Dianne Trottier, a 33-year-old tenacious journalist killed by a hit-and-run driver while crossing the street in her electric chair. CANADIAN PRESS/CBC

While cyclists in Toronto rallied to remember Darcy Allan Sheppard, the cyclist killed after allegedly being dragged along Bloor St.  by a car driven by former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant, another car accident was causing comparative degrees of outrage at the eastern edge of the country…

and this one embodies my worst fear.Toronto resident Dianne Trottier was described as  “feisty” and “outgoing” whether she was chasing down a story as a producer for CBC News: Around the World, or chasing accountability when it came to disability issues. While crossing a crosswalk in Fredericton, New Brunswick on Aug. 29,2009 in her electric wheelchair, she was hit and killed instantly by a hit-and-run driver.

While it has me shaking my head that this senseless tragedy was made worse by a driver who was cowardly enough not to stop and face the music, I found myself knowing full well that this could have just as easily been me. It was a deep-in-the-bones realization.  The type that strikes you in the middle of the night as a single-digit-age kid, when it suddenly dawns on you for the first time that one day, any day, by virtue of the fact that you are a living being, you will die and there is nothing you can do about it. I’d call it a kind of out-of-body chill.

Trottier’s death just reaffirmed something I’ve always felt with some certainty since I moved to Toronto in August 2003. If Vegas odds-makers were taking bets on the circumstances of my death, the line on “Getting Hit by a Car While Navigating a Crosswalk” has got to be 2:1. After all, I’ve had so many close calls already.

I’ve lost count of the number of times a car has turned into the middle of the crosswalk, while I’m half way to the other side and the walk sign is on. So many times I look up only to find some dumbfounded, apologetic driver behind the wheel, while I’m thinking about lodging my cane through his windshield.  What about those times a car has sped through the crosswalk without looking back as I’ve already started my journey. Luckily, they’re close enough to shave the hairs off my chest, but that’s all. Had I been going just a little bit faster, I could have been the next casualty, just like Dianne.

Patience is a virtue, but so few drivers actually use it. Combine that with the fact that scooters  and electric chairs are silent, have low visibility and are lower to the ground than a bike or a pedestrian and you have a wicked recipe for street pizza. Don’t even get me started on what happens in cases where the battery happens to be low on power—that’s when you really start to put your life in God’s hands. Plus, just because cars yield for you on one side of a crosswalk, doesn’t mean cars in oncoming lanes won’t try to overtake them. My friend told me this is illegal, but you wouldn’t know it on Toronto’s streets. What about the guys who force pedestrians to bob and weave between the cars because some driver finds himself parked in the centre of the crosswalk? Some drivers even make it worse by backing up into the car behind them to try and let you through, only to exacerbate things thoroughly.

I’m so afraid, that when crossing the street with able-bodied people, I find myself on the inside lane. I figure the more able-bodied pedestrians I can put between me and oncoming traffic, the better the chances a car will hit them first and their bodies will shield me slightly from impact.  So if you’re walking with me and I let you step off the curb first, it’s probably because I’ve set you up to be my sacrificial lamb in case of emergency.

I learned pretty early on that sometimes survival of the fittest doesn’t necessarily refer to physicality.

While cyclists fight for more bike lanes and respect on Toronto roads, unless something in Toronto traffic changes, the next time you see me I may be splayed out between the yellow lines under a white sheet.

These kinds of problems have been around for years, of course, and the most visible public activism around bikes and cyclists’ rights have been the Critical Mass bike rides, where groups of cyclists take an unplanned route through the city, filling at least one lane of traffic, to prove the point that, as the Critical Mass slogan goes, “We’re not blocking traffic—we are traffic.”

However, Critical Mass has also driven away some cyclists who don’t like the tone of the rhetoric or the behaviour of the participants. One of the Critical Mass refuseniks, Jennifer Watkiss of Vancouver, recently started a new bike ride that aims to be a more polite alternative, called Critical Manners.

