The Grass is always greener in someone else's cracked pavement...

Even though I haven't lived in Toronto for nearly ten years, and have no intention whatsoever of returning to live in Canada, I still subscribe to "Cyclometer", the e-newsletter put out by the City of Toronto's municipal cycling department. Stacy, the coordinator, is a wealth of information about cycling and urban mobility policy, and it's inspiring to see the way cycling is taking off in Toronto and other North American cities....

Then, yesterday afternoon, I opened the latest version of "Cyclometer", and saw this:

There are a number of theories for why cycling in Europe is both safer and more popular than in North America. One theory relates to transportation infrastructure: European cities most often feature cycle paths separated from motorized traffic, while Canadian cyclists are more likely to be sharing the road with parked and moving cars. "The relative safety of these two styles of infrastructure has been the subject of much debate among cycling researchers and advocates, but little research," explains Teschke.

Now, to be fair, there is one mention, in the first part of the announcement, that both the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia are going to conduct research into cycling safety in NORTHERN Europe, not Europe as a whole. It strikes me as facile to assume that things are better on this side of the ocean than they are in Vancouver or Toronto or wherever.

I'm not aware, for example, of any European city where cyclists don't have to rely on road riding to get around. In Madrid, we have a decent cyclepath that rings the city, but only two which take you east-west - and both of those are less than a kilometre long. Until the so-called Green Ring was built, Madrid had 60 km of bike trails, and 30 kilometres of those were to take you up out of the city, to the Sierra. Never mind the fact that you needed a car to get to the trailhead. And getting grannies, small dogs and kids off the bike trails? Yet I still get a chorus of "Oh, you live in Spain. What with Contador and Indurain, things must be great for cyclists there." Well, maybe. Contador lives in suburbia and Indurain's Basque. And neither of them use their Treks to get the morning paper, you wanna bet.

I know that things really aren't that better in other cities, either. Reading the CYCLOTHERAPY blog on The Independent's website, for example, doesn't give me the sense that things are much different in London. Julián Illara, the coordinator of Burgos en Bici, recently came back from a cycling conference in Rome and told me of being horrified at ending up on a six-lane motorway during Rome's Critical Mass late last month. Rome cyclists are so pissed off at being marginalized that they have no problem doing what they can to screw up traffic.

If the UN is so worried about climate change, I have an idea: start a Directorate of Alternate Transport. Instead of spending money on allowing the sons of third-world despots to live the high life in Manhattan, let's take some of that dosh and start a library/website/information office/whatever that allows cycling organizations, academic bodies, government organizations or whoever to share information, policy, research, whatever.

But don't let's make the mistake of assuming that eveything that's not where we are is brilliant and good. It's a common enough refrain here... "Oh, but everything is so much easier for cyclists in Amsterdam...in Northern Europe....in Denmark...in Chicago...whatever." It isn't.

It's the same mindgame that makes people assume that if they can't reach perfection, it's not worth the effort to even try in the first place. We all work with what we've got. We can learn from others, but we can't be them.