Movin' bikes: the continuing story

Got my first pickup completed this afternoon - all the way out in Barrhaven. It was a lovely classic 80s road bike, ram's horn handles and all. The donor said it had covered hundreds - maybe thousands - of kilometers and was still in great shape. "I just got older and stopped riding it," she said. "It's been in the garage ten years. Isn't that terrible?" But then she'd seen the CBC News spot on Wheels4Refugees and got in touch with them.

So I got it up onto the rack, and strapped down with some of the extra slings and biners I had with me. "Oh, are you a rock climber too?" she asked, and when I said yes she asked if I'd read Into Thin Air. I told her not yet but I'd heard it was really good.

She was getting started on a new phase of her life, she said. On her own and loving it, getting on with the next thing. Donating the bike seemed like the right thing to do. "I'm really glad a piece of my old life can go on and become part of someone else's," she said. And she asked me to thank everyone at Wheels4Refugees for "rolling out the welcome" and helping people get started on a new life. Including her.

So I headed off, keeping an eye on the rack in my rearview to make sure nothing was shifting in flight, and gingerly took the 417 downtown to swing by 350 Sparks and drop it off, along with the bike lock, helmet and lights she had given me as well. 

Pictured here, at the dropoff point. Come on, isn't it lovely? 

Got a couple more to pick up tomorrow and then we're just waiting for more donors. (If you want to donate a bike, get in touch with them and let them know!)

Bike donating update: or, Old Man Winter dissents

After I posted yesterday's blog about donating the tiny bike, in which I mentioned I might need to borrow a bike rack so I can help collect other people's donated bikes, I got a PM on Twitter from one of the folks at Citizens for Safe Cycling, who said she had a spare rack I could borrow. So I swung by her place this afternoon to get it, threw it in the back of my car, retreated to my parking garage to get out of the snowstorm that was getting up a head of steam outside, and mounted it.

Seemed pretty simple, though I've never used a car rack before. There aren't really any individual cradles on it, so the bikes just sort of rest on the posts (and I think I'll have to lower them one more notch, closer to horizontal), but I think I can pad things out with some old T-shirts to wrap the tubes in, and tie things down with some of my climbing slings and a short chunk of rope, because I know at least how to make things pretty secure using slings and rope.

Test run was supposed to be tonight, when I was going to go to Kanata to get a couple of donated bikes. . .

However. Then this happened.

I didn't think the snow looked that bad, but it took me about half an hour to get from Carleton University to Carling. Yeah, that's about a kilometre and a half. The radio was announcing collisions and pileups and cars in the median all over the city, and said the highway (which I was going to need to take) was at a standstill. So I said screw it, turned around, and inched home, stopping to call the donor and tell her I'd have to reschedule. She sounded a little relieved that she didn't have to worry about me on the roads, and I felt better about not forcing anyone to stand in a snowstorm while we loaded a couple of bikes up on the rack.

So, we'll have to reschedule. The bike donation saga continues!

Meanwhile: Seriously, how do people who drive to work stand it? I almost never have to drive at rush hour, or in bad weather. . . it's hellish. Just that half hour of inching slowly down Bronson, getting annoyed at other people trying to budge in front of me, hitting the gas, hitting the brake, hitting the gas, hitting the brake, popping it in neutral to try and flex my clutch foot, listening to the radio announcing, again, all the roads that were slow or stopped -- if I had to do that every day I'd be a wreck.

Wheels4Refugees (bikes are a force for good)

This morning I was going to be in the car anyway giving a friend a lift, so I loaded this tiny little bike into the back and swung by 350 Sparks Street to drop it off at Wheels4Refugees.

I found out about Wheels4Refugees at Spring.Bike.Ottawa (of which more in a future post) and instantly thought of this bike, which I found abandoned in my parking garage last year and picked up because I couldn't just leave it there. It's so cute. It's so tiny. It's so pink and white. The seat says "Magic Dust" on it. It really should have handlebar streamers.

