A few years ago, I spent an extremely pleasant long weekend in Montréal . What's not to like about a beautiful, diverse city with good food and art where French is spoken?
What made all of that even better? Cycling. La ville aux cent clochers is, simply, one of the best cities for cycling I've encountered. The bike lanes aren't just lines of paint in a street: They're physically separated from the rest of the traffic (although a couple I rode seemed a bit narrow for two-way bicycle traffic) and there seems to be more respect, or at least a better detente , between cyclists and drivers than I've seen in any US locale.
Moreover, the lanes I encountered weren't just paths that suddenly began in one place and just as suddenly ended somewhere else, far from any place else. (Perhaps if I'd spent more time in the city, I might have found such useless paths.) Instead, there are at least a couple of lanes on which you can cross the city, and other lanes are actually useful in getting to and from anywhere you might be or want or need to go. You can even ride a lane to the Jacques Cartier Bridge or other crossings to or from the city, which is on an island.
What I didn't realize was that much of that pleasant, stress-free riding was a result, directly or indirectly, of "Bicycle Bob" Silverman.
In 1975, he co-founded Le Monde à Bicyclette, or Citizens on Bicycles. His choice of the French name was important because he knew that if he were to realize his dream of starting a "velorution " to break the "auto-cracy," he would need to reach beyond his mainly-anglophone circle. Also, he said, the main cycling organization in his province--la Fédération quebecoise de cylotourisme , now known as Vélo-Québec, was focused mainly on recreational cycling.
In the previous paragraph, you might've noticed that Silverman had a penchant for appropriating the rhetoric of political upheval. That was no accident: He identified as a Trotskyite and, in his twenties, lived in Cuba, where he met Che Guevara, before he was deported for distributing anti-Soviet literature. After that, he lived and worked on an Israeli kibutz before
"bouncing around Europe" and falling in love with cycling while riding in France (of course!).
His vocabulary also reflected his flair for the dramatic. Le Monde à Bicyclette staged "die-ins" to protest cyclist deaths--which have since decreased significantly--in the city and province. Silverman and his organization argued that the reason was not, as some claimed, that cyclists were careless or they shouldn't have been cycling in the city in the first place. Rather, he argued that there were too many cars and that their number wouldn't stop growing as long as the city's and province's infrastructure is built around moving them rather than on human interactions and sustainable transportation--and that the bicycle is as viable a mode of transport as any other.
He also led other kinds of demonstrations, like the time he dressed up as Moses* and pretended to part the waters of the St. Lawrence River to lead cyclists across. (Hmm...Maybe this is why he was called a "prophet" of the bicycle-friendly, sustainable city.) Another time, he rolled out a carpet on Boulevard Maisonneuve to press for the group's demand for an east-west cycle route (which now exists) across the city. In yet another action--which got Silverman three days in prison--he and a group of fellow cyclists painted clandestine cycle lanes in the dark of night.
Save for his time in Cuba, Israel and Europe, and the past few years in the Laurentians, Bob Silverman was a lifelong Montreal resident born and raised in the city. His work was therefore not only abstract ideas about sustainability (before that became a widely-used term) or even cycling itself; it was his way of trying to achieve the kind of city he wanted. That, according to Michael Fish, the architect who founded Save Montréal at around the same time Silverman and his friends started Le Monde à Bicyclette. "Nothing since the multiple achievements of Robert Silverman for the rights of cyclists has so affected positively the environment of the region, at almost no public cost," he explained.
He and others want to memorialize Robert Silverman, who passed away at age 87 on Sunday.
Whatever the city does, the next time you ride there (or if you ever get to ride there), thank him.
*—I tried to find a photo of “Bicycle Bob” in Old Testament prophet mode. To this day, my mental image of Moses is Charlton Heston: a result, most likely, of seeing “The Ten Commandments “ every year, on the night before Easter, during my childhood.
