What caused Roger Williams to plow his truck into a formation of disciplined, experienced riders on a bright, sunny autumn morning, I wonder. I broach the subject with Sheila, suggesting that Williams’ brief, appalling inattentiveness is the kind of blunder that can haunt a man for the rest of his life. She’s obviously heard this kind of empathetic consolation before. “He can sit around, drink a few beers, and have people feel sorry for him. I mean, that’s what he’s going to do. I have no sympathy for him at all. You’re a young guy, twenty-six years old, driving a truck. Pay attention to the road.”
Curnoe loved everything about bikes — the wheels, gears, derailleurs, the riding, speed, testosterone, and camaraderie. I cross-wire this passion with his steadfast anti–US imperialism, and suggest that biking must have been an enviro-political act for him. “O-h n-o-o!” Sheila says. “Greg never talked about the environmental aspect of bicycles at all. I don’t think he ever thought about it. Greg loved cars. He wanted to get a Maserati. When I married him, my mom and dad loaned him their car. He gripped the steering wheel like a maniac, leaning forward with the thrill of it all. He got so many speeding tickets, I said, ‘Greg, we can’t afford this!’”
Curnoe transferred his love of speed to a love of bikes. He forever searched for the perfect flat roadway to better his time trial scores, sought out the best equipment, and never, ever, threw anything out. Spent inner tubes, broken derailleurs, a worn-out sprocket could all be raw material for his art. Seven years ago, Sheila’s office replaced the bike workshop on the main floor, but most of Greg’s bikes and all of the various parts and paraphernalia still sit in the basement of the 107-year-old converted lithograph factory. They remain as if time stopped on November 14, 1992.
Two weeks after the accident, Williams was charged with one count of dangerous driving causing death, and five counts of dangerous driving causing bodily harm. The prosecutor measured the distance between the 402 underpass and the point of impact on Highway 2. He was convinced he could show that Williams had taken his eyes off the road for as long as thirty seconds, which justified elevating the charge from careless to dangerous driving. A conviction on the lesser charge carried a maximum penalty of six months in jail, a $1,000 fine, and a two-year driving suspension. Dangerous driving carried a maximum prison term of fourteen years.
When the trial finally opened in January of 1994, however, evidence demonstrated that Williams was sober and in control of a mechanically sound vehicle, and that he bore no malice. He said he’d been distracted by the glare from the sun and the flooding. The prosecutor pointed out in his final address that the highway at that point was straight and flat, visibility was first rate, and the thirteen riders looked “like a 45-foot multicoloured snake wearing every colour of the rainbow moving down the road.” Williams’ lawyer said there was no doubt that his client was responsible, but not criminally responsible, which is what the charges claimed. The trial took four days, and after five hours of deliberation the jury acquitted Williams of all six charges. Sheila Curnoe (along with riders Dale Nichol and Jorn Pedersen) pursued Williams in a civil trial suit, and won. The money was nice, but it merely papered over the hole in the family’s life. “There’s this empty space,” Sheila said a year later.
switching to glide
The bicycle, according to scholar Donald Zaldin, revolutionized nineteenth-century culture. Its progenitor was the two-wheeled velocipede, invented in 1817 by Germany’s Baron Karl von Drais. The velocipede looked like a bike, but it had no crankshaft or drive train. The rider was propelled along by foot power alone. Then, sometime in the mid-1860s, a French metalworker figured out how to add a crankshaft. Two decades later, in 1885, England’s John Kemp Starley attached gears to the rear wheel instead of the front. Three years later, John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish veterinarian, improved pneumatic tires and introduced the smooth ride. Suddenly, anyone, rich or poor, young or old, could travel beyond his or her immediate surroundings at no extra cost and with little wear on the body. The past century has seen numerous design upgrades and innovations — the three-speed Raleigh, the ten-speed derailleur, the mountain bike, the hybrid — but the concept remains the same.
And that concept’s irreducible nut is the body defying gravity. Riding is governed by physics, specifically by torque-induced precession. Gravity causes a stationary bike to fall over, but applying torque — using the legs and feet to push down on two pedals attached to a crank — changes the equation. The drive train transfers the rider’s energy directly into movement. The wheels turn and stay upright, and torque allows 182 pounds of human tissue to move on two flimsy pieces of rubber filled with air.
