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Cycling's benefits should be easy to peddle
Toronto's annual Bike Week started yesterday and an hour at a busy intersection on Yonge St. during the morning rush produced sightings of perhaps two dozen cyclists, most of them school kids, a few couriers, a handful of Spandexed keeners with chiselled calves, and one gent in a tattered cardigan with clips on his trousers looking like a professor late for a lecture. Even as traffic was bumper to bumper and throngs squeezed through subway doors, the great two-wheeled revolution remained on the drawing board — or at least home in the garage. In truth, we hadn't expected much better. Not after catching Councillor Adam Giambrone on Citytv's Breakfast Television rhapsodizing about how bike racks mounted on some TTC buses would help with the "intermodal splits" in how people commute. Intermodal splits? You could almost hear viewers spit up their Cheerios. Mercifully, the interviewer demanded a translation. And Giambrone said what he meant was the various ways — walking, biking, transit — that people might make their way to work. With the bike-friendly buses, folks could pedal one way, take transit home, he said, all the while reducing traffic, aiding the environment, enhancing their health. Alas, intermodal splits or not, bicycling as a daily mode of transit has never caught on in North America the way it has elsewhere. As far as bikes go, there seems to be no middle ground. They're either the province of children or the obsession of triathletes and supermen like Lance Armstrong. Perhaps North Americans never took to cycling because there was just too much distance to cover, especially after we invented the suburbs. Perhaps generations were creeped out on cycling by the sight of Elvira Gulch making off with Toto in The Wizard of Oz. Or maybe it was the sight of two-wheeling Jack Layton and the easy stereotyping of cyclists as sanctimonious lefty granola heads. Perhaps it was just an instinct for survival and distaste for car antennas swiping their ears. After all, most folks would probably sooner raft to work down the Don River than brave the traffic of city streets while riding a bike. Whatever the reason, if Giambrone wants to get people out of their cars and onto two wheels, he's going to have to do better than sing the praises of intermodal splits. It's going to take a sales job. What the councillor should have done was crib from The Noblest Invention: An Illustrated History of the Bicycle, put out two years ago by Bicycling magazine. In it, the aforementioned Lance Armstrong says bikes are the dream ride of those who have "runaway hearts." Do you hear that, councillor? Runaway hearts. Not intermodal splits. "Our first bike is a matter of curb-jumping, puddle-splashing liberation," Armstrong wrote in his introduction to the book. Liberation, councillor. Let my people go! Free yourself from the tyranny of seat belts and gas prices. His first bike meant "freedom from supervision, from car pools and curfews," Armstrong wrote. "It's merciful release from parental reliance — one's own way to the movies or a friend's house. More plainly, it's the first chance we have to choose our own direction." Now, there's something to build a dream on, councillor. Did you know that on her 10th birthday, the writer Dervla Murphy got a bike and an atlas? A few days later she decided to cycle to India. This was remarkable given that she lived in Ireland. Even more remarkable is that, 22 years later, she did. Why? Because, as one cycling aficionado puts it, bikes travel at "the ideal pace to see the world: fast enough to outrace boredom, slow enough to absorb detail." What Giambrone should have done, if he wanted to get us excited about biking, was say something like what Bill Strickland did in a chapter called "What Every Kid Wants." There is "no vehicle more playful, no piece of exercise equipment so liberating, and no symbol of childhood that so powerfully and paradoxically signals the coming of adulthood," he said. "Your bike takes you down the driveway, over the curb, away from the steady hand of your father, then beyond arm's reach and eventually farther. As far as you want to go ..." We always remember that moment, the moment we learn to ride, the very definition of something we'll never forget. Some say the lessons of balance we must master to ride a bike are the same we need learn to deal with life. Bicycling is at the same time both simple and profound, described as a veritable physics class in motion. The bike teaches the "costs and consequences of propulsion," Strickland said. Stolen ones are frequently our first introduction to the dark side of humanity. John Lennon's fondest childhood dream was apparently to have a bicycle. Imagine. Albert Einstein claimed to have dreamed up the theory of relativity while riding his. But even those testimonials pale next to that of H.G. Wells. "To ride a bicycle properly is very like a love affair," he said. "Chiefly, it is a matter of faith. Believe you can do it, and the thing is done; doubt, and for the life of you, you cannot." Intermodal splits, indeed. Jim Coyle usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. |