There’s a war being waged on the streets of Toronto between cyclists and drivers. We leave the battle behind with our bikes and our cars when we step onto the sidewalk, but for many of us, once in mechanical motion, it’s on. It’s particularly heightened for those of us who manoeuvre around the city streets every day. You’ve seen it before. If you’ve ever been in a car with a driver who muttered “Damn cyclists!” or heard a cyclist swear at a thoughtless door-opener, you’ve witnessed the daily slinging of bullets that is the commuter’s war.
When Darcy Allan Sheppard flew off Michael Bryant’s car, this conflict really came to light in Toronto. I, myself, had only really begun to think of this tension in battle terms the year before, when I tore a strip off a sweet-looking older lady who’d – oops! – decided to skirt around stalled traffic by squeezing her car into the bike lane. She narrowly missed my boyfriend on his bike by about one inch, who artfully swerved around her, but I was less graceful; I pounded on the side of her car as hard as I could with my open palm, colourfully critiquing her driving abilities in a way that made implications about her overall worth.
Now, Mama didn’t raise me up to talk to old ladies like that, but broken and bruised as I was from a run-in I had had with a pick-up truck the month before, I found I was a bit, oh, wound up on the road. What should have been an issue with one aggressive pick-up truck driver, (well two, counting a previous hit-and-run incident), had become an issue with all cars. I felt incredibly guilty for being rude (to an old lady!) but that anger, that fear, is very hard to control. It’s not a question of impolitely cutting someone off. On the road, lives are at stake. On my bike, my life is at stake.
It may be frustrating for cars to negotiate their way around the increasing number of cyclists on the road, but the fact is, it is ridiculously dangerous to ride a bike on the streets of Toronto. Cars are not endangered by bikes, and car drivers are very rarely being killed by cyclists. There’s nothing like feeling the wind in your hair, avoiding traffic jams and keeping your twoonies in your pocket. The only downside is that you will occasionally be hit by a car and may die. Probably nine-tenths of the riders you see on the road have been involved in a collision of some sort. Does that risk make cycling ridiculous, or the city infrastructure?
The municipal government has dedicated so much web space to talking about what they’re doing to promote cycling and protect cyclists that the idea of advocacy almost seems redundant, and yet Toronto’s cyclists continue to get plowed down like unwitting pins in a game of urban bowling. If the City of Toronto is already planning on increasing the number of bikeways from about 166 km to 1000 km in 2011 (without actually remaining on target), encouraging businesses to take the Bike Pledge, and funding safety education programs and collision response protocols (without actually specifying what those are), then why does Toronto have more cyclist collisions than any other major Canadian city? Why do cyclists get hit and killed in Toronto, without anybody being charged with even the mildest infraction?
History was never my strong subject, but even I know that when you have two segments of the population pitted against each other, with lives at stake, you have a brewing civic problem.
My friends, on our two feet, we are all pedestrians; brothers in ambulation. But once you get on your four wheels and I get on my two, I hope you’ll forgive me a swear word or two.
I prolly shouldn’t be telling you this, but my friend made my day with this little anecdote. The friend, who shall remain anonymous, recounted how a car, trying to make a left-hand turn into a driveway, and too impatient to wait for traffic to pass, opted to make the turn too soon, driving up over the sidewalk to avoid traffic and very nearly killing my friend. There were no apologies, no repentant shrug, and my friend, shook up from proximity to death or injury, proceeded with indignation to his destination where he asked his hostess for an egg. “An egg?” she said thoughtfully, “I only have this one that’s way past its expiry date…”
On Tuesday it was my birthday and I am 33.
Oh, 