I fixed it up last year thinking I might give it to a friend with a little girl (or a little boy who really likes pink and white), but that never really worked out, and besides - my friends are fine, they can afford to buy tiny bikes for their own daughters. I feel pretty good that this particular tiny bike will go to a kid who's been through hell.



A family arriving in Ottawa fleeing a war zone gets here with nothing. Instead of settling them here with the expectation that they'll have to get a car, Wheels4Refugees wants to give them the option of biking, which saves a lot of money on transportation. It also gives them a chance to get to know their new neighbourhoods that might not happen by car or transit. Kids who have been through traumatic experiences benefit from outdoor play, and some of the kids coming here haven't been able to go outside and play in, literally, years. Now, with bikes and some street-safety training, they can start exploring independently and hopefully gain some confidence and start to recover from what they've been through. Parents can get to work and language classes and other services without having to pay for and navigate transit, or ask their sponsors for rides; older kids can get themselves to school.

You can donate bikes any time at 350 Sparks Street, which used to be a hotel and is now the headquarters for CapitalWelcomes. They also need bike lights, reflectors and bells. I've got some extra inner tubes I may drop off. They'll also take cash donations. If you're keen and have time, they're looking for volunteers to teach cycling skills and help people find safe bike routes, Arabic speakers to help with training and translation, volunteer bike mechanics, and people with cars and racks to help pick up and drop off bikes, (I may not be able to speak Arabic, but I do have a car, so I've signed up for that last one. If you've got a bike rack you can loan me, let's talk.)

Happy International Women's Day!

It's International Women's Day, and for some reason - well, really, for obvious reasons - I'm thinking about bicycles.

Bicycles are quiet, easily overlooked, unassuming heroes in the history of women's independence. I'd never really thought about them as the emblems of freedom that they are until I got into cycling, discovered the late-1800s European cycling craze, and then discovered what its impact was on women. It's hard to do much reading about cycling without coming across Susan B. Anthony's famous quote that bicycling had "done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world."

Check this piece out at annielondonderry.com - Women on Wheels: The Bicycle and the Women’s Movement of the 1890s - for a decent overview.

(I have to add, too, that while I was poking around the 1890s, I discovered that H.G. Wells wrote a novel about bicycling: The Wheels of Chance. It's here on Gutenberg.org for your reading pleasure.)

It wasn't just that bicycles gave women a way to get around independently. They also normalized women - not just labourers but all women - being physically active (and oh, the panic about "bicycle face" and the strains of cycling on the female body). And they paved the way for less restrictive clothing, as women wheelers realized that voluminous skirts were a total pain in the ass and started hitching them up, or giving them up entirely in favour of more practical bloomers. "The bicycle will accomplish more for women's sensible dress than all the reform movements that have ever been waged," said Demerarest's Family Magazine in 1895.

Anyway, there is all that history in Europe, but bikes are also still fulfilling that role all over the world. Bikes are still subversive. 

Just as a couple of examples: apparently, there are laws - patchily applied, but on the books - against women riding bikes in North Korea. I like to think it's because deep down, authoritarians know a woman on a bike is a dangerous woman on some level. And last year, in Yemen, a woman tried to organize an event to encourage more women to ride bicycles in the face of a fuel shortage - women are allowed to bike, by law, but it's still a social taboo. Some people (koff, "men," koff) found the idea of women on bikes so unthinkable that they insisted the photos of the event must be Photoshopped or that the women must actually be men in disguise. 

And in many places a bicycle actually represents a chance for a girl to go to school, or for a woman to run a business. World Vision has a "Donate a Bicycle for a Girl" campaign to provide bikes in countries like India and Cambodia where girls might live too far from school to walk, or the trip might be too dangerous. Bicycles for Humanity does something similar.

So for IWD, it's worth paging through World Bicycle Relief's Women In Motion list: women competitors, entrepreneurs, students, and philanthropists all over the world, all with that one thing in common. . . bikes. Still being subversive, still causing social change, still fostering independence.

