there?

Anyway, he rockets through the intersection against the red, and she is right behind him.

Amazingly, no one dies, but not because of any smart move made by either cyclist.

You decide which one was the bigger moron.

Cross-country cycle adventure

Bill Parker of Edmonton is living the cycling dream. Or nightmare, depending on your point of view.

He's spending the bulk of this year riding from Edmonton to Newfoundland, in the not most direct of routes.

A marriage breakup meant "it was time to start something new," he said, when I got him to pull over on Homer Watson Boulevard in Kitchener a few minutes ago.

In March, he set out from Edmonton, with the goal of visiting a few addresses in Newfoundland. He may not make it quite that far, depending on how long his money and the goodwill of the people he meets hold out.

He's slept outside in minus 30 degree weather, in $100-a-night motels and in spare rooms and rec rooms. One family in Winnipeg -- "And their last name was Alberta" -- put him up for nine days of bad weather.

In eight or so bags, he has his life packed on a Trek Navigator 100 with a step-through frame: 170 pounds of bike and gear, including his shaving mirror, a crank flashlight and a tiny Casio colour TV. The 47-year-old Parker himself is only 135 pounds.

Today he came into the Waterloo Region from the Niagara-Hamilton area, using the rail trails. He's heading for Toronto, and then north into Barrie and Orillia, seeing the sights, meeting people, and covering about 80 or so kilometres a day.

The worst part of the trip? "The north. So isolated. Nothing to look at. You look forward to seeing a radio tower."

The next big goal? "Montreal. I haven't been since Expo 67."

Bumped by a bus

I've been watching with pride as my adult daughter becomes more of a cyclist and cycling advocate in Toronto.
In theory, one of Canada's best cities for cycling. In practice . . .

She e-mailed me this week to note that she had been "bumped" by a bus. She's OK. Cracked fender and damaged rear wheel. Both departing from a stop, so a low-speed incident.

After I was happy to hear she was OK, I was really angry at the bus driver. That bus didn't "bump" a cyclist; it hit one. Buses and bicycles are part of the multi-modal urban transportation future. We are road warriors together. Bus drivers have to take extra care around vulnerable road users, and particularly with cyclists, their eco-brethren.

Generally, I have gotten along well with bus drivers, but have heard critical comments from other cyclists about bus drivers. What's your take on the bus-bicycle relationship? Are we BFF? Or perhaps not.

About that Critical Mass dustup

There have been a couple of public and private comments about my post on the confrontation between Waterloo Regional Police and a member of the Critical Mass event on Friday, April 23.

The rider himself has responded and you can see his comments on that post.

It apparently wasn't about lights, but about the power play that sometimes happens between politicized cyclists and police. Was the officer in the cruiser being hindered in his forward motion? Yes. Were his lights flashing or siren wailing because he was on the way to an emergency? No. If it had been a convoy of senior citizens in motorized scooters on King Street, I wonder if any of them would have been hustled off to the police station.

Having said that, I was myself mighty ticked at a Critical Mass event last year when the group declined to let Grand River Transit buses past the cycle parade. GRT is a part of the alternative transportation solution. Surely, they should get special consideration.

When you adopt an absolute position, there is bound to be head-butting. Take it easy, guys. We're on bikes for joy, not to annoy.

Someone critical of critical mass?

I've heard a rumour that the April 25 Critical Mass in Waterloo Region ride had a problem with local law enforcement.

The story being passed around is that a rider was arrested, detained and then released without charge, for not having a light on his bike. I'd really be curious about this incident, since the Highway Traffic Act (Section 62(17)) refers to having the lighted lamp on the bike one-half hour before sunset, and my recollection of the Critical Mass rides is that they usually wrap up before that. Just curious...

I've asked a few questions of the Waterloo Regional Police, but there doesn't seem to be an official report on the incident.

The tipster did not see the incident and I did not see the incident, so it would help if someone who actually witnessed the incident, or the rider himself, would drop me a line at bbean@therecord.com.

Being bike-friendly

Alan Durning raises a number of interesting points about making urban centres bike-friendly in the environmental blog Grist in a posting from last spring (see it at http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/5/18/12579/3294) .

It is a strange ethos that has city planners put sidewalks in places where few people walk, so that there is a continuity of pedestrian-friendly infrastructure, but seem rarely to consider bicycle lanes in the same light.

Bike lanes on too many roads in our Region begin without a connection to another bicycle route and end without a connection to another bicycle route.

I call it, "starts nowhere and ends nowhere." A "starts nowhere and ends nowhere" bike lane is like a bicycle-route demonstration project. Ride on Strasburg Road in Kitchener or Westmount Road in Waterloo if you want to see what I mean. You skrinch your way through traffic to get to the bike lane, have five minutes of confident cycling in a designated lane -- which in truth, is no more than a space demarcated by white paint, and violated by any motor vehicle that feels like doing so -- and then have to turn back onto some four-lane road jammed with impatient motorists. Yikes!

Even the best separate bicycle trail in KW, the Iron Horse Trail, starts nowhere and ends nowhere. Is this the future of bicycling for our urban areas? If you know a planner, flip her/him a copy of the above link, and ask the question.