or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bike

This past July, I self-published my first book—Vanbikes: Vancouver's Bicycle People and the Fight for Transportation Change, 1986-2011.

Advance voting is done; voting day is tomorrow—Saturday, October 15th, 2022. By Sunday morning, every municipality will have a new or re-elected mayor, and a new mix of councillors. In Vancouver, we also get new Park Board commissioners and school board trustees.

My dislike of parties almost overwhelms my desire to participate in the party system—really the partisan poo-slinging—in the first place. But here I am, voting for parties.

Advance voting started this past weekend. Despite having some candidate ideas, I was largely unprepared to vote. I realized that what I needed was a tool for organizing the most important factors for my picks for Vancouver mayor, council, park board and school board: values and affiliation.

The report’s recommendations were broad, deep, and ultimately driven by forces that were intangible to the average urbanite — environmental degradation and a changing climate. And so, unlike bike lanes, it’s a battle that continues to be waged, almost 30 years later.

When summarizing Gregor Robertson's ten years as mayor, any historical perspective on the City of Vancouver will undoubtedly refer, perhaps quite pointedly, to his responsibility for the growth in cycling — the activity, and more importantly the infrastructure that enabled its growth.

Before formal advocacy groups formed in Vancouver, small groups of people would gather informally to discuss conditions for transportation cycling. They were the first voices for change.

In the late 1980s, a small group of young environmental activists began to identify as a subculture people concerned about bicycles, and their place on the streets…and they began to build a community.

Two television shows appeared in Canada in the early 1990s, featuring a Vancouver bike shop owner who took it upon himself to get cycling onto the screen, and into the mainstream.

Despite the many formative events in the cycling advocacy world just before and after Expo ‘86, it wasn’t until the 90s began that the bigger picture began to come together.

“I wanted to make Vancouver more of a place that was safe to ride for people with disabilities or the 8-80. I hadn't got that phrase in my head, but that's what I was thinking - kids and older people. That's what I wanted.”

“We realized it was making a difference. Every show women would come up to us and say this is really meaningful for us. Seeing women on bikes, and seeing us represented in this traditionally male-dominated world.”

“I had raced, and I rode cross-country here and did a few things, but I was more interested in the bigger, bigger, bigger picture….As we started getting a little bit more pull here and there, we started doing the CAN-BIKE stuff. That's where, if you will, I dug in.”

“My dad took me to see On the Beach the summer it came out, in 1959. It was basically the end of the world, and the last days chronicled in Australia. I was on the edge of adolescence; I don't know, my dad must have thought I needed to have this in my brain. Well, it's been in my brain ever since, of course.”

"That Vancouver is now one of the top cities in North America for protected bike lanes is unbelievable; the substance of what’s happened is pretty dramatic. Public perceptions and attacks is a whole other part of the story."

"You might get laughed at the first time, but you back it up with numbers and success and experience elsewhere, you can start to make the case. But if you don't do that, you're never going to get the funding that you need, and it's never going to meet anywhere near its potential."

"When you're doing union negotiations, it doesn't matter who you're working with, that group across the table is your employer and the financial agent, and you have to be able to work together. And you have to be able to talk. Because they hold the cards. And if you're not willing to do it, the only thing that's holding you up is legislation, which can go at any time."

"One of my usual approaches was just to let everybody know that I rode my bike all the time, and if there were ever any cycling aspects of projects, I was happy to help on them. Rather than being hard-nosed about things, I was more of a soft-pedalling lifestyle bicycle advocate."

"The wind blows from positive to negative, back and forth, and if you don't have a constant stream of reinforcing messages, the negative ones can start to dominate. Politicians decide where the money is spent. We run the risk of electing the wrong people for the wrong reason, and having big chunks of this undone."

"I'm not a meeting-goer, I try to avoid them at all costs if I possibly can. I went to one of those meetings and it was mostly guys, and they were all really into maps and routes, and that's totally not what I was into. But I was completely won over by the passion and the integrity and the willingness to sacrifice so much in order to make this city a better place to bike in."

"The volume of cyclists are one block off. It has really been apparent to me that if you're trying to make that make that population shift, there's a visibility problem that we suffer from here, because we are one block off. I think it matters if you see people cycling."

"Because cycling was given a low priority within engineering culture, it was given to the junior engineers who had just come out of university. They were more interested in actually doing something, and didn't mind ruffling some feathers. And that's helped create that culture change."