Getting a little of my own back

Bank Street in Old Ottawa South is four lanes wide: two lanes of traffic, two of parked cars. If you're on a bike, you stay on high alert, watching for opening doors, watching laneways and driveways for people turning in and out, and having cars skim by you in the traffic lane, pinching you between them and the parked cars.

So I was doing that yesterday, biking along in the door zone in the northbound lane, when I heard a guy in a crappy blue Civic coming up behind me. There was no one in the oncoming lane. This guy, however, was not about to move out of his lane for anything, and he zoomed past me about a foot and a half off my left shoulder, aggressively close. And honked at me as he did, just a little tap, but combined with the way he was driving, I took the honk to mean, "get the hell out of the road."

As I followed him up the street I saw him duck and weave through traffic, just like you might expect. I grumbled to myself that I wasn't running my camera, and that he'd just wrecked my mood - on Winter Bike to Work Day no less. 

Feeling grumpy, I cranked up the hill. But then I realized, at Sunnyside, that I was catching up to him at the red light. There's something satisfying about that: all that dodging and weaving in and out, and the woman on the bike passes you. I filtered up past the line of cars at the light, looked in the window at him, muttered, "What good did all that do you anyway?" and then the light was green. 

Ahead, I had to take the inside lane because of a line of parked cars at the curb. Fortuitously, I was right in front of Aggro Civic. So I signalled, moved left, and took the lane for about a block, right smack in front of him. 

And oh, the revving of engines and the squealing of tires when I finally moved over (in front of the library) and let him pass. Twenty or thirty whole seconds had passed while he was stuck -  oh God oh God - behind a bike.

The thing is, I knew he was an aggressive driver; I was actually doing the safest thing by moving over and taking the lane, but I was very aware that there was a pushy guy at the wheel right behind me who had already honked at me for existing. Pissing that kind of driver off is always risky. You're likely to make them more dangerous. And being even a little confrontational, when the power difference is so huge, takes some guts: car-on-bike road rage is a scary prospect.

But it was also - maybe because it took some courage to do - darn satisfying. 

---

Then, when I mentioned the incident on Twitter, someone accused me of being "petty." "Not a great way to get people on your side," he said.

But every day, I get a half dozen of these microaggressions, from careless, ignorant, or actually hostile drivers. Several times a day, my safety is actively threatened by drivers, just while I'm getting from one place to another. I yell, I honk my horn, I flip them off, the driver continues on their way oblivious or - worse - smirking: "Heh, did you see her jump? Har har." There's very little you can do: you can't catch up to them, and if you provoke a confrontation, well, they're in control of a deadly weapon and you're not. Sue me if, this time, I was a little proud of myself for claiming a bit of my own back. 

To paraphrase Atwood - "drivers are afraid cyclists will inconvenience them; cyclists are afraid drivers will kill them." The longer that goes on, the less interested I am in being nice about my place in the road. It is not fair that my safety should be threatened on an ongoing basis just for moving around in the world. 

I'm also not interested in getting anyone - especially Aggro Civic - "on my side." There's no "side" to be on, there are the rules of the road: which I was obeying. And this guy isn't going to be suddenly convinced that bikes have a right to the road by my cowering out of his way. No one will be convinced that cyclists have a right to the road if all we do is jump out of the way, endangering ourselves in the process of trying, very hard, not to ever ever be in the way of a driver. 

Saying I should have backed down from taking the lane out of some kind of interest in "furthering the cycling cause" is like saying to the suffragettes, "No one likes a shrill woman, can't you be nicer about wanting to vote?"

If cyclists don't get in drivers' way, they're invisible. The assumption that, regardless of the situation, the best thing a cyclist can do to keep the peace is stay out of the way - that assumption is actually dangerous. It puts the cyclist off at the side of the road where she can be ignored by the drivers, it makes cyclist's behaviour less predictable, and it trains the drivers to think whatever happens to a cyclist is her own fault. It also lets drivers continue to forget we exist.

