Cycling to work way of future in Halifax?

Chronicle Herald

LEZLIE LOWE

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Getting butts on bike seats?

It’s the raison d’etre for HRM Bike Week, on through June 6.

Bike Week entices Haligonians onto their cycles using a well-worn technique: rewards.

There are complimentary pancake breakfasts for bike commuters, free while-you-wait bike tune-ups, plus bowling, yoga, harbour kayaking and parties — all gratis.

Bike Week is a honkin’ good time, but it’s more. It’s a rare opportunity to celebrate being a cyclist in a city where hills, narrow streets and jerk drivers make biking a slog.

But if we want the effects to stick, we need a HRM Bike YEAR.

It’ll take that to shift this fanciful festival from a week-long huzzah to a serious effort at ridding our streets of the scourge of cars.

Yup. I said it.

Get cars off Halifax roads.

Highways? They’re made for vehicles, for the swift, long-distance transportation of goods and people. Country roads? I understand why folks in, say, Malay Falls need cars to get to the grocery store.

But city streets?

They’re for people — pedestrians and wheelchair users, skateboard-commuting tax lawyers and children biking to school. Electric bikes? Yup. Vespas? Fine. Buses? For sure. Motorcycles? Hmmmaybe. But vehicles? Uh-uh.

I’m not talking a ban. People with mobility issues need door-to-door transfer, kitty litter is too heavy to hump home in a backpack and trucks need to deliver goods downtown. No one’s getting rid of her car here. But vehicles should be the exception, not the carbon-belching rule on city streets.

Yeah, I hear the scoffing.

Heck, I can hear it all the way from Toronto, where, on May 18, Ontario MPP Cheri DiNovo introduced a private member’s bill that would require drivers travelling 50 kilometres an hour or slower to leave a metre between their cars and cyclists. At faster speeds, DiNovo wants a bigger gap.

The bill has been through first reading and is unlikely to pass — one metre, drivers say, is extreme.

Think a metre is radical? Consider the lengths we’ve gone to organizing our cities around cars (and by no coincidence, our political systems around the exploitation of and dependence on oil). One metre for a bike doesn’t seem like such a big whoop.

But bills like DiNovo’s — and community events like Bike Week, in which 4,000 Haligonians participated last year — can spark big changes in people’s perspectives on the place of bikes in our society.

How?

We start small, by celebrating bikes and demanding drivers give cyclists enough space on roads. (Gotta slow down for a bike? Suck it up.) We clamour for more bike lanes and encourage people to take stock of the difference between needing to drive and wanting to drive.

We push for better transit. And bike racks. And public showers, where bike commuters can clean up (the new Seaport Farmers’ Market will have one). Then? As gas prices climb, we enact restrictions on vehicles in some parts of the city.

Over time, cars are no longer the norm.

And where does it leave us?

Broke, frankly.

The businesses supporting Bike Week, like Mountain Equipment Co-op, Java Blend Coffee Roasters and Bowlarama, can’t pony up pancake breakfasts and discounted espresso and free bowling for cyclists forever. The city can’t give bikers free bus rides and fund better transit at the same time.

The slow death of the car also means less federal gas tax infrastructure money, $63 million of which has come our way since 2005. Talk of the city licensing bikes won’t make up that kind of cash.

Does that mean drastically fewer cars and many more bikes on the roads spells the end of the world?

Considering greenhouse gas levels from automobile use? Considering obesity rates? Considering air quality? Considering how sweet it is to get to work using your power?

No, actually.

Our reliance on cars and our single-commuter culture sound more like the end of the world.

But for now, start small: pancake breakfast anyone?