Bike theft on the rise again, say Toronto cyclists

Nadia Hosseinzadeh's bike was stolen downtown just hours after she bought it. (Vince Talotta/The Toronto Star)

When she walked into a bike shop earlier this month, Nadia Hosseinzadeh’s eyes were drawn to a shiny blue Schwinn mountain bike and its handy front basket.

But less than four hours later, her flashy new ride caught the attention of a thief, who promptly cut her cable lock and stole the $300 bike.

How I stopped worrying and learned to love the trailer

When I bought a MEC kid’s bike trailer last year to carry my young daughter around, I didn’t think I’d be hauling it to and from work every day. But after a few weeks, not only was I used to it, but I most days I’m actually glad to have it.

In the early spring, I was still able to park the trailer inside my daughter’s daycare each morning; there was a reasonable amount of space and evidently I was the only person commuting with a trailer in the fairly crappy weather.

But one beautiful afternoon it all came to an end. When I arrived at the daycare, there were four trailers just inside the entrance, prompting a new ‘no trailer’ rule.

So I had to decide whether to lock it up outside each day or just ride it back and forth to work. I decided to try out the latter option for a while, because there was no cover outside the daycare and I didn’t relish the idea of picking it up on those soaking wet days.

Having been at it now for a few weeks, here’s why I’ve come to like it.

Exercise

If it wasn’t for cycling, I would get almost no exercise at all most days, so my daily ride is a life-saver. Now, this is a little like the ‘you should hit yourself repeatedly with a hammer because it feels good when you stop’ argument, but I’m getting even more exercise with that trailer — it’s the equivalent of jogging with leg weights on.

Not that this doesn’t become a bit of a drag now and then, particularly when I’m pedaling into a head-wind or struggling up one of the hills in my neighbourhood at the end of a long day, but it’s a small price to pay to get legs like Curt Harnett (plus a little PhotoShop work).

Storage

I usually don’t have a lot of time between leaving work and picking up my daughter from daycare, so if there’s shopping to be done I have to do it en route. But as most cyclists know, a couple bags of milk and a box of cereal can fill up a backpack pretty fast. But you won’t believe what you can get inside a trailer. I recently cycled home with some beer, wine, cat food, toilet paper and some produce tucked into the back. (I did have to drop these items off before picking up my daughter. But the rear compartment holds a lot of stuff even with a child in the front.) On another occasion I stopped at the hardware store to pick up a large container of deck wash and two long brushes. Try that with a panier.

And there’s the locking potential. I’ve stopped at the grocery store many times only to find no available lock racks. When this happens, I just lock my bike to the trailer with a cable and U lock. I wouldn’t leave it overnight like this on Spadina or anything, but I just can’t see somebody trying to make off with a bike and trailer locked together.

Enforced prudence

A trailer can also be a good way to keep your wilder side in check. Like sailing off curbs at top speed? Or zipping through intersections or parking lots? Not with a trailer you won’t. Let’s just say that a trailer helps you avoid temptation.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

We all know that the relationship between cyclists and drivers can be a bit heated, but drivers seem to cut you a lot more slack when you’re pulling a trailer. This is hardly surprising, since they presumably infer (correctly, most of the time) that there’s a child inside.

Either way, it’s nice to see cars giving you a little more room or slowing down a little more before passing you.

It’s nice to travel lighter on days when I don’t have to drop my daughter off. On the other days, I’m more than making the best of it.

It's all green lights for cyclists in this California city

Is this device a way for cars and bikes to live in peace and harmony?

A city in California is aiming to encourage people to ride their bikes by using "military-developed technology," which detects a bike approaching a traffic light and keeps the light green.

Bicycle Film Fest returns to Toronto - Aug. 10-13

The Bicycle Film Fest is returning to Toronto next week with a slew of films, art shows, discussions and parties. 

The films, mostly shorts, will be screened Friday and Saturday at The Royal (608 College St.), with an art show at The Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen St. W.) and after parties at The Horseshoe Tavern (370 Queen St. W.), Bike Pirates DIY space (1292 Bloor St. W.) and the Hard Luck Bar

For a full festival schedule, visit the website.

The films come from all across the world, including a few local shorts, and explore a wide range of bicycling endeavours, from the whimsical and absurd, to the political and spiritual. The festival includes a film about Leslie Slowley -- a.k.a. The Backwards Rider, well known on Queen St. W. -- whom the Star wrote about last month. Director Ben Lenzner's 8-minute film on Slowley explores the man's "life and riding style."

One of the most intriguing aspects of the festival is a panel discussion on Aug. 10, moderated by Yvonne Bambrick, entitled "Building Bridges: How to tell good stories and win over non-cyclists at a dinner party.” With all the heated rhetoric around bike lanes and various wars on various vehicles, there has perhaps never been a more important time to hone these skills.

The festival, which travels to 28 cities around the world, is in its fifth year in Toronto. From the website: "Brendt Barbur, Founding Festival Director, was compelled to start the Bicycle Film Festival when he was hit by a bus while riding his bike in New York City. He insisted on turning his negative experience into a positive one. In 2001 Barbur started the Bicycle Film Festival as a platform to celebrate the bicycle through music, art and, of course, film."

One way to deal with bike lane bandits

As we reported in this blog yesterday, the mayor of Vilius, Lithuania staged a photo op to show his commitment to illegally parked cars in his city.