No, that guy didn't learn a lesson. He didn't decide that cyclists are human beings with rights to the road. He was probably confirmed in his opinion that cyclists are stupid, reckless, self-righteous, annoying, deserve to be run over. I don't actually care. He didn't gun it dangerously past me in a narrow lane again, and his own impatience got him all upset and angry. My work here is done.

MadMaxification

One of the advantages of riding a cheap mountain bike is that I feel like I have all kinds of license to add shit to it. Pretty much from the time I put two Beamer headlights from MEC on the handlebars several years back and realized that two headlights are not just brighter than one, they're also cuter (see my profile picture on this blog), I've generally taken up as much space on the handlebars as possible. It doesn't hurt that the cyberpunk fan in me likes the aesthetic of the clobbered-together, wired-up apocalypse-survival vehicle. Some days it helps to feel like you're ready for World War Z.

(On days when I particularly hate every human being behind the wheel of a car, I'm glad you can still access Bob Fishell's Spike Bike stories, which date back to the 80s and which still come flashing into my mind occasionally:

The year is 1998. The Federal Government is the puppet of a consortium of the 20 large corporations which run the country. State and local governments have been completely taken over by real estate developers, whose goal it is to turn America into one giant suburb consisting of subdivisions, apartment complexes, shopping malls, and office parks.Bicycles have been all but outlawed. The Bicycle Act of 1992 made it illegal to appropriate tax dollars for bike lanes, paths, etc., and included a provision that "those persons riding bicycles on public roads do so entirely at their own risk." The law was originally intended to stem the flood of imports of Japanese bikes before foreign trade was cut off entirely in '94.

However, the ramifications of this law were much more serious. If a cyclist were to be injured or killed by a motorist, the motorist could not be prosecuted or even sued. It is open season on cyclists. One man fights back....)

Some of my additions have been more successful: others - like the short-lived half-a-two-litre-Coke-bottle I bolted to the down tube in an attempt at a makeshift front fender - less so.

Right now, I have no room left on my handlebars, what with the gearshifts, two headlights, legally-mandated-but-essentially-useless bell, GoPro camera mount (thinking of moving that, now, because large swathes of the camera's field of vision now have things like headlights in the way), and my latest and proudest addition: a vintage AirZound airhorn.

Gifted to me back in December by a friend who dug it out of her workshop and handed it over in the middle of a solstice party conversation about biking, this little horn is noisy. Really, really noisy. It puts out something like 120 decibels.

Hooked up to what looks like a 500-ml air canister which you can refill with a bike pump and which sits nicely in the bottle holder, it screws on to the handlebars with a quick release clamp. A button on the top of the back end of the horn sets off an ear-piercing blast.

I have to ride with my left hand over the gearshift if I want to keep a thumb on the button through sketchy intersections, but it's worth it. If only because I then go through the intersections almost hoping someone will be a jerk. Because I will blow them off the face of Christmas.

I think I'm even happier that this horn looks pretty vintage compared to the ones on sale out there on the interwebs: adds to the 80's-tribute apocalyptopunk look.

Of course, as soon as you've hooked up an air horn to your bike, you start picturing what else you could put on it if it were legal (and if this really was the Spike Bike dystopia). It didn't take long before friends asked, on my Facebook post about the horn, when I was adding the flamethrower or plasma gun for rush hour. Discussion of the logistics of the flamethrower had another friend suggesting, "Better install it under your seat so it aims backwards and melts bumpers of the tailgaters. Pilot light should be shielded though so it doesn't fry your bottom."

When I told my brother about the horn, he suggested I could hook it up to a generator so it just sounded all the time when I was riding. I could just roll down the street cocooned in a protective cone of deafening noise. Not sure whether that image cracked me up more, or trying to figure out how long it would take before people - Ottawans in particular - complained to someone in authority about the "aggressive, bullying, noisy cyclist."

