Cycling: Ups and Downs

Toronto is flat, flat, flat. Flat as a pancake, said my friend Heather's husband Mike before we moved to the place, giving me a little shiver of doubt about our plans. I like hills. I love mountains.

Lower Don River, PanAm Path

Turns out that Mike was mostly but not entirely right. Toronto is flat with just a gentle slope northward from the lake, the residue of retreating glaciers. But there are the ravines--crevices in the earth with running streams or rivers, paths of greenery, wildflowers, parks.  To shift gears, I've learned to seek out Cedarvale, the Lower Don Valley, Moore Park, Rosedale. Downs and ups. Contour lines,  but negative ones.

Cycling in Copenhagen
with eldest and youngest. Amagerstrand. 

The advantage of general flatness is for the cycling commuter. My favourite way to get to and from work, or around town on errands, is by bike. I think of cycling as the closest thing to human-powered flying, how birds feel, air rushing past, feet not touching the ground, mobile and lithe. It is a privilege to be able to live where I can ride to work with relative ease. When we lived in hilly Durham and I worked in Newcastle and dropped children at school and nursery it never seemed possible; in Brighton, again, the distance and children posed problems. In both places, lack of safe cycling infrastructure mitigated against the effort.  (It is better there now, at least in Brighton.)  Last month I visited elder son in Copenhagen and again loved the feeling of cycling in that city. So bike-friendly, so easy, so normal. I read recently that Copenhagen is the safest cycling city on the globe. "You'd have to ride 40x around the world before you'd have a serious crash,  in terms of statistical odds," tweeted @barbchamberlain.

Toronto's urban geography is in many ways like Copenhagen: flat, northern, downtown-focused. But Toronto missed the boat with respect to cycling ease and safety. Cars remain king, emperor, deity. We have some bike lanes, though very few protected and separated from cars. My most direct route to the office takes requires using bike lanes designated only by paint and running alongside both car lanes and streetcar tracks. They get very little respect by thoughtless drivers. I call them out when I can. The other day, a blue and sunny summer morning that made cycling to work a true treat, I tapped on the window of an Uber driver dropping passengers in front of a university student residence. "You're blocking the bike lane." Other cyclists wobbled past, dangerously in lanes of traffic, struggling not to fall into the treacherous streetcar tracks. "You could just pull into that driveway." I pointed.

He ignored me, so I moved in front of him, pulled out my phone and snapped a picture of his license plate. He leaned out his window. "Get out of my way! You are just envious of me." He shook his fist. "You will stay poor. You will die and go to hell!"

It took me a second to collect his meaning, that he thought I was riding my bike out of poverty and despair. That I envied him-- a man stuck inside a random black car on this sunny summer day! I started to laugh; I couldn't help it.

Such a revelation about how people live in the same world, occupy the same streets, and see things so very differently. As an anthropologist I should not be so surprised, but there you go. I was. I rode away, still marveling. Different strokes for different folks, of course, but I cannot help thinking that Mr. Die-And-Go-To-Hell would be a happier man if he got out of his shiny car and rode a bike once in a while. Perhaps not along College Street dodging Uber drivers, but certainly down a ravine, alongside a running stream, with wildflowers brushing his ankles. If only the world were such that he and I could have talked about it.