In the middle of the journey of my life, I am--as always--a woman on a bike. Although I do not know where this road will lead, the way is not lost, for I have arrived here. And I am on my bicycle, again.
I don't know whether Robert "Bicycle Bob" Silverman, about whom I wrote yesterday, uttered the title of this post. It's not hard to imagine that he did--le peinture n'est pas une infrastructure--when he was campaigning for the safe, practical lanes Montreal's cyclists enjoy.
Someone who did say that--in English--was a fellow identified only as "John" in Hertfordshire. He documented a "near miss" in which a driver squeezed him over to the curb.
"John" blames, in part the driver: "Whilst this was telegraphed right from the point when the van signals to turn right, there was a weary inevitability of at least one of the drivers not being able to see beyond the end of their bonnet and creating an easily preventable situation"
While the carelessness or cluelessness of drivers is not news to cyclists in the UK or US, "John" also blames what an editor of road.ccsarcastically calls "a great piece of cycle superhighway." His all-too-close encounter, he says, "demonstrates that poor cycle infrastructure, in this case a narrow lane that disappears just when you need it, can cause more problems than it solves."
He said what I've said--and, what I don't doubt "Bicycle Bob" said: Poorly-conceived, -constructed and -maintained bicycle infrastructure is not only less convenient, but more dangerous, for cyclists and motorists alike, than no infrastructure at all. I have seen too many examples of that here in New York, but too many planners persist in believing that simply painting a few lines on a street will lead to a safer co-existence, or at least a truce, between cyclists and motorists.
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.
This year's Winter Olympics have just ended. I have to admit that I didn't pay as much attention to them as I've paid to Olympiads past, though I haven't been living under a big enough rock to not know about the saga of Kamila Valieva. Whether or not she intentionally took a banned substance, the way her teammates and coach and the Russian sports establishment have treated her is child abuse, pure and simple. That the International Olympic Committee did nothing to prevent her situation from snowballing--and, if they do anything, they're more likely to discipline her than her team, coaches or the relevant Russian organizations--confirms something that I've long known: The IOC is, purely and simply, one of the most corrupt organizations in the world. Even if Valieva's tale of woe hadn't unfolded as it did, the fact that this year's games were awarded to Beijing is, for all sorts of reasons, evidence of how avaricious the IOC is.
(As Harry Shearer reminds us, the Olympics are a movement, and we need one--every day!)
As bad as the IOC is, it has at least one other rival for unscrupulousness in the sports world: the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI). (I'd also put FIFA in the same league, if you will.) The travesty of Lance Armstrong's carrer is, alone, evidence of that. UCI officials seem to react to doping in one of two ways: They look the other way until they can't (that's how they acted in the L.A. farce) or they talk about how they're going to do whatever they keep riders from using banned substances and severely discipline those who did, while making some deal or another that sends the exact opposite message.
Red Bull, to my knowledge, isn't banned by any major sports organization. I've never drunk it myself, but from what I've heard, it gives one of the quickest, most intense, legal bursts of energy. That is probably the reason why it's so often associated, whether through sponsorship or in other ways, with high-intensity sporting events.
Evie Richards at the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup in Alberstadt, 2021
Such was the case with the Mountain Bike World Cup, the sport's premier UCI event. Sponsors are selected by the UCI, as they are at other events under the organization's umbrella. Red Bull is sponsoring this year's edition, as it's sponsored the past ten. I can't help but to see some UCI official winking while making the deal.
Well, this will be the last time for Red Bull. For next year's event, Discovery Sports will be the sponsor. They're part of the Discovery broadcast network, which broadcasts a wide variety of sporting events. I don't fault their work, but, given UCI's history, it's hard not to think that the money involved swayed them--and will give the UCI even less incentive than it (or the IOC or FIFA) to act on its stated commitment to fight doping and other forms of corruption in the sporting events they sanction.
