Special to Globe and Mail: Friday, Jun. 06 2008
I am cycling along Bloor Street, a busy downtown Toronto thoroughfare, when it hits me. It’s not a car door (this time) but an idea that would help Prime Minister Stephen Harper become a Global-Leader-In- The-Fight-Against-Global-Warming, as he likes to refer to himself, while respecting the values of his conservative agenda.
I cross Spadina and cut sharply left to avoid a car pulling into a no-parking zone in front of the variety store, only to have a horn greet me on the other side. It is then I recall how Mr. Harper’s Conservatives often emphasize the importance of breaking the “cycle of dependency,” whether by reducing funding for harm-reduction drug programs, in creating policies for first nations, or in the case of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty during his days serving in Ontario’s Common Sense Revolution, reducing welfare rates. I chuckle at the irony of the word “cycle” – and narrowly avoid rear-ending the car in front of me.
Our transportation system is a cycle of dependency. We get up Monday ready to devote a full day or more of the week to covering the cost of owning and operating a car, importing oil from people who don’t even like us (it’s not just Alberta – Ontario oil mostly comes from other foreign sources) and, at the end of the week, are left with a deteriorating climate that makes us more dependent on air conditioners to fight the heat, irrigation to fight the drought, and hip waders to fight the rising seas.
I pull into the centre lane and signal a left turn, just as I learned in my City of Toronto bike safety course. The pickup driver behind me hasn’t taken this course, and revs his engine so loudly my reflectors rattle. “Get off the road – you’re not a car,” he yells. He is right, of course. Unlike cars, bikes have no tailpipes and emit zero greenhouse gases (GHGs). And to get your bike on the road each day doesn’t involve anyone drilling for oil in a place like Venezuela, shipping that oil to Canada by tanker, refining it, delivering it to local gas stations, and then pumping it into your car before exhausting the remnants.
Mr. Harper could give a whole new meaning to the moniker “master of spin” by promoting the bicycle. His government, which currently spends virtually nothing on cycling (unless health-care costs to repair the broken bodies of cyclists are counted) could go zero-to-60 very quickly by funding a national bike strategy. Better yet, Mr. Harper would be able to show up Toronto Mayor David Miller, who reigns over a city bike plan that is still stuck closer to zero.
I lock my bike outside my office but forget to say goodbye to my bike light. Theft, however, isn’t the main reason Torontonians don’t ride their bikes more -nor does it explain why Toronto has a lower cycling-to-work percentage than the Yukon or Northwest Territories. The lack of bike lanes is the real problem, according to city residents.
Where bike lanes have been created in Toronto, the number of cyclists has increased dramatically.
Toronto actually has a good bike plan – and if you could cycle on a plan, it would be great. Unfortunately, the Toronto plan, which envisions 500 kilometres of bike lanes by 2011, is currently on a pace to meet that target just shy of 2070.
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On a slightly brighter note, last fall Toronto Council passed a resolution to study the feasibility of a bikeway (instead of bike lanes) along the length of Bloor Street and Danforth Avenue, a connected road. (Yes, it’s feasible – after all, thousands of 4,000-pound motor vehicles, six feet wide and 12 feet long manage to negotiate this east-west artery every day.)
As I near my home, the pleasant smell of baking bread entices me to stop and shop. I greet a neighbour who 35 years ago fought the proposed Spadina Expressway, which would have turned this downtown neighbourhood into the blighted core of many U.S. cities. Neighbours like him had a vision of the community that didn’t include thousands of cars and trucks racing through the area on super highways.
Their vision, and determination, inspired a generation – a generation that now struggles against an enemy that imperils all of us: global warming.
What better place for the PM to announce a bike strategy than right here at Spadina and Bloor? And what greater drama than the Global-Leader-In-The-Fight-Against-Global-Warming coming to Toronto to one-up the Greenest-Cleanest-Vanity-Fairest-Mayor by pumping up bikes?
I feel buoyed by the logic of my thoughts and sail across a green light at Bathurst, where an oncoming motorist looks poised to cut me off with a left turn. I pretend not to notice him and he slows down. Mr. Harper, too, could be clever, in this case by breaking our cycle of car dependency without spending much taxpayer money. By promoting bicycles – the world’s most energy efficient transportation vehicles – for Canadian cities, he would be recognized as a climate-change leader by millions of North Americans, instead of just by his communications staff.
As I reach my street, I ignore a one-way sign. A motorist coming the other way looks at me disapprovingly. Cyclists don’t always obey traffic rules, it’s true; in a world where we are told we must accept cars and their pollution as a reality, most of us cyclists are still going the wrong way. Mr. Harper has a chance to lead all of us in a wiser direction.
