Power to the pedal

Mouths fall agape all up and down Robson Street; it seems the circus has come to town. Women cover their mouths with their hands, stifling laughter and howls. Young men, some on the verge of collapse, pull out their camera phones to capture the moment: 70-odd cyclists are slowly rolling up toward Granville Street, male and female alike, and many of them are naked.

It was difficult to tell if those who partook in the World Naked Bike Ride on June 11 this year were more pro-bike or anti-car, as they were shouting slogans such as "If you love your car, set it free!" The nude pedallers were, however, putting on a distinctive show of a fringe attitude: they refuse to be polite, refuse to make excuses, and refuse to submit to the widespread Battered Cyclist Syndrome.

Vancouver's mainstream cycling culture is, well, all over the place. A proper Tour de Vancouver would have you sharing a coffee with cool-looking downtown bike couriers before comparing rides with the binners headed to United We Can. The Union-Adanac bikeway is full of commuters headed downtown, and up on the Drive you'll find that bike boxes, kiddie carts, and poochie pockets are the bohemian answers to the minivan.

Heading west on 10th Avenue past Main Street to Ontario Street, you'll be distracted on occasion by alterna-hipsters on their art bikes and choppers. Along Southwest Marine Drive, dozens of spandex-clad randonneurs will make you literally eat dust. Once you reach UBC, try to blend in with the students and their skinny road bikes bombing back down the hills, and then drool your heart out over the stylish new cruisers being hawked in Kits. Take the scenic route over the ever-contentious and barely safe Burrard Bridge sidewalk bike lane and you'll arrive in the West End just in time to get rammed by a pair of tourists sharing gelato on a tandem.

You'll soon find that each of the major urban cycling cliques-couriers, cruiser riders, creators, and commuters-can be very one-track-minded, focusing either on fashion or fitness, adrenaline or whimsy. But as disparate in intention and expression as they are, urban cyclists are bound together by a belief in a single power, the power of the individual to propel himself or herself. Plus, parking becomes a nonissue, which is almost worth the added danger.

For experienced cyclists like John McQueen, there's a fine line between being pro-bike and anti-car. A bike courier for 15 years, first in Toronto and now in Vancouver, the 43-year-old was sitting at the corner of Pender and Howe streets last week, waiting for a friend to come get him and his broken bike. McQueen claims to be one of the lucky few full-time working cyclists who never "bails", but most aren't so lucky.

"One of the guys I work with has had five major crashes in the last year and broken all but three of his teeth," he says with a grimace.

Attired in the dark clothes, shoulder-slung satchel, and pen-behind-the-ear look befitting most couriers, the youthful-looking daredevil claims to have developed precise sonar when it comes to navigating the waters of downtown traffic. He knows from experience, for example, that most red lights in the downtown core get run by at least one driver, so he watches for it every time.

"Being cut off happens all the time. People come up behind you and make a right-hand turn right into you, or squeeze you into the curb. Last winter I almost got put into a steel lamppost," he says.

But he no longer gets angry: "It happens so commonly to me, I just ignore it, like water off a duck's back."

McQueen, who used to work retail and office jobs, finds support with his fellow couriers, about 90 percent of whom are male. They are the most honest, hard-working people he knows, kept close by the common bond of the underdog: he refers to the job as "borderline oppression". He's also the happiest he's ever been.

Therein may lie part of the solution to Vancouver's so-called no-fun label: have everyone join a cycling club. Outsiders and recent arrivals, especially those from Toronto, are constantly whining about how unfriendly Vancouverites are and how hard it is to meet people here. Solution: get on a bike and get a move on!

Beverly Penney lives in Yaletown but commutes by cruiser to her job as a stylist with the Barbarella Hair Salon on Main Street. Her three-year-old bike is a fine example of why cycling can be aesthetically appealing. To put it bluntly, she's got a sweet ride.

"That's one of the reasons why I ride it, just because it looks good," she explains during a break inside the salon.

White with pink detailing on the rims, accented with pink and silver "go faster" flames on the seat and frame, Penney's voluptuous Electra cruiser echoes a bygone era when kids played out on the streets and beer was cheap. She bartered haircuts for the three-speed beast with the cruiser court at Denman Cycles.

Cruisers are an older, more fashionable style of bicycle. Although some true vintage 1940s and '50s cruisers will be on display on Sunday (June 26) at the fourth annual Vintage Bicycle Swap Meet and Show at the Cambrian Welsh Hall at 215 East 17th Avenue, most cruisers on the road today are much newer, with West Coast beach-style designs. The "townie", on the other hand, is a recent hybrid recumbent-inspired innovation, finding familiarity with jorg&olif's imported Dutch city bikes. With step-through frames and "flat-foot" positioning, both of these bicycles allow riders to assume an upright posture at all times and easily rest their feet on the pavement without dismounting or leaning.

Cruiser, townie, and Dutch riders will find the style and construction of their bikes much more conducive to wearing suits, skirts, high heels, and other accoutrements from the pre-spandex era.

