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.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Friday, June 6, 2008
It's all right if it sucks.
One of the things that kept me riding (and sane) throughout the trip was my weekly chat with Roge Blasco.
Roge is the host of two renowned radio shows about travel, La Casa de las Palabras (The House of Words) and Levando Anclas (Hoisting Anchor) on Radio Euskadi, the Basque regional broacasting network. At the end of every week, after 9:30 in the evening, we'd talk for ten or fifteen minutes about how the trip was going. No one in Spain is as up on the movements of travellers as Roge is: you name the means of transport or the country, he knows someone who's been there and done that, but there's always a note of enthusiasm and jealousy when he interviews you. It's like at any moment you expect him to say, "Gimme a couple of hours, and I'll be there..." and for him to slam down the phone and show up at your hotel before sundown.
Yesterday we did a taping for an edition of Levando Anclas which will be broadcast in July, and Roge brought up the fact that a lot of the problems that we had on the trip were weather-related. And I thought about something that I read last week, which makes all the more sense now that I've got some space to reflect on the trip.
CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper is the cover story on this month's edition of OUTSIDE magazine and has been a reader of the magazine for decades. When he was 19, he was inspired by the article to take a trip across Africa, and from there went on to be one of the channel's best-travelled journalists. For copyright reasons I can't clip the particular question and answer that moved me, but if you click here(http://outside.away.com/outside/culture/200805/anderson-cooper-2.html) and do a search for "It's supposed to suck", you'll see which one I mean.
It was a great relief to read this. It was a relief to see someone else say that it was all right if the trip didn't go perfectly, if the weather sucked or you realized that you were generally a lot happier when your travel companion went off on his own and you didn't see him for three days. It was all right to be awake at night, normally at 12:03 AM, obsessing about whether someone was going to steal your bike and leave you stranded in some lost town in Soria. (Funny, I never obsessed about breaking my neck - but the thought that someone would nick Ruby gave me more than one sleepless night.)
And Mr. Cooper is right. You learn a lot more about your own limits and your own sense of possibilities when things don't go perfectly. If you don't have adversity, you don't learn how strong you actually are, how resourceful you are and that it's all right to be alone. A woman travelling alone is not an automatic target for all the evil and crime in the world. As women we receive messages, consciously or unconsciously, that if we go down into the woods today, we're going to end up dead in a ditch somewhere, that we're just asking to be raped or attacked or God knows what. (I should get my mother to fill this part in.)
That doesn't mean that we shouldn't take precautions. But fear has limited value when undertaking something like this. If you're too fearful, everything is going to seem like a threat, rather than just crap that happens to everyone.
You don't get bad weather because you're a woman travelling alone.
You don't get pelted by hail because you're a woman travelling alone.
Sometimes it is going to suck. You just can't take it personally.
You shrug it off, you learn, and you keep your head down and keep going.
Roge is the host of two renowned radio shows about travel, La Casa de las Palabras (The House of Words) and Levando Anclas (Hoisting Anchor) on Radio Euskadi, the Basque regional broacasting network. At the end of every week, after 9:30 in the evening, we'd talk for ten or fifteen minutes about how the trip was going. No one in Spain is as up on the movements of travellers as Roge is: you name the means of transport or the country, he knows someone who's been there and done that, but there's always a note of enthusiasm and jealousy when he interviews you. It's like at any moment you expect him to say, "Gimme a couple of hours, and I'll be there..." and for him to slam down the phone and show up at your hotel before sundown.
Yesterday we did a taping for an edition of Levando Anclas which will be broadcast in July, and Roge brought up the fact that a lot of the problems that we had on the trip were weather-related. And I thought about something that I read last week, which makes all the more sense now that I've got some space to reflect on the trip.
CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper is the cover story on this month's edition of OUTSIDE magazine and has been a reader of the magazine for decades. When he was 19, he was inspired by the article to take a trip across Africa, and from there went on to be one of the channel's best-travelled journalists. For copyright reasons I can't clip the particular question and answer that moved me, but if you click here(http://outside.away.com/outside/culture/200805/anderson-cooper-2.html) and do a search for "It's supposed to suck", you'll see which one I mean.
It was a great relief to read this. It was a relief to see someone else say that it was all right if the trip didn't go perfectly, if the weather sucked or you realized that you were generally a lot happier when your travel companion went off on his own and you didn't see him for three days. It was all right to be awake at night, normally at 12:03 AM, obsessing about whether someone was going to steal your bike and leave you stranded in some lost town in Soria. (Funny, I never obsessed about breaking my neck - but the thought that someone would nick Ruby gave me more than one sleepless night.)
