Walking

High-fives all around, humanity. You’re familiar, of course, with the terrible story of James Robertson, the Detroit man who walks over twenty miles a day to work at a job that pays $10.55 an hour. A crowdfunding effort has raised nearly $300,000 – that’s Robertson’s take-home pay for a decade, by the way –  to help him get to work.  And now he has a  “team of financial advisors" to help him out. Problem solved!  And here you crazy lefties thought that the problem was the economy we've chosen to have, and the cities we've chosen to design. Ha! Ha! 

In other news, a crowd-sourcing effort is underway to save a drowning polar bear whose ice flow has melted due to climate change. We'll alert you when the polar bear is saved and that problem is solved, too.

#JeSuisCharlie

Feeling more aggrieved than usual, your unbending author interrupts regularly scheduled programing to clear his throat in defense of civilization. 

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Yes, I tweeted #JeSuisCharlie. Yes, I put the hashtag on Facebook. Yes, I even put it on the wipe board on my office door, which isn’t really my office door, hence the “even.”  #JeSuisCharlie is a small thing, but not meaningless, a gesture of solidarity with victims of religious fascism. As someone who makes his living in the world of thought and ideas and written expression, I found the murders at Charlie Hebdo particularly poignant even though far worse acts of violence against innocents were committed elsewhere in the world that week.  Boko Haram murdered several hundred people in the town of Baga around the same time as the Paris shootings, and despite what some people seem to think, I am not ignorant of the one if I care about the other. 

The very minute I saw the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag, I knew that the backlash against it would begin with a couple of days or so. Sniping of the kind I just described was inevitable. Even before the Ice Bucket Challenge (remember that?) reached its zenith last summer people started saying, “Why all the attention about ALS? Don’t people know that heart disease kills more people?” And so on.  If you’re ever giving a eulogy, try that line of reasoning out. “Well, sure, this guy is dead. But, come on. A lot more people than him died this week. Don’t you people care about them? What kind of monsters are you?”  See how that goes over. 

So the backlash against #JeSuisCharlie has taken on a perfectly predictable form and has come from perfectly predictable people, including a number of journalists who make a living writing Op-Eds that wouldn’t make the cut for emergency backup columns on Measure of Doubt.  To those people, I say: just how stupid do you think I am?  Did I anywhere claim that posting #JeSuisCharlie is an act of bravery? That it constitutes a serious blow against religious fascism? That it mitigates the need for vigilance about freedom of expression in my own country? Does it mean that I am unaware or uncaring about other acts of violence, including some committed by the government of France in the past? Does it mean I am not aware of the complexities and nuances of the political, economic, and cultural conflicts that underpin the attacks? Does it mean any of those things about anyone who posted it?  To listen to and read many cranks you’d think so.

There’s another distressing side to this, too, even though it was equally predictable. You wouldn’t think you’d have to defend the idea that people ought not to be murdered for hurting the feelings of the kinds of people who murder people for hurting their feelings, but you do. There are hordes of people saying right now, “Well you poke the bear…” or “I’m against murder, but…” and so forth. We've been listening to that noise since The Satanic Verses pissed off people who never read it. So, here’s the thing. Am I committed to freedom of expression? Yes. Do I understand the nuances and complexities of the statement I just made? Yup, some of them. You can explain the rest to me if you feel the need. But will I post any of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons here? No. Why not? I already told you, and it’s not because I’m afraid of terrorists. 

Commuting

Behold, my friends, the form of self-inflicted brain damage called the rush-hour commute. Is there any single greater waste of time, productivity, and money that our society has imposed upon itself?

Well, my wife and I have rarely had to contend with anything that bad, but we've spent our share of time accomplishing nothing but raising our blood pressure and the global temperature while sitting in an expensive automobile going nowhere. 

So we've made an important decision. This week, we’re getting rid of our car. It’s an experiment. It might fail. I doubt this will be our last car, and we’ll be renting occasionally, too. But there’s no harm in trying it for a while. We're three-quarters of the way there, anyway. In four years we’ve put a paltry 25,000 kilometres on a car that, all told, costs us around $500 per month. 

