[URBAN NOTE] On Toronto cyclists

[rfmcdonald]

On the 2nd of August, the Toronto Star featured on its front page an article concerning cyclists who wanted the right to ignore stop signs.

You don't need to be a genius to know that riders of bicycles in this city keep their balance in no end of illegal ways.

They keep moving steadily, for instance, through the four stop signs that decorate the intersection of Beverley and Baldwin Sts. On any given morning you can watch the streams of pedal-powered commuters approaching that four-way stop, most of them rolling downhill to the downtown core, almost all of them treating the four-letter word on the red octagon like an impolite suggestion.

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Most of them, like the woman in the Hollywood-large sunglasses perched atop the of-the-moment army-green folding bike, pause from pedalling to survey the flow while coasting, resuming their rhythm when it's safe to proceed.

Only a very few actually, fully, stop. To obey the Highway Traffic Act to its letter, after all, would be to contravene other statutes.

"There's an unwritten law, the law of preservation of momentum, that all cyclists follow," said Yvonne Bambrick, the executive director of the Toronto Cyclists Union.

On the 3rd of August, the Toronto Star featured this article about memorials to fallen cyclists.

It seems out of place, but to Amanda McKinnie its poignant effect is of utmost importance. The white two-wheeler tells the sad but impassioned story of her husband, Alan Tamane, who was struck and killed by a truck in that location while riding to work in June 2007.

McKinnie said the bicycle, dubbed a "ghost bike," underscores the message that cycling in Toronto is far from safe. She said the pain her family was left to bear has yet to subside and their grief is so deep that she and the couple's four children, aged seven to 15, avoid travelling in that area.

"I do go there on occasions," she said. "We do put flowers there on Father's Day and his birthday."

Ghost bikes, like the one installed to remember the passing of Tamane, can be found on city streets across North America as a way of keeping alive the stories of fallen cyclists, killed during collisions with motor vehicles. Tamane, who was 47, fell prey to such a tragedy on his way to do research at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, where he was based as an immunologist for the pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis.

Irony drenches our late-modern world.