When I moved back to Toronto, I had no interest in getting a car, and the transit system here is prohibitively expensive for someone trying to save money. So I knew that high on my list of priorities would be an apartment and a job close enough to each other that I would be able to bike between them. Thankfully I did, and after the first month of getting settled in I took to Craigslist to find some proper transportation. I figured buying a used bike and making it roadworthy would still be less expensive than buying a new bike; as it turns out, I was about as wrong as possible, and spent far too much on parts and service than I wanted to. But it has two wheels, a seat and brakes, and it gets me back and forth to work in half the time the streetcar takes, so I still think it’s money well spent. It may not start paying for itself until next summer, though.

I consider myself a cyclist; I may not have the spandex shorts or fancy repair kits or silly tiny hats, but it’s my preferred mode of transportation and I consider it vastly superior to other modes of urban transportation. Driving in downtown Toronto scares the crap out of me, but cycling has never been that bad, even though I’m right on the road with way more cars than I ever had to deal with in England. And there’s a certain comraderie and pride I feel, seeing a mass of cyclists go through an intersection and knowing that every one of those bikes is one less car on the streets.

So when I heard about the tragic death of a bike courier in my city on Monday night, I immediately jumped on the moral high ground. “How dare those brutes in cars drive around as if they own the road with reckless abandon for cyclists? This article says he was dragged for like two blocks! He probably didn’t even notice he hit the guy!” It felt good to have another way to rage against cars, but it quickly subsided as more and more information was revealed. The driver of the car turned out to be a former attorney-general of Ontario, which brought in all kinds of attention, mainly surmising what would happen to his career. But in the middle of all the reports, a few odd details jumped out at me; namely, the fact that eyewitnesses reported an “altercation” between the driver and cyclist at an intersection, and that the reason the cyclist was dragged is because he was hanging onto the side mirror.

I couldn’t wrap my head around it. What could have happened to anger the cyclist so badly that he held onto the front of the car as it sped away? And how could the driver have just gone for it, knowing he was dragging someone behind him? Now, the final piece of the puzzle has been revealed; the cyclist was drunk, so much so that he probably shouldn’t have been allowed to drive a car. Suddenly the situation seems a lot clearer; drunk guy on bike gets bumped by car, gets mad, picks a fight with a car driver, car speeds off, drunk guy hangs on until he’s knocked off. And according to one theory, the swerving that slammed the cyclist into the mailboxes and trees on the side of the road may have been a result of construction closing the right lanes of the road and the cyclist holding on by the steering wheel. The driver isn’t talking to the press, and with good reason, so right now it’s all based on surveillance tapes and witnesses. It’s all a bit too early to tell.

Toronto has a strange relationship with its cyclists. The biking community is large, bike racks line all of the major streets, and there are a huge number of paths for nature riding all over the city. But the downtown core has a mere handful of actual bicycle lanes, forcing us into the way-too-small space between the curb and the vehicles tearing past us. Many drivers seem to have difficulty grasping the notion that sometimes bicycles have the right of way (particularly when we’re going straight and the car beside us is turning right). Pedestrians gleefully step off the curb directly into the path of cyclists, and then yell at us for not stopping, because apparently making sure no cars are coming is all they can handle. You can wear a helmet, use hand signals, ring your bell, and do anything you want to make yourself feel safe, but at the end of the day, you’re on a tiny metal frame surrounded by things that are faster and stronger than you, and that may or may not even be aware of you. It’s nerve-wracking to say the least, and the more you bike, the greater the odds that you’ll be hit. When you bike every day, it’s almost inevitable.

I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of cyclists try to have it both ways, thinking that taking the environmental and social high ground excludes them from those troublesome “traffic laws.” I’ve seen cyclists go through stop signs and cross walks, going down one-way streets the wrong way, and the worst one, hopping onto the sidewalk when the street isn’t accommodating enough. I can’t excuse their behaviour, other than saying that those people are bad cyclists, in the same way someone coming to a rolling stop at a stop sign is a bad driver. We all do it because we believe it’s safe to do so, but that’s where the big distinction between cars and bikes lies; how safe it is to be bad at it.

If I hit a pedestrian or cyclist on my bike, we’ll both go sprawling and get up with scrapes and cuts and a lot of swear words that I would deserve. Even if I hit a parked car, I’d merely splat against it like Wile E. Coyote and bruise my ego worse than my body. But if a car hits me, I’m dead. Period. I know that, and I bike the way I do in order to minimize the chances of that happening. All that goes out the window if car drivers only pay attention to each other. If you point a gun at me, it would be foolish for me not to get out of the way, but it would be insane for you to start firing without knowing what you might hit. If you’re behind the wheel of a car, it’s your responsibility to make sure that car doesn’t hurt anyone, not just the people inside it.

People take their cars personally. Back in May, there was a proposal to close the two-way middle lane on Jarvis St. and open up proper bike lanes. Sounds simple and probably a good idea, but it became a gigantic issue for political reasons that I still don’t understand, and combined with the (gasp!) expansion of plans for public transit and pedestrian paths, newspapers proclaimed a “war on cars” as if fewer cars on the streets is somehow a Bad Thing. Cities all over the world are starting to re-think how people navigate their cities, and accommodating them; look at what New York is doing, and then think about how ridiculous it is for Toronto to say it can’t spare five kilometers of one lane on one street for bikes.

(Meanwhile, the council quietly rejected a proposal to add bike lanes to Bloor St., one of the busiest and most vital streets in the city that has to handle way more bikes and cars than Jarvis ever will.)

Part of me hopes that an isolated incident of a drunken cyclist doesn’t become a political issue that the cycling community holds up as an example of how dangerous the streets are. This tragedy wasn’t caused by a lack of bike lanes on Bloor; it was caused by alcohol, ego, and a competition for road space that goes way beyond what vehicle you drive. But Toronto badly needs to do something for the increasing number of cyclists, and if this is what motivates change, then I suppose I can’t complain.

cycling, toronto