“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.”
"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."
"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. "
"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."
"I wasn't necessarily thinking about it as like a new movement. I think I was thinking of it like formalizing these desires and intentions that people already had, and taking them to the next stage of 'let's make it happen'."
"We need to be writing letters to tell people to do their job. People need to be told this is not acceptable. I hate doing it, but until the culture changes, that's still a really important role."
I had been looking for an excuse to rethink my career priorities, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. “Now’s the time,” I said to myself, and I wrote a rant on my blog, in the hopes that it might lead to some further inspiration on the subject of cycling in Vancouver.
