Are Cyclists Against Religious Freedom?

I most recently visited Montréal around this time of year in 2015. My visit spanned a holiday weekend in the US: Columbus/Indigenous People’s’ Day, which just happened to coincide with Canadian Thanksgiving. That weekend, foliage colors were at or near their peak, highlighting the city’s beauty.

Of course, one of the things that made my visit memorable was the cycling.  La ville aux deux cent clochers had a network of protected bike lanes that was not only more extensive, but also seemed to be more practical for transportation cycling, than anything I’d seen in the US up to that time. Best of all, there seemed to be a respect between cyclists, pedestrians and motorists that I rarely, if ever, see in my home country.

Now, however, the sort of fight I thought could happen only in the ‘States might be brewing. It could pit cyclists and the city against…churchgoers.

A few months ago, bike lanes were installed on both sides of rue Terrebonne in the Nôtre Dame de Grace borough, and the previously two-way street became a one-way thoroughfare. That has upset business owners who say that the lanes have taken parking spaces and thus led to a loss of revenue.

But one of the most vigorous complaints has come from Paul Wong, the warden of St. Monica’s church. He claims that church attendance—and donations—have decreased by nearly a third because, as he tells it, parishioners can’t find parking.

Had such a scenario unfolded in the United States, Wong or someone like him might’ve turned it into a “religious freedom” issue. It will be interesting to see whether he can or does that. Canada’s constitution does guarantee freedom of religious expression. I am no scholar of either the U.S. or Canadian Constitution, but I have to wonder whether Canada’s laws could be interpreted in similar ways to US policies. There have been cases in which employees—mainly Muslim—of municipal, provincial and national governments alleged discrimination against them for wearing symbols or sartorial accoutrements of their faith while on the job.

One thing I would never mention to a congregant of any house of worship is that I am an atheist. Can you imagine what visions of a “conspiracy” that might invoke? Oh yeah, that transgender atheist cyclist is trying to keep us from worshipping in the way God wants us to.

This Fix Is A First

The other day I wrote about the obstacles , financial and logistical, that caused BCycle, Houston’s bike sharing network, to shut down.

What was not said—but was, I believe implied—was the difficulty of keeping the bikes running. When share bikes need repairs, they usually are brought to the share network’s central office or shop. That, of course, adds significantly to the amount of time the bike is out of service, especially if the problem needing repair develops in a part of the city far from headquarters.

Photo by Dave Sidaway for the Montreal Gazette 

One bike share program aims to remedy that problem. Bixi, Montréal’s bike share program, is trying what it believes to be a “first,” at least in North America. Yesterday, it opened its first “Carrefour Bixi”: a mini-bike repair shop connected to a larger docking station. It’s located at Parc La Fontaine, where Bixi is especially popular because of its proximity to both the city’s popular tourist attractions and its central business district.

Bixi plans to open several more Carrefours in other areas where Bixi is popular. Those stations will mainly handle small repairs like flat tires or brake and gear adjustments, which account for the majority of repairs.  More serious fixes will continue to be done at Bixi headquarters.

Robert Silverman: A Prophet Of Bicycle-Friendly Cities

 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.