Still, people look at us like we’re crazy. Getting rid of the car! It’s like we told them we’re getting rid of our heads. Some people have told us that not owning a car is irresponsible: the automotive industry being one of the cornerstones of our economy, after all. And a couple of people have actually gotten angry. Actual anger. The problem, you see, is all that fancy book learnin’ we’ve done. Don’t know what the real world is like.  No common sense. Them degrees are just expensive bits of paper. Can’t see the forest for the trees.  One wonders how we function at all, boneheads that we are.

Speaking of forests and trees, they’re one of our major concerns. I’m convinced that the overwhelming majority of peer reviewed scientific evidence proves that climate change is real, potentially catastrophic, and that human beings are the major contributor to it.  So one way or another, sooner or later, we’re all going to be driving less, or at least driving vehicles that are less polluting. But there I go again, with my fancy-pants evidence-based thinking.

An interesting thing: for millions of people, there is an astonishing invention that offers inexpensive, reliable, emission-free transportation. It can hugely reduce urban traffic congestion if properly utilized. It can even help its operator lose weight. It’s called a bicycle, and in some cities it’s just taken for granted that it’s how huge numbers of people get where they’re going.

My wife and I are bicycle commuters for about nine months out of the year, and in snatches for the winter months, too. We're fortunate to live near bike paths and most mornings can beat the rush-hour traffic to work. People always ask about the rain and cold, but it’s a mild inconvenience next to the stress of the morning commute for drivers. Seriously: when is the last time you enjoyed driving to work? By contrast, our commute is stress-free and nothing quite matches that feeling of smug superiority when you ride up and your colleagues avert your gaze, simultaneously envious of you and humiliated about the hideous state of their own decrepit and decaying carcasses.

The bicycle has been a mature technology for a better part of a century now. This bike might look like a revolution in design but fundamentally it’s not that much different than sometime your grandfather might have owned. And yet there was a time in North America, not long ago, when bicycles were considered something for children and a small number of adult hobbyists. In the last three decades, however, a huge adult bicycle culture has emerged. For a while, the industry floundered around trying to find the right bikes for ordinary people. The bike shops are full of beautiful, featherweight carbon frame bikes that cost thousands of dollars, but for the average person looking to commute those are like buying a Ferrari to go to the mall and back. Thankfully, for a few hundred dollars now you can get a very good commuter bike (and I don’t mean some ten-ton hunk of junk purchased at Canadian Tire) that will suit your needs perfectly.

Now have a look at these. They’re breathtaking, decadent, handmade titanium bikes from a company called Budnitz. They’ll cost you about $8,000. Seriously: have a look. The bike community has its share of snobs and on the message boards these have generated a lot of hate, mostly about the cost. But really it’s just expensive in the way that a luxury car is. Now, I’m not endorsing this particular brand, just using it to illustrate a point: even one of these sumptuous machines, the Rolls Royce of commuter bikes, is actually a pittance compared to what people spend on their cars.

In 2012, the CAA estimated that a car on average costs its owners $10,452 dollars per year – that’s the cost of payments, insurance, gasoline, maintenance, and depreciation factored in.  Consider, too, that after ten years most cars are hunks of junk ready to go to the scrap yard. By contrast, a good bicycle frame will last forever and a day. Maintenance and replacing parts on most commuter bikes will set you back a couple of hundred bucks per year.

So, we have a means of commuting that is cheap, environmentally sound, and makes us healthier: the bicycle. Why do more people not use it? Well, some people just can’t. I get that. It’s hard to haul your tool kit to the job site on your panniers. Or they have kids to get to soccer practice. Or maybe their commute is too long, or it’s just not practicable to show up at work and have to shower and change. And heavy snow is a big obstacle, though perhaps not to these. There are safety issues, because cities don’t often factor cyclists well into their transportation plans. But the biggest problem for people with short commutes is simply a psychological one. They can’t quite imagine getting where they’re going without their cars. But millions of people do, every day. The way I see it: we’re going to do what we’ve mostly been doing anyway, and get paid $500 a month to do it.

Cycling

We’re from London, so Amanda and I spend quite a bit of time in Toronto, which is where the culture is. In fact, I propose that Tourism London should adopt the motto, “London: Just Two More Hours to Toronto.” About the only thing we dislike about the place is the traffic, and anyone who has ever driven on the Gardiner knows the tedium of interminable gridlock on a road that is incongruously called an “expressway”. They will also have fantasized about what it would be like to go hurtling down the Gardiner without any other cars in sight. As I don’t drive, I picture myself on my bicycle, instead. On Saturday, I realized this rather modest dream. Let me explain.