The thinner the bicycle’s frame, the less wind resistance, and aerodynamics only increases efficiency; leaning over the handlebars, especially going downhill, reduces drag and boosts speed. Spoked wheels are almost as strong as solid ones, at a fraction of the weight. Using a derailleur, a transmission system invented by the French in the late nineteenth century, the rider easily switches the chain to a smaller sprocket and — voila! — more torque, more distance in less time. As the rider increases cadence — the number of revolutions per minute — he injects pure power, especially in higher gear ratios. The work is hard but satisfying.
insects and beasts
Lawrence of Arabia, masochist that he was, reportedly searched for the steepest hills to climb, and once he reached the summit he’d walk the bike down. He was hardly alone in this apparent self-sacrifice. Asked why he put himself through gruelling punishment in preparation for races, seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong said, “I didn’t do it for pleasure. I did it for pain.” The Dutch novelist Tim Krabbé, known for his psychological thriller The Vanishing but also a one-time racer, elaborated on this embrace of physical misery. In his novel/memoir The Rider, he wrote: “Velvet pillows, safari parks, sunglasses: people have become woolly mice. They still have bodies that can walk for five days and four nights through a desert of snow, without food, but they accept praise for having taken a one-hour bicycle ride.” An acquaintance of mine, Shauna Gillies-Smith, told me that when she was in labour she almost gave birth before leaving for the hospital. So inured to heightened pain from competitive riding, she hardly noticed her contractions.
Because of torque-induced precession, most riders don’t have to go to these extremes. Generally, we lay back and enjoy the glide. Bikes are up to five times more efficient than walking. “Cycling is probably the most sustainable of all transport modes,” say Rutgers researchers John Pucher and Ralph Buehler in their 2005 study of Canadian cycling patterns, “producing virtually no pollution of any kind and requiring no non-renewable energy resources at all.” All very well, and there are more riders on Canadian roads than ever, but our numbers are puny compared to Europe’s. In Copenhagen, city officials estimate that a solid and very respectable one-third of commuters use the bike. In Canada — with Victoria in the lead at about 5 percent and Toronto lagging way behind at 1 percent — for every two-wheeled insect buzzing around on pedal power, there are sixty-one sleek, fast-moving, fuel-injected four-wheeled animals on the road.
There is some momentum in urban Canada for mass engagement with the freedom of cycling, but it has to be tempered by the law of the urban jungle. The four-wheeled beasts are stronger than the two-wheeled insects, and sometimes insects hit the windshield. In 1984, there were 126 cycling fatalities in Canada. Since then, despite the lack of mandatory laws for adults in all jurisdictions, increased helmet use appears to have reduced the number of head injuries, and government awareness campaigns have convinced many drivers to watch out for cyclists. By 2002, the number of deaths dwindled to sixty-three, and cycling injuries fell from 11,391 to 7,596. These encouraging results are borne out anecdotally by a neighbour. He tells me that in his twenty years of bike commuting, he’s noticed a change in drivers. Intersections are still treacherous — riders never know when drivers will speed ahead and hang a right on them — but most drivers now understand that cyclists are part of the road.
Still, when you consider that vehicles cause nearly 90 percent of fatal cycling accidents, riders must maintain a healthy respect for the beasts. Gillies-Smith, a Canadian landscape architect now working and raising a family in Boston, and until recently a competitive cyclist (she twice won the Canadian Cyclocross Championship and was ranked in the top ten on the much larger American circuit) says, “In a car, there’s a real disassociation with the world. There is this belief — although almost every driver hits a cyclist by accident — that bicycles don’t belong on the road.” When drivers are protected inside a hull, invincibility is an illusion easily achieved. “When I ride in the city,” Gillies-Smith says, “I’m extraordinarily cautious. I don’t take risks. I really, really back off.”
drivers on the storm
Drivers can be the victims of bad luck or bad driving as well, but for riders it’s the lack of armour that counts. And once in a while, a story comes along to throw an icy shroud around every rider’s heart.