"Cyclist accused of being ACTUAL menace to the public: news at 11."

The friend who gave me the horn rides motorcycles: her wife suggested a "cow's-tail," which I had never heard of before but which, she explained, is a colourful leather braid, about two or three feet long, that clips to your handlebars with a quick release. If people get too close, you yank the braid free and can whack their windows with it. "Wakes up the texters," she said. "Maaaaaaaaay not be entirely legal though."

So I mentioned my occasional fantasy, of a three-foot-long horizontal stick attached to my back rack, with a spike in the end of it, so people passing too close would key themselves in the process. (Think about it: I'd have damaged their cars, yes: but only because they had, demonstrably, been breaking the law. Yeah, I bet I'd still get sued. Interesting legal conundrum though.) 

Naturally, #ottbike rose to the occasion:

@k8thek8 @auxonic @amazon_syren #prototype #BenHur pic.twitter.com/1X9oWju5ZY

— Timothy Hunt (@timhuntottawa) February 7, 2016

Sure, a flag might be less aggressive, but we're in Spike Bike mode here. (I have also considered the much less confrontational route of marking where a metre from my bike is, on my GoPro, then filming a commute and counting how many people pass inside that distance. Not that I expect any major action from it - like tickets or anything..)

To be a bit more serious, I've found it kind of amazing how many questions I've seen online about whether or not it's legal to put an air horn on a bike. (Hint: if you can buy one at MEC, they're not illegal.) Really, in the Ontario HTA, there aren't many restrictions on what you can attach to a bike: there are more rules about what you must attach: a silly bell, front and rear lights, those "strips of reflective material" that no one but no one actually has on their front and back forks. But the idea that an air horn - essentially, just a noise maker like a bell, but at a volume that will penetrate to the interior of a car and be salient to a driver in the way that a bell, or your shouts, won't be - would be illegal for some reason just speaks to how submissive people think cyclists should be. Don't take up space, don't block traffic, don't make anyone slow down. . . and for heaven's sake don't be as loud as a car.

Tough. Got an air horn: not afraid to use it. Just be glad it's not a flamethrower.

It's good to be back

When I went home for Christmas, it was pretty balmy around here: no snow down, and some nights I didn't even need gloves - in December! But I came back to proper winter conditions. I was all keen to get the bike out for the first snowy rides of the season, but discovered the first day I wheeled it out into the hallway that the brakes were bottoming out on the handlebars, and if I pulled them all the way and pushed the bike, the wheels would still turn. Not so safe.

Being on a clock that day, I sighed, put the bike back into my apartment, and took the damn car. 

And then I had an extremely busy week, with no time to fix the brakes, and I didn't have fenders on the Nakamura anyway, or a rack. . . 

So, what with one thing and another, I didn't get back on the bike until yesterday, when I finally had the time to haul the bike out and make sure it was safe to ride. And then I rode to a meeting that night, and to the rock gym tonight. And it was absolutely great to be back.

Here are the options: I could take the car. Sit in there, stuck in traffic, fighting condensation on the inside and ice on the outside, not clearly able to see around me. Scrape ice and snow off it. Shuffle parking at work, trying to fit three or four cars into one driveway, having to back them in and out. Negotiate snowbanks and slippery, narrow, steep streets where I work. Deal with skids and sketchy instersections, and other drivers. Deal with a freezing steering wheel. Wait for ten minutes in a parking lot with the engine and fan running so the windshield can defrost enough that I can see where I'm going.

Or, I could have 360-degree visibility and the option of getting the hell out of traffic if it starts getting sketchy, never have to scrape ice or brush snow, warm up within minutes of leaving home, park anywhere I damn well please, and get to watch my breath steam in the beam from my headlamp. I can have my heart rate up and lungs taking in cold air. I can have quiet, dark streets at night with that hissing noise under my tires where they're cutting through a thin layer of slush, and the moon overhead.

I'll take option two, thanks.