And Mr. Cooper is right. You learn a lot more about your own limits and your own sense of possibilities when things don't go perfectly. If you don't have adversity, you don't learn how strong you actually are, how resourceful you are and that it's all right to be alone. A woman travelling alone is not an automatic target for all the evil and crime in the world. As women we receive messages, consciously or unconsciously, that if we go down into the woods today, we're going to end up dead in a ditch somewhere, that we're just asking to be raped or attacked or God knows what. (I should get my mother to fill this part in.)
That doesn't mean that we shouldn't take precautions. But fear has limited value when undertaking something like this. If you're too fearful, everything is going to seem like a threat, rather than just crap that happens to everyone.
You don't get bad weather because you're a woman travelling alone.
You don't get pelted by hail because you're a woman travelling alone.
Sometimes it is going to suck. You just can't take it personally.
You shrug it off, you learn, and you keep your head down and keep going.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
The Adventure Begins
Well, whatever. Whatever isn't done can be mocked up, ad-libbed, put into order or taken care of at a later date. I got to Chamartín Station without too much difficulty except that the bike, fully packed, is quite heavy, so.........
8:29 - Shortly before the train took off, a guy got on the train with a LeMond ten-speed that had to be a good ten years old. Looks like he's heading up to Ávila. I think he's gonna be disappointed. There's rain in them thar hills. LOTS of rain.
14.17 - Good stuff. Turns out that the train I took DOES go all the way up to Irún, which means that it also goes by Ordizia, where Stuart and Jools live. Hur-RAH, as my host would say. The train going up from Vitoria is full of university students, and quite a number of them are speaking in Euskera, which sounds comforting when they speak it. Now that I just hope that one of them doesn't put his or her bike (all of their bikes are made by Orbea, not surprisingly) against mine, so that I can get off more easily in Ordizia.
I love the Basque Country. Everything's so tidy and orderly up here. And there are so many bidegorris (bicycle lanes), making it easier to get around by bike. Three of the students on this train have brought their bikes and they just fling 'em on the train without any ado - bang! and on they go.
18:33 - If it stays like this for the rest of the weekend, we'll have gotten off lightly, that's for sure. It's a heavy mist, more than anything, and Stuart seems to think that the odds of having an epic, ripping boomer worthy of King Lear is pretty minimal. He said that last weekend they were supposed to get snow and instead they ended up sitting around watching the rugby match in their shirtsleeves. So who knows.
8:29 - Shortly before the train took off, a guy got on the train with a LeMond ten-speed that had to be a good ten years old. Looks like he's heading up to Ávila. I think he's gonna be disappointed. There's rain in them thar hills. LOTS of rain.
14.17 - Good stuff. Turns out that the train I took DOES go all the way up to Irún, which means that it also goes by Ordizia, where Stuart and Jools live. Hur-RAH, as my host would say. The train going up from Vitoria is full of university students, and quite a number of them are speaking in Euskera, which sounds comforting when they speak it. Now that I just hope that one of them doesn't put his or her bike (all of their bikes are made by Orbea, not surprisingly) against mine, so that I can get off more easily in Ordizia.
I love the Basque Country. Everything's so tidy and orderly up here. And there are so many bidegorris (bicycle lanes), making it easier to get around by bike. Three of the students on this train have brought their bikes and they just fling 'em on the train without any ado - bang! and on they go.
18:33 - If it stays like this for the rest of the weekend, we'll have gotten off lightly, that's for sure. It's a heavy mist, more than anything, and Stuart seems to think that the odds of having an epic, ripping boomer worthy of King Lear is pretty minimal. He said that last weekend they were supposed to get snow and instead they ended up sitting around watching the rugby match in their shirtsleeves. So who knows.
Friday, February 8, 2008
How do you know when you're ready to go?
SIGNS THAT YOU NEED TO GO ON YOUR CYCLING VACATION NOW:
a) You live in a 20-square-metre studio apartment and you start thinking, Hm. Rather roomy, this.
b) You've sworn at the noisy neighbors once today. You've sworn at your laptop three dozen times. And it's only two in the afternoon.
b) The manager of your gym complains that you've worn out two static bicycles since Christmas.
d) You're cooking on your Campingaz stove for the sheer hell of it.
e) You're using your camping towel for the sheer hell of it.
f) You find yourself spending far more time than usual in the dried-pasta-and-soup section of the supermarket.
g) You can't find anything wrong with the idea of spreading cream cheese with your index finger.
g) The only clothes you find you wash on a regular basis are black, black, dark brown, washed-out-black-going-to-grey and the occasional red garment (for visibility, natch).
