Take the Lane

Toronto Bike Summit

Unholster your BlackBerry or put a note on the fridge: the Toronto Bike Summit will be held Thursday, May 28, at the Novotel Toronto Centre, from 8:15 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Sponsored by the Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation and the Clean Air Partnership. Speakers from Toronto, Edmonton, New York, Chicago and Nijmegen, The Netherlands, will address issues ranging from bicycle infrastructure to cycling advocacy. Registration ranges from $125 to $75.

If you live in Toronto, care about cycling and can afford it, you should go. See the website here.

Did the bicycle affiliation kill a sensible bill?

A recent post in BikePortland.org suggests that a perfectly sensible bill related to vehicular homicide was killed in the Oregon state legislature because it had an affiliation to bicycles.

The bill has been heavily promoted by Mary O'Donnell, whose bicycling husband was killed in 2007 by a 28-year-old suspended driver who didn't bother to attend the court hearing and sent her fine in by mail. O'Donnell's bill would have filled the gap between the current criminal negligence statutes and the lightweight careless driving rules. But the legislators, the post suggested, weren't comfortable with a complicated piece of legislation that had a bicycle connection and potential "fiscal impacts" (aka, increased costs of enforcement).

You can read the post here. It would make me ill to think that the legislators had better things to do than think about some dead cyclist, and weren't really up to spending more money to enforce laws that might stop people from doing things that wind up killing people.

A few words from the Fast Lane

Ray LaHood, the American secretary of transportation, has his own blog (or purports to have his own blog -- does a minion write it?) called the Fast Lane. Last week, on Earth Day, he posted on bicycling and its place in the modern transportation infrastructure. It's worth a read, and worth passing around to your friends (and foes).

Another log for the bicycle helmet bonfire

This story in the New Scientist will add fuel to the ongoing debate about the need for bicycle helmets.

Moron of The Week, #23

This morning, at Courtland and Hayward in Kitchener. You were driving a green van turning left off Hayward Avenue onto Courtland. I was in front of you signalling my left turn.

Rather than wait for me to complete my turn and then change lanes into the right-most lane on Courtland, you chose to go around me into the outermost lane of the oncoming traffic. And once you got past me, and entered the lane, in front of me, on Courtland, you cut across into the right-hand lane so you could turn up Walton.

The kicker to this is that you were a woman driving and there was at least one kid in the van. Let's assume you weren't driving your own kid, because who would demonstrate such hazardous motoring behaviour with their own kid in the back seat? But who let you put their kid in danger?

Whoever you are, you are my Moron of the Week.

Greg's Law and E-bike changes

I don't know if you noticed the passage of Bill 126 amidst the buzz over Ontario's cellphone ban for motorists.

Bill 126, the Road Safety Act that was also passed this week, contains some matters of interest to cyclists.

One is that one of the objectives of Eleanor McMahon, the driving force behind the Share the Road Cycling Coalition, was realized with the passage of the Greg's Law provisions. Her husband, Greg Stobbart, was riding his bicycle when he was struck and killed by a suspended driver in 2006. Under the new bill, a suspended driver stopped by police may have his vehicle immediately impounded, rather than having to wait for the bureaucratic machinations involved in getting an order to impound it. McMahon has been lobbying hard to get this provision, and with some 500,000 suspended and unlicensed drivers in the province, 75 per cent of whom still drive despite the lack of a valid licence, there is fertile ground for vehicle seizure.

The other matter is the redefinition of the bicycle. It now includes "power-assisted bicycles", the so-called e-bikes. Riders of "power-assisted bicycles" must wear a motorcycle or bicycle helmet. There are also provisions that allow the Minister of Transportation to make regulations about helmets without having to go to the lieutenant-governor. For those who have concerns about government inclinations toward a mandatory helmet law, this may cause some discussion over the breakfast table. Read the whole bill here.

Will taking a CAN-BIKE course make me a better motorist?

