The BC General Election is May 14, 2013. Now is the time to get on the voters’ list, meet the candidates in your electoral district, and let them know that you want to see some action on sustainable transportation, from transit to cycling.
If, like me, you missed last night’s Next Generation Transportation: All Party Forum, you can catch up on the conversation by viewing a summary of the participants’ tweets (thanks SFU Carbon Talks). Don’t forget to also search #bctranspo on Twitter.
On Election Day (and advance voting days), join the BC Cycling Coalition’s Bike to Vote campaign by pedaling to the polls.
Together, we can make transportation an election issue!
Don’t let the headline get you down. Meghan Winters, Health Sciences Professor at SFU, states in the article: “On the whole, consistently studies show the health benefits of walking and cycling far outweigh the health risks of injury. So on the whole, from an individual and public health perspective, cycling and walking should be promoted and encouraged.” The abstract for the study referred to in the article is available on the publisher’s website. If you have a library card, you should be able to access the full text of the article very soon from the Canadian Business and Current Affairs database.
I’m not a fan of fare zones so I was pleased to learn from this blog post that true distance-based pricing will be explored as an option when TransLink conducts a comprehensive fare policy review in the next few years. Also, the picture of the 1958 fare zones is fascinating!
Spacing Vancouver posted Brigitte Patenaude’s A Car-Free Life video today, which features the Bruntlett family. Watch Chris, Melissa, Coralie and Etienne travel around Vancouver on foot, bike and public transit:
You can follow the Bruntletts’ car-free experiences on Melissa’s Velo Family Diaries blog.
Car-free travel in Japan is wonderful and easy. I’m certain it’s one of the best places to visit without a car.
Trains
Everything you’ve heard about train travel in Japan is true: it’s fast, punctual, frequent and comfortable. Japan’s trains, including those in the transit systems of the places we visited, were the highlight of our vacation. Our 14-day Japan Rail Passes (about $580 CAD each) were useful for intercity travel and even hopping around Tokyo on the famous Yamanote Line.
We zipped between Tokyo, Nagano, Nagoya, Kyoto and Hiroshima using the super-fast Shinkansen bullet trains, which easily exceeded our expectations. Zooming from Hiroshima to Tokyo (800 km) in a mere five hours is impressive, and puts to shame Amtrak’s eight hour travel time between Vancouver and Portland (500 km).
Even the train station architecture is amazing in some places. Kyoto Station is a marvel from top to bottom, so much so that we decided to have our anniversary dinner there. We found a quiet corner on an upper level of the station, and we munched on takeout while enjoying a perfect view of the orange and blue lights of nearby Kyoto Tower.
Trains within cities, particularly the legendary ones in Tokyo, were easy to navigate and often very fast and frequent. Taras Grescoe’s chapter on Tokyo in Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile is the perfect introduction to the city’s transit system and helped me to appreciate the astounding flow of people at busy stations like Shinjuku and Shibuya.
Walking
We wandered around cities using a combination of transit and walking, which is an ideal way to explore. Walking seems safe thanks to thoughtful pedestrian crossings, separate facilities (such as the many car-free walkways in Tokyo), and quiet side streets where vehicles are rare and attentive.
Walking in Japan reveals the joys of serendipity. We got lost. A lot. We learned quickly that it can be very frustrating to find a particular address in parts of Japan. We enjoyed ourselves much more when we let go of searching for specific places and needing to know where we were. Wandering, exploring and discovering were consistently more rewarding.
The bonus of combining walking and transit is that you can never be really lost. Eventually you find a transit stop or station and you can usually at least navigate back to your accommodation from there.
Walking is the best way to experience Japan’s large cities since there is so much to see everywhere, indoors and outdoors. Department stores aren’t just for shopping — if you walk through them you will find food (often on the lower levels), restaurants (often on the upper levels), and maybe even bowling alleys or rooftop gardens. In, over and around transit stations are shops, restaurants, and pachinko parlours.
Japan also reminded me of something very simple that makes it easy to travel car-free: abundant washrooms. I’ve never understood in Vancouver why our transit stations, particularly our new Canada Line stations and Waterfront Station with all its amenities, don’t have public washrooms. There are washrooms everywhere in Japan, and travellers can reliably count on finding them at transit and train stations. It’s a simple thing, but something Vancouver is strangely reluctant to provide unless you consider the often-broken soaking wet automatic toilets in the ad-laden metal boxes adequate.
Cycling
We only rode bicycles on the Shimanami Kaido cycling route (more on this in a future blog post), but we loved observing all the people riding bikes everywhere we travelled in Japan.
The weather was sticky, humid and in the 30s every day, but this didn’t seem to stop anyone from riding their bikes in everyday clothes.
In North America, we often hear that when children enter the picture it will be time to get a car or at least drive more, and Japan showed us that families can stick to bicycles for most of their transportation needs. When I saw a mother with one child in a front seat and one in a back seat on her bicycle, I thought, “right on!” because I don’t see this very often in Vancouver. I soon realized she wasn’t doing anything extraordinary. Over the course of our two-week vacation, we saw many parents (mostly mothers) travelling with multiple children on their bicycles and they didn’t need fancy cargo bikes, trailers, bakfiets or other expensive equipment to do this. Bike shops in Japan sell a variety of bicycles that are already equipped for carrying children.
Japan changed my opinion on sidewalk cycling. Prior to travelling there, I was known for grumbling whenever I would see someone riding their bike on the sidewalk. Now I see that sidewalk cycling can work, even in a busy city like Tokyo, if people pay attention to each other and the cycling is slow.
OTHER HIGHLIGHTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
If you’re planning a trip to Japan, you may be interested in some of the other things we enjoyed:
japan-guide.com – an unbelievably helpful and accurate website, particularly if you’re planning day trips where you need to do some transportation research
I have a confession that I’m afraid to share: I often wear cycling gear when I commute to work and I own a boring hybrid bike that won’t win any beauty contests. For those of you who just gasped, rest assured that other times you’ll usually find me riding my bike in a skirt. All the same, I’m feeling very uncool these days because I sometimes like “gear” and don’t have one of the cute bikes advertised in Momentum Magazine. Apparently, my failings are discouraging the growth of bike riding in Metro Vancouver.
A Cycle Chic movement is trying to take hold in Vancouver and I have reservations about it. In the simplest terms, Cycle Chic, founded in Copenhagen, is “the art of riding bicycles in regular, preferably fashionable, clothes… [it] aims to take back the bike culture by showing how the bicycle once again can be an integral, respectable and feasible transport form, free of sports clothes and gear, and how it can play a vital role in increasing the life quality in cities.” While I strongly support the goals of Cycle Chic, I have a problem with the movement’s shallow emphasis on fashion and style.
The only thing you need to ride a bike is access to a bike. Any bike. We should wear what we want and stop judging other people who are riding bikes. If we want more people to ride bikes in Vancouver, we need to permit individuality. Be comfortable and practical, wear gear if you want to, don a helmet if that’s your choice, ride only in underwear or put on your fanciest suit. Just be yourself on your bike and let others do the same.
Vancouver is not Copenhagen or Amsterdam. Bike riding is increasing in our city and we’re going to develop a bike culture our own way. It will recognize the uniqueness of our history, geography and climate, and it’s going to be remarkable.