It was on Saturday that me, my wife Amanda, my friend Alison, and her brother Colin (that's us, above) participated in the Ride to Conquer Cancer, a 200 KM bike ride from Toronto to Niagara Falls in support of the Princess Margaret Hospital. We departed the CNE around 8 AM with 3,100 other cyclists, and headed for the Gardiner Expressway, closed for the time being in order to accommodate the riders. About four minutes into ride, Alison and I were side-by-side when we both heard the unmistakable sound of her tire blowing. A flat, after four minutes! We pulled over. Within a few minutes, an official Ride support vehicle arrived, and the ride volunteer, a remarkable fellow named Don Ryan, trailed that day by a CBC news-crew, went through one faulty tube after another trying to get the bike fixed. (An aside: for our first-ever television appearance, Alison and I will be seen wearing form-fitting bicycle shirts and shorts, and I’d like to remind everyone that the camera, as is well known, adds thirty pounds.) After about twenty minutes or so, I was told that I should ride on, while Alison would be taken forward to the first rest stop with her bike in the truck.

I therefore was the last – the very last – of 3,100 riders. I positively hurtled down the Gardiner, propelled by a hefty tailwind and by the sudden and rather terrifying realization that, behind me, they were starting to let cars back on. But for about four or five minutes, it was just me and the empty lanes, and as I left onto Lakeshore (also temporarily closed), it occurred to me that I was experiencing something that very, very few of Toronto's perpetually frustrated commuters ever have. Then the terror started – fast cars re-entering Lakeshore (a vehicle ahead of me was picking up the pylons that they had laid down to demarcate where riders should be), and I actually went through a tunnel with a very considerable dump truck beside me, the driver no doubt puzzled and angry as to what I was doing out there, where no cyclist should be at all.

After another minute of frantic pedaling, a police-car pulled up beside me. The officer said, “You are last. I will be your escort.” Last! Last of 3,100. There was no time for explanations. I felt quite humiliated, and did my best to put in a credible performance for the next fifteen minutes, or as creditable as a rather dumpy middle-aged academic can be expected to put in. So, while I pedaled furiously to catch up with the back of the pack, I was followed by this slow-moving police car, its lights going the whole time, in what bewildered onlookers must have thought was some sort of bicycle-car equivalent of the O.J. Simpson “car chase”.

But it was there, at the back of the pack, that I had my most humbling experiences of the weekend. It was not the gifted competitive cyclists who impressed me the most that weekend (on Sunday, one such rider crossed the finish line in Niagara, then, announcing he was from Hamilton, turned about, and headed back). The people who impressed me most were a variety of differently-abled individuals, at the back of the pack but undaunted. There were no fewer than two one-legged cyclists, and several who were legally blind, accompanied by other cyclists as guides. And there were an assortment of people who did not meet the expected standards of what distance-cyclists ought to be: elderly, riding beaten-up bikes, they nonetheless pressed on, motivated, no doubt, by some personal grievance against the most dread of all diseases.

Those first moments of the first day were frustrating, at times humiliating, at times scary, and above all humbling; the last moments of the first day, as we ascended the Niagara Escarpment at Hamilton in the driving rain, were cold, wet, exhausting, and actually painful. In short, it was everything that a ride against cancer ought to be, and in the many moments that I felt like quitting on that steep, long, and winding hill, I thought of my mother, who never, never did.

Cars

Apart from eight seconds in an ill-fated attempt at snowmobiling when I was about twelve (I hit a tree), I have never in my life operated a motor vehicle. Not a car, truck, van, motorcycle, all-terrain vehicle, or riding lawn motor. As my high-school friends will recall, this fact was the only potential point of personal embarrassment in what was otherwise an ideal social existence, a golden age when my green eyes, thick lustrous hair, athletic frame, and irresistible personal charisma were envied and resented by all males, but proved almost frighteningly alluring to the veritable legions of giddy and twittering females who attended my every move. But the driving thing was hard to get past. "Why doesn't he get his license?" they wondered. It only enhanced my mystique.

