Why we ride
Kyle E. Mathewson
March 28, 2018
As a young kid, a bike is freedom. A bike is your own path. A bike is your own direction. A bike is a way to get away with friends, explore, learn, discover, fall, and get back up. I grew up in Edmonton, in the west end suburb of Lymburn, where we were allowed to bike on the sidewalks and not the road. We went to school downtown and so biking was never a thought. Our bikes were put away in the winter. We drove everywhere we needed to go in our mini-van.
But some of my best memories as a kid were from biking around with friends, we could go farther and farther from home each year, we could lead the younger kids on trips around the neighbourhood, and even into neighbouring areas. We felt independent, we were explorers. We were racers. We were a bike gang. Older kids had bikes the younger kids wished they could have. But the older kids were becoming bored with their bikes, they wanted something else.
As a teenager, I biked to junior high. This was a new sense of freedom, we could leave at lunch on bikes, I could show-up and lock my bike on the bike rack. My other friends biked, we could bike together to and from school. I remember fondly a large school bike ride in the river valley. This would be my last bike memory for a while, for something happened late in junior high, we all got our drivers licenses. Now cars became that freedom, cars became our directions, our paths. We could go places, visit people, explore hidden parts of Edmonton, pickup friends. Bikes were for kids, cars are for adults, and we wanted to be adults.
My high school was across town, and cars were cool. I’m not sure I biked at all for those three years. Cars were kings at high school. Everyone had cars, everyone drove to school, went off at lunch in their cars, skipped class to drive around, drove to parties, drove to lunch. I couldn’t tell you if there was a bike rack at Ross Shepard High School in those days, but I knew the best places to park. I drove my dad to work and picked up some friends for school. Some of my best times were in cars in high school.
After high school I worked in a pizza place and a kitchen, and started working as a landscaper as well. I biked to some of these jobs, but when I started college at Macewan I took the bus for an hour each day from Lymburn. This was a great time to read, listen to music. It never crossed my mind to try to bike the distance. I once walked home after an exam and it took 3 hours. It was the best commute of my entire two years there. Where I went next would change my life in many ways, including the way I commute.
I moved to Victoria to finish my degree. I followed a girlfriend. The summer before I left I was a landscaper for a family friend. In addition to paying me for my work, he gave me a gift that would greatly impact my future. He gave me a bike. He gave me the bike he had been letting me ride all summer. He gave me freedom, direction, ownership. He gave me my own path. I took the bike to Victoria, where I was lucky to move to one of the most bike friendly cities in north America. I loved it. I began biking to work each day, from downtown up to the campus. At first I would put my bike on the bus, but the bike was often faster than the bus so I got used to commuting the entire way.
As young students we didn’t have money for a car. We took buses and ferries and taxis. I began to get used to riding my bike to most places I needed to be. The strangest was soccer games, all over the southern Vancouver island, I would find the route and bike there. Luckily I play goal keeper so I was never too tired from the biking and in fact it was a good way to clear my mind in the usually anxious times before games.
The University of Victoria was a great place to bike to, and on afternoons I would take the scenic route home around the shoreline. I had fallen in love with biking all over again. I was hooked. Then a graduated, top of my class, and went to graduate school at the University of Illinois, in the small college towns of Champaign-Urbana, stuck in the middle of corn fields. Before I left Victoria, I gave the bike to a good friend from soccer (my most reliable defender on the soccer team). To my knowledge he still rides it to this day. Giving someone a bike is one of the easiest ways to convince them to start riding, and this wouldn’t be the last time I payed the gift of bike forward.
The rural campuses of American universities are fantastic places for young people to learn to bike. The towns are small, everything is close together on campus, and most campuses have quite well developed bike infrastructure. There are always plenty of used bikes. Within a month of moving, I had bought a new road bike on Ebay. I was so excited, I had never had a road bike, and this was my first real purchase of a bike (I was making a lavish below poverty salary as an NSERC fellow). I must have ridden this bike on every street in that town. Biking is so easy that I rarely walked anywhere, I biked to get groceries, to class, to the lab, to parties. Many of my friends in graduate school had cars already, or bought cars once they arrived, and were surprised at my biking everywhere. But I found no need for a car, took buses, trains, or planes off to see new places, and had never felt so free is riding out in corn fields in the middle of southern Illinois, going straight for an hour.