Most cruiser riders, Penney regretfully asserts, do not wear helmets. Helmets help protect cyclists from themselves. They also make you feel like a dork. Cruiser riders generally don't like the look and feel and have even passed around a petition asking to repeal the mandatory helmet law at one of the recent monthly installments of "Rod's Famous Cruiser Rides".

Penney, who does wear a helmet, regularly goes on cruiser rides either with friends or with the informal cruiser clubs, citing "the social aspect" as a big reason for cycling. I notice a suspiciously beer can-sized beverage holder attached to her cruiser's handlebars.

"Sure, we drink sometimes when we ride our bikes around the seawall at night, but there's no one on the seawall. We've had friends fall off the seawall into the ocean once in a while!" she exclaims with a laugh.

Suddenly the pro-helmet argument gains a little ground.

Penney's biggest fear, though, is getting "doored": having someone in a parked car open a door into her as she coasts by. She's also concerned with drivers who squeeze cyclists into curbs or parked cars. Sometimes she rides on the sidewalk. Though she notices a lot of drivers' disrespect toward cyclists, she isn't quite down with the pro-bike advocacy crowd.

"I think Critical Mass is kind of a hoax. They ride down on Friday nights in the middle of traffic at rush hour, but there's tons of bike paths in this city," Penney explains.

Thanks in part to groups like the Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition, Vancouver keeps gaining ground for bike lanes, but we still lag behind cities such as Seattle and even Calgary in sheer kilometres of bike routes.

As for Critical Mass, it is simply a pro-bicycle movement that arose in San Francisco in 1992 as a pseudo-organized safe ride home. Today, the group rides are more like fast food: cheap and cheerful but a sure-fire artery clogger. Some cyclists feel that Critical Mass is neither cool nor mainstream, but they don't necessarily know that cycling's roots were never cool either; it was a fringe obsession, at best. In the 1890s, some Canadian physicians were convinced that serious cyclists were prone to a variety of chronic injuries and ailments such as "bicycle face", a "peculiar strained, set look" produced by constant tension. The physicians also warned female riders that they risked deforming their pelvic bones in addition to ruining their reputations as "delicate and modest ladies". To think that a man or woman could be their own horse!

Cara Fisher has been her own horse since the 2001 transit strike, when she started attending Critical Mass and other bike events in the city. After attending an early chopper-building workshop hosted by Portland's Chunk666 club, she was hooked. In a recent cycling documentary, a member of Vancouver's Margaret Charles Chopper Collective (to which Fisher now belongs) sums up the group's modus operandi: "We make regular cyclists look normal."

"We're sort of like a freak-bike-art collective. We all pretty much met through Critical Mass. We all had an interest in crazy wackiness and a love of bikes, and so we started to build choppers of all forms. We're all bike geeks and artists," Fisher explains.

Fisher, who has been spotted on occasion sporting a dress made from bike tire tubes, is also the events coordinator for the nonprofit PedalPlay. PedalPlay is the place to go if you want to weld a custom chopper, stacked-frame tallbike, or any other pedal-inspired design. Fisher and her PedalPlay cohorts regularly instill a "creative environmental presence at community events", running pedalling zoos where tiny tots and brave adults alike can safely ride Dr. Seuss-inspired monstrosities.

Fisher's own nerve-racking experiences on the road have shown her not only that drivers can be lazy and careless but also that cyclists need to obey the rules of the road and remain vigilant. She doesn't plan on being one of the thousand or so cyclists injured each year in B.C.

"A lot of drivers feel that cyclists are in the way, and cyclists make them feel unsafe and make them have to pay more attention," she says. "It's sort of like a dual relationship in that sense: maybe they feel the same way about us as we feel about them."

Still, Fisher doesn't back down from inconveniencing drivers once a month at Critical Mass, which she says still draws and empowers a wide cross section of cyclists, with some exceptions.

Hayden Johnston, a 26-year-old double for a young Tom Cruise in shades, has been cycling seriously for 10 years and hasn't once participated in any group rides within the urban arena. On his way from his home near VGH to Granville Island (one of the best places to avoid taking your car), he stopped to chat about his take on cycling culture in Vancouver.

"I don't think it has evolved into a culture yet. I think it's still that a lot of people just enjoy it as a mode of transportation in a city," he says.

Though he admits he is occasionally spooked by those transit buses that choose to dominate, his tactic for avoiding injury seems remarkably passive: "I try to be as safe as possible so that I don't run into conflict with anybody else."

Not being plugged into any of the subcultures of cyclists in town, Johnston rides alone or with select mountain-biking friends and has yet to attend a Critical Mass event. He isn't bothered, though: we haven't achieved a real "critical mass" anyway.

"If you look at Amsterdam or big cities in China, you have fleets of bikers," he explains. "Either we don't have those type of cultures or we don't appreciate bikes that much as a mode of transport."

Cycling in Vancouver, one of the worst Canadian cities in terms of traffic accidents, insurance claims, and pedestrian fatalities, has got to be the ultimate show of vulnerability. The one thing Vancouver cyclists share is the same experience as a gang of acid freaks: a whole host of bad trips.