Actually, no. It was and sometimes remains a point of dumbfounded disbelief and even, on occasion, real irritation amongst acquaintances and some relatives and in-laws (my friends have long since stopped caring, bless them.) Among my more distant relations, especially, my refusal to get behind the wheel, coupled with my protracted schooling has, I am convinced, led them to the conclusion that I am "simple" or perhaps even a homosexual. On the plus side it has kept me from participating in that most dreary of male bonding rituals: men with beers standing around cars, admiring engines, discussing performance. (Paging Dr. Freud.)

Our society is auto-centric. We build our homes and cities on the supposition that automobile ownership is nearly universal. No invention, not even the telephone or the personal computer, has had such an enormous social and economic impact on our lives as the automobile. By choosing not to drive, I have limited my social life, my choice in accommodations, and even my career options. I have to plan my days much more carefully than people who can hop in the car and go. I cycle, I walk, I take public transportation. I accept rides as a last resort. Identification is a problem, too, since the driver's license is almost always the first kind of ID people ask for when they are required to. Nowadays I get by with my passport and health card (although not long ago a very unpleasant special-collections librarian refused me service because I couldn't provide her with a driver's license) but in my late teens and early twenties I had neither. Consequently, I never set foot in a drinking establishment in my undergraduate years, a point of embarrassment then, but, in retrospect ,a fact that saved me a lot of money, time, and probably my grade-point average as well.

My wife owns a car, but cycles religiously — in three years she has racked up only about 9,000 kilometers on the odometer — and she does the driving when we travel. I admit that this is an inequitable distribution of labour. I attempt to compensate by paying more than my share of the car-related expenditures (it works out to a quite obscene $15 per day, by the way), and I do the navigating, although last summer I experienced the sensation of technological redundancy when we borrowed a GPS for our vacation. Not only did it give better directions than me, it didn't talk back. Amanda considered it an ideal travel companion.

At a certain point — it was in my early thirties, I think — I shrugged and admitted to myself that what I have is a phobia and that it didn't really bother me. As phobias go, it's not very common, but it's not that rare, either, and there are hundreds of websites and support groups devoted to helping people afflicted by a fear of driving. Not a chance. I have to have something to make me stand out from the herd and, besides, just imagine the meetings. "Hi, I'm Graham. I'm a Motorphobe. Sorry I was late, I missed my bus." No thanks. I'd rather join the Oprah Fan Club and get in touch with my inner child.

At any rate, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you. Car accidents have been a fixture of modernity in Canada ever since Father George-Antoine Belcourt rolled his steam wagon at his parish's Saint Jean Baptiste Day picnic in 1866. (How fitting that the owner of Canada's first car also had its first car accident.) Father Belcourt survived, but generally speaking the butcher's bill from automobile accidents is positively staggering. In the past ten years, the number of Americans killed in car accidents was about 425,000 - more than the number of Americans who were killed in World War Two. And people make fun of my phobia. How many people get killed or maimed by chickens?

In Canada, the number of car-related deaths in the same period was 27,000 (it is a curious fact that the United States has nine times Canada's population but about fifteen times the number of automobile fatalities.) Granted, the statistics are getting better as cars get safer and as emergency medical services improve — relative to population they were about four times worse in the 1940s — but amongst teens cars are still the leading cause of death. (I actually knew someone whose father bought her a car for her 16th birthday in order to "keep her safe". On the other hand, he wouldn' t let her light the BBQ. I wonder what the stats are on teenage BBQ-related deaths.)

I don't want to create the impression that the possibility of getting killed is at the root of the issue - as a semi-frequent passenger I'm not much better off. It's more a question of finding the whole exercise far too complicated, with too many independent variables and too little margin of error. It's hard to explain, and I probably could overcome the problem if I were inclined to do so, but it's very low on my list of priorities, especially when I still haven't read Northanger Abbey.

In the last year or so, however, I've noticed that attitudes toward my choice not to drive have been changing. I get fewer furrowed brows and uncomprehending guffaws, and once, not long ago, somebody even said, "good for you." It's not hard to figure out what has brought about this transformation: gas prices are growing by leaps and bounds, and the planet is changing. I'm by no means car free, if you will (I still take buses and accept rides) but my ecological "footprint" is far smaller than most of you despoilers of the Earth. And so, my friends, when the ice caps have melted and the polar bears have drowned and the topsoil has turned to dust and you need scuba gear to visit the Guggenheim, don't come crying to me.