Right, then...what have I missed?
a) You live in a 20-square-metre studio apartment and you start thinking, Hm. Rather roomy, this.
b) You've sworn at the noisy neighbors once today. You've sworn at your laptop three dozen times. And it's only two in the afternoon.
b) The manager of your gym complains that you've worn out two static bicycles since Christmas.
d) You're cooking on your Campingaz stove for the sheer hell of it.
e) You're using your camping towel for the sheer hell of it.
f) You find yourself spending far more time than usual in the dried-pasta-and-soup section of the supermarket.
g) You can't find anything wrong with the idea of spreading cream cheese with your index finger.
g) The only clothes you find you wash on a regular basis are black, black, dark brown, washed-out-black-going-to-grey and the occasional red garment (for visibility, natch).
Right, then...what have I missed?
Sunday, January 20, 2008
A slightly adjusted route
After taking a look at some maps (and as usual, more maps and even more maps), I've decided to tweak the route a bit during the final days going through Andalusia.Originally, we were going to go through Arcos de la Frontera and head down through Medina Sidonia. But, after a bit of reflection, I realized that that presents a couple of problems:
a) It'd mean having to take the A393 regional highway, which is pretty enough, but which can't really be recommended, due to heavy traffic and non-existent shoulder to ride on.
b) We wouldn't get to see Ronda!
So the route's changed a bit. Instead of doing the entire Vía Verde de la Sierra on Sunday, April 20th, we'll backtrack a little bit so that we can head to Setenil de las Bodegas, so that we can visit Acinipo, the Roman settlement that essentially served as the first Ronda. From there, we'll take some back roads and country paths in to the north end of Ronda.
The next day, Monday 21 April, will be a rest day, which will allow participants to take part in some sightseeing, get caught up on e-mail and get some shopping done for the next couple of days. If you've never had the opportunity to visit Ronda, you're in for a treat: it's one of the most atmospheric cities in Spain!
And if you want to stretch your legs even more, go for it: you can take a bus up to Grazalema and bike around the north end of the park, and meet us in Alcalá de los Gazules on Wednesday, April 23rd. This essentially gets us into Tarifa one day later, on Friday the 25th of April, but it's worth it in order to avoid traffic and to enjoy the fabulous views to be had from the south end of the Alcorconales Regional Park.
Saturday, December 22, 2007
12000 and a snowstorm to boot!
Like most North American cities, Ottawa has its fair share of right-on coffee shops inhabited by goateed types banging away on Macintosh notebooks while sipping espresso. Even in the steamy environs of Bridgehead on Bank, Andrew Cameron stood out among the hippies and hipsters. Not because he was, easily, twice as tall as everyone else; but because when he emerged from the snowstorm, he was totally decked out in cycling gear: two Buffs topped by a helmet; a well-loved pair of lobster gloves; about four layers of different tops...and a big smile.
"Cycling in Ottawa in winter is like being able to go on a big mountain bike ride without getting muddy," Andrew laughed, and he would know. This past fall, Andrew had the opportunity to take part in the Tour D'Afrique (http://www.tourdeafrique.com), a twelve thousand, hundred-day-long cycling tour that cuts across the African continent, taking thirty-two cyclists across more than a dozen countries.
I'd found out about Andrew's trip through the Events board on Mountain Equipment Co-op's (http://www.mec.ca) website, and was interested in hearing more about what it's like to take part in such a long trip. Given that Andrew was a racer, not an organizer, of the Tour, most of the information that he could share with me had to do with what it's like to do something like this - useful to know what works and what can be done better.
Thanks, Andrew, for taking the time out to meet with me! And for those of you who'd like to know more about Andrew's trip, be sure to check out his blog at http://12000km.blogspot.com.
"Cycling in Ottawa in winter is like being able to go on a big mountain bike ride without getting muddy," Andrew laughed, and he would know. This past fall, Andrew had the opportunity to take part in the Tour D'Afrique (http://www.tourdeafrique.com), a twelve thousand, hundred-day-long cycling tour that cuts across the African continent, taking thirty-two cyclists across more than a dozen countries.
I'd found out about Andrew's trip through the Events board on Mountain Equipment Co-op's (http://www.mec.ca) website, and was interested in hearing more about what it's like to take part in such a long trip. Given that Andrew was a racer, not an organizer, of the Tour, most of the information that he could share with me had to do with what it's like to do something like this - useful to know what works and what can be done better.
Thanks, Andrew, for taking the time out to meet with me! And for those of you who'd like to know more about Andrew's trip, be sure to check out his blog at http://12000km.blogspot.com.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Ready to roll
Nine-forty-nine in the morning, and I have decided that I'm ready to go.
Not go to the gym, not go back to Canada, just GO and do the damn Trans-Iberian already.
The only thing that's missing is the time off. I have the maps. The GPS unit is on its way. The weather is nippy, but it's not impossible.
All I'd need is some time free, and I'd be ready to roll.
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