Yeah, it's a rhetorical question. Any kind of road-think will make you a better motorist, just like it will make you a better cyclist or a better pedestrian. The past two days have been pretty intensive road-think. We sit down at about 8:30 a.m., sneak in a couple of breaks, ride, read, talk, view videos, ride some more, make notes and leave when we're chased out by the incoming yoga class at 5:30 p.m. I'm probably spending more time on my cycling skills (and teaching skills) than I spent on my driver training course back in the day. (Back then, car tires were carved from granite.)

I passed the first written CAN-BIKE exam. One mistake (and of course, I argued the point). I've got enough bicycle control to ride a series of figure-eights within your average parking spot, and can rotate my my head for left and right shoulder-checks like a Disney owl.

After spending about 10 minutes in the shade by a three-way stop, I have resolved to stop my rolling stops. The Waterloo Regional Police could balance their budget with an officer who targets rolling stops (hint-hint, at Dixon Street and Eckert Street in Kitchener).

I have also found that clear signals help both of motorists and cyclists understand what is intended and expected. Two mornings running, a clear shoulder check and arm signal prevented a motorist from trying to zip by me on the lane I intended to enter.

It felt satisfyingly powerful. 

CAN-Bike, Day One

Well, I survived my first day. And as Anthony pointed out in a response to my last post about my CAN-BIKE jitters, I am learning the evil truth about my bad habits.

What I'm taking this week is a four-day CAN-BIKE II and CAN-BIKE Instructors course. Assuming I pass, at the end of it, I'll be an accredited CAN-BIKE instructor who can come into your workplace or community centre and teach the CAN-BIKE II course to people who want to ride in traffic. There are five other people taking this week's session here in Kitchener. Today, we spent about half the day indoors going over some basics, and the other half out on the streets around Rockway Golf Course, mystifying neighbours and kids from Rockway Collegiate as we rode around residential streets calling out turn instructions and road hazards up and down the line of seven riders.

After 35 years of thinking I knew all about cycling, I was reminded how sloppy my thinking is. It really does make sense to adopt a professional attitude on the road, and to claim one's share of the road. I think a lot of cyclists (feeling perhaps like second-class road users) behave in ways that minimize their presence on the road (scrunching over as close to the curb as possible, for instance). The danger is that the motorist will treat that cyclist with no more regard than he/she would to a paper bag at the roadside. If we want to be treated like equals to motorists, we have to be more assertive and confident road users.

That, and my hand signals are pretty ineffective, and a bit infrequent. I guess I can't grump about motorists who don't use their turn signals if I am inconsistent about using my hand signals. Three days to get this right.

Pre-CAN-BIKE jitters

You would laugh to know how nervous I am going into next week's four-day CAN-BIKE training course in Kitchener.

Here I am, 36 years in the saddle as an adult cycle-commuter/tourist/bicycle advocate, and I've got the jitters about being in a small-group setting to learn about proper cycling technique. The big jitter is probably about being shown up before the younger and less-experienced students as an old dog who never learned new tricks, or even some of the old tricks.

Certainly, the course manual is pretty daunting. I think it was delivered to the office by forklift. It's thick enough to stop a bullet, and I hope I'm not thick enough that I can't absorb chapters 4, 5, 1-3, 6-11, 13, 14, and 15 before class begins. (Thankfully, we skip chapter 12.)

Actually, if I do absorb all that information, my brain will be so big that my centre of gravity will be thrown off.
Better just to keep the manual at hand, ready to thumb through.

Tyler Hamilton to quit cycling?

The website CycleTo is reporting that American road racer Tyler Hamilton is to announce today that he is retiring from professional cycling.

He is reported to have tested positive for DHEA, which he says was part of an over-the-counter medication he had purchased to help deal with his ongoing battle with depression. You may remember Hamilton for the buzz when it was revealed that he had ridden part of the 2003 Tour de France with a broken collarbone,and won a stage with a 140K solo breakaway, but a lot of the positive vibe evaporated on subsequent doping questions and a two-year suspension that ended in 2006.

You can read CycleTo's story here.