Fixing one’s own bike isn’t necessary, but it sure feels empowering. During my time in Illinois I made very close friends with the proprietors of a used bike shop. When you bike as much as I had learned to, and when you have left religion behind to the extent I had, the mechanic at your used bike shop is the closest thing you have to a rabbi or pastor. They always knew exactly the right thing to fix a noisy crank, and how to tackle difficult problems in life or work. I spent a great deal of time learning to fix my bike for the first time. Fixing your own things is liberating, fixing your own vehicle is even more so. One of the only things I find more meditative than long bike rides is fixing my bike.
While at graduate school in Illinois, I met my wife. Our first date was a bike ride (she didn’t think it was a date). She had a beer holder on her bike. We were fellow Canadian ex-pats, she from Toronto. We biked to each other’s houses. Our first kiss happened after I fixed her bike outside one night. We would have biked to our own wedding had our parents not insisted on driving. It was love at first bike.
I stayed for a fellowship at Illinois while my wife finished graduate school. We moved into her condo. She had a garage, we had 4 bikes in it, then 5. We mountain biked at a nearby river valley, and rode around town together almost daily. Soon we found out we had a baby on the way, and our friends and the bike shop gave us our first bike carriage. I practiced for weeks before the baby was even born, using the cart for groceries, excited to be a bike family.
With our new baby, we resisted the pressure once again to fall into the car lifestyle. We got a car seat and fit it into the bike carriage (poor grad students). People looked at us funny. I rode to work with the baby in a wrap around my chest, people looked at me funny. These are all very normal things in Amsterdam, but in north America, we have been brought up to think that cars are the only safe way to travel. In fact car crashes kill 1.3 million humans each year. One in every 7000 people dies in a car crash each year.
It not like I didn’t enjoy driving. During this time I was going on some of the most epic road trips anyone has ever done. I drove route 66 with a friend, in 36 hours from Chicago to Vegas. I drove 10,000 KM in one month with a rental car. I drove to the florida keys, san diego, montreal, and Tofino. We would drive 16 hours straight to go skiing in Colorado. But I felt no need to have a car living in such a small town, with everything I need a bike ride away. But soon I would move back to Edmonton, a sprawling city with the area of Chicago but with one tenth the people. I would need to get a car. Driving in Edmonton was the only way I knew how to live in Edmonton.
We resisted the pressure to get a car. Hundreds of conversations, “when are you getting a car”. We looked for a place to rent close to work on campus at the University of Alberta, and found an affordable house that was near grocery stores, day cares, transit, and work. We got a bike carriage, and some new bikes for the different terrain in Edmonton. We have a two-car garage, with 12 bikes in it, and plans to get more. We had our second child, and got a bigger bike carriage. Not having a car is so unique in Edmonton that the newspaper ran a story about our family. I want this to change. I want more families to be able to experience life like this. Free, on your own path.
It isn’t always easy. It is cold here, it is snowy here. It is icy here. Some days we walk, some days we ride extra slow. In the winter, with no car, your world shrinks. We say no to parties and events in distant parts of town not serviced by transit. This shrinking is cozy, the Dutch have a word gezellig, the cozy warm feeling you have around family. Without a car in the winter, our life becomes much more gezellig. Every day is like a trip to the ski hill, we gear up, we enjoy the fun snowy trip, and then we cozy up and get warm together as a family. We visit hot tubs, we swim, we invite people over. Some of them drive. We wish they could have a more gezellig winter too.
I have gifted about ten people bikes. I once got my wife a bike on Valentine’s day (with pink streamers). We give people useless gifts almost monthly, but a very inexpensive and unique gift can drastically change people’s lives. My brother sold his car. My graduate students at the university can learn about the city they just moved to with the freedom a bike can afford. I remember my father biked to work when I was younger, before some neck problems and the distance necessitated driving to work instead. I recently bought him an eBike, and he is feeling young again biking the few kilometres to work on some days. It is much easier in good weather due to the conditions in Lessard where he lives. I hope that many people in our suburban neighbourhoods can bike to work, and better infrastructure and year round maintenance will make that a possibility.
Now I see my own kids discovering the freedom that bikes can offer. We never have to convince them to bike. They see us bike, and want to be like us. They see each other bike and want to do it to. They can bike their own directions, they can propel themselves forward. My two-year-old just biked to school for the first time this spring, and was beaming with pride the entire ride, so proud to be like her older brother. The other kids are jealous and wish they too could bike to school. So do I. This is why I have become an advocate for safe separated bike lanes throughout our city.
