Happy Bike Week!

In classic Toronto fashion, the wizards at City Hall have managed to organize Bike Week to coincide almost exactly with a massive crackdown on cyclists. People all over the city (including me) were nabbed for various traffic infractions.

Most of them richly deserve it, and I’m all for better behaviour on the part of bikers and drivers alike, but it is so typical of our passive-aggressive nature in this city that something as honest and earnest as a celebration of cycling can be so instantly tarnished by a pea-brained shock-and-awe campaign on the cyclists themselves.

It left the road full of angry cyclists and vindictive motorists alike. Yay Bike Week! Raise a sport bottle of bile!

I’d feel better if I heard one story of a fine being levied on a single jackass motorist who brained a cyclist because or she is too lazy to check before hopping out of the car. If I could give tickets for that, I’d be giving out at least a dozen a day.

Anyway, lest this end up another in a long string of utterly meaningless city initiatives that are enforced for about 48 hours, crassly harvested for their PR potential, then left for dead in the gutter, I thought I’d post the current road rules for cyclists.

Note that the fines are out of date/inaccurate; I guess everyone was too busy planning Bike Week/Operation Two-Wheels-Bad to actually, you know, do their jobs. Or maybe it was the provincial government’s fault again. Or the Feds. Or the Department of Homeland Security. Honestly, does it matter?