“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.”
"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."
"It's important that you can come into Metro Vancouver as a touring cyclist and you know you're going all the way to Vancouver, all the way to Tsawwassen, or all the way to Horseshoe Bay, as if you were driving a car. We don't do that at all for cycling."
"I think what's been lost is a focus on issues like inclusiveness. For all of the work that's been done, I think HUB is still a very middle to upper class organization. There's lots of white guys. It hasn't really gotten into the concerns and representation of low income cyclists. Groups like PEDAL and Kickstand work on that."
"I have activism in my heart but I never thought that it was the only way to get things done. For me B.E.S.T. was my passion and my professional work. I was trying to shift the direction of B.E.S.T. to a little bit less radical and more mainstream."
"I was more of a facts guy, and sometimes I'd think geez, I'm losing the argument because I just can't do the alpha-bulldozer-persuade-the-meeting thing. You can do lots of research before you go into a meeting, and have all your facts lined up, and somebody that makes a real passionate play sways the group."
"I came to visit my friends in Vancouver, and one of them asked, 'Well can you do your job in Vancouver?' I said, 'Good question!' So then I started looking into what Vancouver had for Bike to Work Week. And there wasn't one."
"People had a mindset that when you find a problem, you just have to write a letter to the city, because they probably didn't know about it. And by working with the city, we found out that they had a list of two or three hundred problems, they just didn't know which one was on top."
"I was motivated personally as a daily cyclist, and as a transportation practitioner I saw how a lot of transportation infrastructure was contrary to properly accommodating cycling. I felt myself in somewhat a unique position — having an understanding, and being able to talk the language of the transportation practitioners."
"Sometimes you can talk forever and nothing gets done. You go along Lougheed Highway, and then the path ends. They kept promising, yeah we're going to do something about it. But nothing ever happened. It made me very angry, and I had to express that anger. I don't want my friends to get killed."
"In the tide of history, the mainstream thinking is in our favour at this point. Because the whole world is slowly moving in that direction. It's a time in motion, and history is going in the same direction. Being on the right path actually helps a lot."
"It was a conscious choice on my part to be as car-free as possible. I had bought into that paradigm and I think a part of me was stubborn, and people said you can't do it. I was like yeah, I actually can do it. I can ride, get some exercise, and it's zero cents a litre. "
"How many times has that happened in an accident? 'I didn't see him, the sun was in my eyes.' Oh yeah? So that was my defence — yellow jacket, yellow hat. I'm out there, I'm loud, you're going to see me, and I'm going to act like a car. And I'm going to take the lane."
"I'm not going to live in Maple Ridge forever, but I don't want to be just like, ‘there's no reason for me to do anything that would help’. I'm helping to put seeds in place for projects that [may] happen ten years from now. It doesn't matter if it's not going to help me, it's going to enrich the community."
"You tell car drivers what's there for them — the restaurants, the gas stations. There's all sorts of information you're told. As a cyclist you're told it's a bike route. Well, I know it's a bike route. Tell me something I need to know."
"Whenever these budgets are tight, this is the stuff that gets cut first. Unless there's somebody that's going to squeak. And if nobody's squeaking about it, nobody's complaining about it, then it's an easy cut."
"A lot of people commute to Vancouver, and they see what Vancouver is building. They come back to the North Shore and the same old crappy bike lanes, and they think we don't want these crappy bike lanes anymore, we want protected bike lanes. They know what's do-able."
"So little money is spent on cycling infrastructure compared to everything else to do with roads. It's astounding how angry some groups get with what's done to promote cycling. Motorists benefit hugely from the fact that there are more people cycling."
"Seriously, I look at that and I go, I've made people's lives better. Based on some stuff that I got excited about years ago. I was in the right time, in the right place. I've made the city better, in such a nice way. That's pretty cool."
"It's not so much about fashion, it's more about people. Just regular people who have style and have lives and do normal things, and it was very much normalizing cycling, so that everyone could relate to it."
"You can't just build a piece of infrastructure that doesn't take you where you want to go, which you'll still see happening in the suburbs. 'Great we got a grant to do this half kilometre bike lane…that doesn't connect to anything else.' You have to connect a network."
“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.”