The first ride, on August 14, attracted about 100 cyclists. Reviews on the group’s website were generally positive, but not without criticism: Changing traffic lights splintered the mass into several groups, and a varied body of hand signal knowledge resulted in a few close calls when inexperienced cyclists stopped suddenly. The next ride takes place on September 11.

Q&A:

This: What made you want to start Critical Manners in Vancouver?

Jennifer Watkiss: The idea came about for the Vancouver police when the Vancouver Police issued their first-ever warning about a Critical Mass ride, for the July 2009 ride. The June ride had had a number of altercations, they had blocked off one of the major arteries in and out of town, and the July ride was set to come up on a long weekend, being the last Friday of the month. So the VPD issued a warning. I was explaining what the ride was to a friend of mine who had been out of the country for the past ten years, and was wondering what the fuss was all about. I’d always been frustrated with Critical Mass, thought it wasn’t the right thing to represent cyclists in Vancouver and hasn’t been for quite a while. So I was explaining to him what this was, and looking up the origins of Critical Mass found Critical Manners, which started in a similar response in San Francisco in, I believe, 2007. So I thought, wouldn’t that be a nice thing to do, and I figured I’d suggest the idea and, you know, 10 friends would show up, but cyclists in Vancouver really jumped on the cry and started to invite their friends, and pretty soon we had about a hundred people come out for a ride about three weeks ago.

Other than the people who came out to ride, what kind of response have you heard?

Most of the feedback has really come from cyclists who are frustrated with Critical Mass. It’s gotten a reputation for being quite antagonistic, and it’s sort of the most noticeable bike protest in Vancouver. So motorists are frustrated with it, and a lot of other cyclists are frustrated with it because they don’t want to be painted with the Critical Mass brush. Because the general consensus is that Critical Mass riders—or that cyclists, because of Critical Mass—are sort of kamikazes and civil disturbers. The biggest response was from cyclists, and then the media really picked up on it, because with the [VPD’s] announcement to stay out of downtown, a lot of people were really, really offended by that, rightly so, because why should they be held hostage downtown by a couple thousand cyclists who think they should have the right to block off traffic without any sort of plan, one Friday every month, especially considering the level it had gotten to.

What are the differences in terms of the actual ride? How is Critical Manners different from Critical Mass?

This is really about taking a positive action to show that something different can be successful. So there are two core differences: one is that Critical Manners has a planned route. One of the biggest disruptions with Critical Mass is that without a planned route—just the people in the front at any given time decide where to go—it throws off traffic, because no one knows where to avoid. Either you avoid the entire downtown core, or you just kind of cross your fingers that you don’t cross their path. So there’s that one. We always have a planned route, so that if anyone should feel the need to avoid us, they can. It’s also a courtesy to the city, there are lots of events that go on, and we don’t want to clash with film shoots, or other special events that people are planning, or road closures. The other thing is we truly ride as part of traffic. So we don’t take up a whole lane of the road, we ride as you would expect cyclists to ride every day. That’s largely single file: mostly because that’s part of the law in B.C., it’s part of the Motor Vehicle Act that bicycles are not supposed to ride “two abreast”, is the specific wording, and bicycles are to ride as far to the right as is practical. Often that means bike lanes, otherwise it’s to the right hand side of the road, that magic sweet-spot where hopefully you won’t get hit by a door opening in front of you, or crushed by traffic that’s going the same direction.

What we’ve seen in the last week, [with the Darcy Allen Sheppard case] is that the low-level, simmering antagonism between cyclists and motorists has boiled over in the last couple of days. Did you feel the same level of ambient hostility to you, as a cyclist, from motorists before you started doing Critical Manners?

