There was a giant turnout for the group ride to protest the Ford government’s bike lane removals. It was nice to be back on a bike after taking a break since the Temagami camp to let my ankle heal, and to see friends from Neon Riders, the Toronto Cruisers, and elsewhere.
Category: Toronto
Photos in a church history
A few months ago, I photographed the stained glass, interiors, and vestements at St. Thomas’ Anglican Church in Toronto. It’s a gig which arose — improbably enough — from a conversation at Peter Russell’s funeral.
Later this month, the book featuring them is to be released: Household of God Volume 2, 1994-2024.
Another sting from our terrible leaders
Our provincial Premier — head of a government which is effectively the political wing of the property development industry — now hopes to get rid of both bike lanes which I use every day: down Yonge Street and along Bloor.
Fall campus
Housebuilding
September rain
Today was unusually draining.
I rode in through the rain, skipping breakfast to give myself more time to sleep / cycle a little slower; then didn’t feel the allure of BBQ food so skipped lunch; then got caught up in a too-long task which became overly too long because of the hunger and tiredness.
I also keep seeing event notifications for ghost rides for newly slain cyclists — sometimes with the galling euphemism/evasion “bicycle accident”, when crashes involving just bicycles are seldom fatal and what is generally being left unsaid for politeness in these notices is “killed by a car”.
Still, I rode home safely, made a nice meal, and am progressing toward feeling capable of handling life’s affronts.
Toronto is a bike city
A friend from the Toronto group bike ride community directed me to Jeff Allen’s intringuing and beautiful cartographic work.
One especially striking map – which supports my view that bicycling has become the best and fastest form of transport in Toronto – shows which areas it is faster to reach from Yonge-Bloor by bike than by transit during rush hour:
You can get a long way! Straight north to York Mills. Southwest past the mouth of the Humber. Southeast past Tommy Thomson Park and into Scarborough.
The map is from 2016, but I would imagine things are worse now with transit underfunding and all the slowdown zones, plus all the streets blocked up by summer construction.
A year since moving in
Neon Riding through campus
Photo by Ed Ng
Group bike rides build community
I have been getting a lot of satisfaction lately from group bike rides. Community emerges naturally when people ride bikes in groups. The contrast underscores how automobile culture is a death cult: every driver gets their own sarcophagus for the living to move them through places while keeping the driver sealed apart. The driver is isolated from nature, from community, and from life at a human scale. They begin to live at a car scale where our instincts and experiences no longer bind us to our neighbours. The car is built to move at 60, 80, 100 km per hour, and to be indifferent to anything it might need to kill to do so.
Group bike rides provide a tangible vision for an idealized future without private cars. That’s a world where people who take the same routes and live in the same neighbourhoods know each other and talk: where they are neighbours. That’s a world with flower fairy girls on lavishly decorated cruiser bikes, and with guys in motorcycle helmets and body armour riding on zippy electric unicycles.
On a bike in the city, you live with the constant awareness of being killed. When riding alone, the great majority of my attention is always directed to nearby drivers and what abrupt, dangerous, or illegal thing they may do next. For drivers in the city, they may live with a mild awareness that their every careless action threatens to kill others, but they are distracted by bluetooth calls and streaming media, alienated from their fellow residents by socially atomized affluence, and shielded by public opinion and a legal system where killing someone with your car through simple carelessness is a minor and unimportant oversight which ought not to impede your happy motoring.