On Canada Day 2000, Frank Groves set out on his usual early-morning ride. He headed southeast on Elliott Street in sleepy Brampton, a suburban enclave thirty kilometres northwest of Toronto. The recently retired Northern Telecom employee was an avid cyclist who liked to get going around 5 a.m. At sixty-five, he kept himself in good shape, either biking or swimming every day.
Elliott Street was without traffic, except for one car, a stolen Dodge Shadow. It was moving fast and, unbeknownst to the silently gliding Groves, bearing down on him. Just before Craig Street, the drunken driver spotted the bike, and aimed his vehicle for its skinny rear wheel. He plowed into Groves, propelling the rider’s body over the Shadow’s hood. Groves smacked the windshield, then fell away from the speeding vehicle. He was killed instantly. Police told reporters the bike remained trapped under the chassis and scraped the road for 700 metres. The car was found on Frederick Street, less than a kilometre from the hit and run. Stymied by construction equipment blocking his path, the driver had abandoned it.
The police appealed to the public for clues about the death, but nothing was revealed. Then, about ten months later, they caught up with twenty-two-year-old Jeffrey Campbell in a Niagara Falls motel room, planning a home invasion. At the trial, the court heard that the young man had smirked as he knocked Groves into the windshield, and laughed while watching television news reports of the homicide the following day. Campbell has displayed no remorse and has since been declared a dangerous offender, after achieving Bernardo/ Olson- like numbers on clinical tests. His behaviour affirms every rider’s instinct that in the urban jungle the car is king, and a heavy, four-wheeled object can — and sometimes will — eradicate a light, two-wheeled one.
the right hook
Mayhem involving vehicles and riders is typically more banal, the carnage mostly attributable to repetitive patterns that could easily be stopped. On October 31, 2005, Ryan Carriere, a thirty-one-year-old postal worker and budding cartoonist, was heading home early in the afternoon after finishing his route. He was planning a barbecue dinner before taking his two daughters out trick-or-treating. He never made it. At the intersection of Gladstone Avenue and Queen Street West in Toronto, Carriere caught the right hook. He was sucked underneath a truck’s wheels and crushed to death. Apparently, that stretch of Queen around Dufferin Street — with a train overpass immediately east of the lights — is known to city officials. Apparently, it has been slated for improvement. Apparently, a discussion has been going on for a decade about making side guards mandatory for trucks.
I call Darren Stehr, spokesperson for Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists. He refers me to a document called “A Report of Cycling Fatalities in Toronto 1986–1998” by regional coroner W. J. Lucas. Under the heading “Large Vehicles and Bikes,” recommendation 15 asks Transport Canada to “investigate the feasibility of requiring ‘side guards’ for large trucks, trailers and buses operated in urban areas to prevent pedestrians and cyclists being run over by the rear wheels in collisions with these large vehicles... ” Lucas’s report was issued a decade ago, and riders like Carriere still aren’t bouncing away from the right hook; they’re being dragged under. In Europe, side guards on trucks are standard.
cycle paths and psychopaths
Along one-way cobblestone canal paths, on dedicated bicycle highways, and sharing the roadway with cars, there are tens of thousands of cyclists in Amsterdam. They get their very own traffic lights — with bicycle icons lighting up red or green — in the central core. Dutch city bikes tend to be clunky: hard to lift, uncomfortable to ride over long distances, and forcing riders to sit too far back. (No one in North America would dream of riding such a bike.) But they’re solid, the tires are large, and they don’t break down — in short, they’re perfect for city riding. Couples lazily ride to dinner, formally dressed in suit and gown, he pedalling (usually) and she sitting on the baggage rack. Moms and dads transport kids the same way. No one wears a helmet. Down at Central Station, the confluence of lanes makes the Arc de Triomphe traffic circle in Paris look like the idyll of Manhattan’s Central Park. Amsterdam is inner-city kinetic energy at its finest.
H-i-i-i-i-s-s-s-s-s... a middle-aged woman admonishes a walker for dallying on her bike highway. She’s one of the ones who have taken up cycling later in life, the government’s social engineering having successfully pushed bikes as a way for people, women in particular — Surinamese émigrés and Dutch citizens alike — to become more independent and mobile. She’s learned the rules of the Amsterdam system to the letter, and her message is, don’t get in my way.