Quite a lot. I’ve commuted almost every way you can think: bike, transit, car, walking, and I know, before I started biking regularly about four years ago, I was one of those drivers who thought, “Ugh, bikes, they’re horrible.” Just as a general sentiment I was willing to paint cyclists with the brush of acting like the laws didn’t apply to them. I’ve certainly felt that same hostility now as a cyclists, despite doing my best to try to ride within the rules of the road, in a safe and respectful manner. And I know other people do too, but there is certainly that low-level antagonism here, and there has been for quite some time. It’s one thing that keeps people from getting into cycling, is they just don’t feel safe. The cycling resources are getting better, but it feels still like “Bikes vs. Cars,” instead of everyone sharing the road. So Critical Manners is certainly a step to try to alleviate that, to put out some respect from cyclists for all road-users, in the hopes that will generate a bit more good feeling from everyone.

Some of the sentiments we’ve heard around here in the last few days are that people don’t want “good feelings”—what they want are hard-enforced laws, better bicycle infrastructure that will make bicycling safety the default rather than the exception on city streets. Critical Mass had always been what people felt was a necessary piece of civil disobedience in order to call attention to these issues. Do you think there’s legitimacy to that?

Absolutely. When the mass rides started, I certainly think they went a long way in drawing attention to cyclists, and saying “We’re out here, and when we get together as a group, we’re not small.” Vancouver, I feel, has gone quite a long way over the past few years, of trying to implement cycling infrastructure. The biggest problem with Critical Mass as it stands right now is that it has gone beyond bike activism and it’s attracted anarchists, basically. I’ve heard the sentiment often that “I love Critical Mass and I love to disturb the peace,” in words that aren’t quite that diplomatic. So there are also a number of cycling organizations that are doing what I think is a correct next step, and Critical Manners certainly follows with them, in saying, “Let’s use the bike resources, or ride as safely within the law as we can,” and when that’s not working, let’s demonstrate that to the city. Our city council right now is quite committed to bike resources, so let’s go out and show them we need new cross-town routes. We have a lot of North-South routes but only one East-West route that’s designated with a bike lane. We need more dedicated bike roads, not just bike lanes. Things like that. The Vancouver Area Cycling Coalition organizes rides to evaluate the current state of bike routes, so they go out and ride and say OK, this route has had a lot of increased traffic over the last little while, it’s less safe for bikes, or if new lights have been put in or not. There’s a lot of work going on in terms of continuously evaluating and improving the cycling infrastructure, and a lot of people don’t see that, because all they see is a mass of beer-drinking, pot-smoking, crazy people on bikes screaming at them.

Cyclists on Bloor Street in Toronto on Tuesday afternoon, memorializing Darcy Allan Sheppard. Photo by Patrick Morrell/CBC.

The chain of events late Monday night that ended in the death of Toronto cyclist Darcy Allan Sheppard—during an altercation with former Ontario MPP Michael Bryant’s car—are terrible and sad to behold. The news spread like wildfire yesterday and the local and national media descended en masse to report every detail.

One such detail (among many) that troubled me was that police volunteered the information that they had had another interaction with Sheppard on Monday. It was unrelated to the night’s events and had nothing to do with cycling nor traffic: the Toronto police had responded to a “noise complaint or a domestic dispute” earlier in the day involving Sheppard and his girlfriend:

Officers had been called to the scene of a domestic dispute on George Street, near Jarvis and Gerrard streets, Monday afternoon, Toronto police said.

“I guess you could say it was concerns of a noise complaint or a domestic dispute. When police arrived on scene, they investigated. There was no indication a criminal offence took place,” Staff Sgt. Kevin Guest told CBC News.

What was the relevance of this information? Why, moreover, were the Toronto police disclosing this information yesterday? No criminal offence, no official report, no charges—just the vague impression of…what? Emotional instability? Irresponsibility? Unsavoury-ness? I can understand a reporter, wanting to leave no stone unturned, asking whether Sheppard was known to police; what I can’t understand is why the police would answer that question, essentially tarnishing the reputation of the victim while the investigation is still going on.

[Photo source]