“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.”
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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. "
"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."
"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."
"In order to get the provincial government to listen to us, we had to have a community. And at that time, the community was there, but it wasn't drawn together. And so there was no voice."
"Should enforcement be based on data, or based on the number of complaints? And are they equal? I think the data outweighs the emotion that exists in our city around hate for people on bikes. And that should be determining enforcement."
"It's a physical practice. It's a direct experience of the world. There's that feeling when you're riding, that you're part of the air, and you're part of the road, and you're part of the city, and it's part of you."
"In those days, the real challenge was that the engineering fraternity felt that if people get out and ride, they'll gain confidence, they'll gain the skills that they need, and they won't want to build separated facilities. Intuitively, we all felt this was bullshit. We just didn't have the evidence to suggest otherwise."
