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.

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 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.”

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Whenever you see absurdity in legislation, it needs to be changed, that's all. I think motorists and cyclists alike recognize that it is almost impossible to understand some of the provisions of the Motor Vehicle Act...the legislation is old and full of bad memories."