We thought you'd like to see the stills from the photo shoot, so you can linger over every shot.

Because you know this would never, ever happen in Toronto where police are rigourous -- rigourous -- in their enforcement of blocked cycling lanes.

Arturas Zuokas, 43, the mayor of the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, with his tank.(AFP/Getty Images)

So much for the Mercedes S-class...

Now, back to reality.

Lithuanian mayor runs over car parked in bike lane - with a tank!

Check out the video, courtesy of www.grist.org.

Of course it's staged, but a powerful statement nevertheless.

...  I'd settle for a simple ticket for all offenders on Toronto's streets.

 

The War of the Worlds, Toronto cycling edition

Can you spot the Alien Lunatics? They will be the ones approaching the barrier on Martin Goodman Trail at top speeds from opposite directions, with no humanoid fears of death or dismemberment. (Jake Lakey/Toronto Star File Photo)

Contrary to popular belief, Toronto does not have a war between pedestrians and cyclists.

Nor does Toronto have a war between cyclists and the drivers of motor vehicles.

What Toronto has is a war between Carbon-Based Life Forms and Alien Lunatics.

The aliens — whose ranks include representatives from all three categories of traveller — seem to be winning.

This is unfortunate, because the extraterrestrials among us appear to have little or no understanding of the physical, emotional, or legal properties that govern life on Planet Earth.

They have no clear concept of momentum or gravity, for example, no notion of caution or fear, no ability to anticipate the future, no capacity for empathy, no inkling of the law.

They also seem to be colour blind, unable to distinguish between red and green.

But what do you expect? They are alien lunatics.

(Metaphor alert: Nothing in this article should be taken to mean that Toronto streets are literally being attacked by actual invaders from space. All depictions of aliens in this article are purely figurative — we’re talking about idiot commuters. Try to remain calm and do not call 911. Now, back to our story.)

You will encounter hundreds of alien lunatics on the roads of this city practically every day. They dress and comport themselves as if they were human. Most of the time, you can barely tell the difference — as long as they are standing still.

The trouble starts when they begin to move.

There should be a law against that, and maybe one day there will be, but we’re not there yet.

When alien lunatics begin to move, they expose themselves as what they really are — creatures from some distant solar system sent here to take control of our roads, to cause us grievous bodily harm, and to make it seem that we — pedestrians, cyclists, motorists — are at war with each other.

But we’re not.

The conflict on Toronto’s roads does not pit different modes of conveyance. It pits people with a perceptible brainwave pattern against witless idiots from outer space.

Sometimes the idiots take aim at each other. (Why? Because they’re idiots.)

Consider the Martin Goodman trail stretching west from Bathurst St. along the lake shore.

At intersections along the way, municipal workers have installed metal barriers ostensibly designed to encourage cyclists, in-line skaters, joggers, and other users of the trail to take care at these locations.

They would be wise to do so because there is not really enough space for two travellers proceeding in opposite directions to negotiate the barriers at the same time without dismembering each other.

To avoid such a fate, one traveller or the other — preferably both — needs to conduct a critical velocity-reduction manoeuvre known on Earth as “slowing down.”

That way, they can proceed through the narrow opening one at a time, an arrangement known hereabouts as “taking turns.”

But extraterrestrials do not seem to grasp this notion.

Instead, they approach each other at top speed from opposite directions, racing wildly toward the barrier in a desperate if completely irrational game of chicken, fully expecting that the other party will wimp out first, or else they’ll both be killed in a heart-stopping, bone-crushing collision of flesh, Spandex, and metal.

Whatever.

Some cyclists invariably do wimp out. (Guilty.) Others do not.

This is a sure way of distinguishing Carbon-Based Life Forms from Alien Lunatics.

The CBLFs have a sense of their own mortality — not to mention the mortality of others.

ALs seem to lack this appreciation.

Alien Lunatics also drive cars and love to amuse themselves with playful little procedures such as sneaking up behind an unwitting cyclist before suddenly gunning the engine and roaring past, close enough to the bicycle so that if it strayed from its path by even a few centimetres, the rider would be knocked over and quite possibly killed.

Alien motorists do not seem to understand that a cyclist’s first reaction, when alarmed, is to tense up, or that a bicycle’s first response, when its rider tenses up, is to wobble, perhaps uncontrollably.

Or maybe they do understand. Maybe that’s why alien motorists aim their vehicles so close to cyclists in the first place. In outer space, they probably treat dead Earthlings as trophies. They probably mount their stuffed remains above the kryptonite mantel and tell interminable tales about the good old days of hunting Earth-dwellers in an exotic killing zone called Toronto.

Yes, it is a war out there — a war between sane, sentient creatures, who would recognize Margaret Atwood if they passed her on the street, and psychotic trophy-hunters from a parallel universe, who would not.

Which brings us to pedestrians. They can be trouble, too, especially if they happen to be lobotomized hiking enthusiasts from Alpha Centauri.

They jaywalk. They cross against the lights. They fail to look both ways. They shake their webbed fists at law-abiding terrestrial cyclists and motorists for failing to cede the entirety of the road.

They are the problem — they and their fellow aliens, whether stumbling with their children along the streetcar tracks, careening along the sidewalk on their bicycles, or drag-racing on Jarvis St. in their parents’ cars.

We have seen the enemy — and he is from Pluto.

-Oakland Ross, Feature Writer