Well, now I'm not sure if I spoke with someone from the Globe & Mail yesterday, or someone from a nefarious right-wing anti-transit group plotting world domination, because there is no sign of the Metropass Affinity Program in today's paper or on their website.
I'm off to meet up with DarrenJ and a guy named Herb today to talk biking and the community-building advantages of websites. Herb is building a great cycling resource for those of us biking Toronto (and Canada!), and I'm dying to link to it, but he's still putting the finishing touches on an already great site, so I'll pull a nugget of gold from the site that helps explain what it is:It is widely known that one of the most important factors in safe cycling is just having large numbers of cyclists around. This principle is "safety in numbers". But having other cyclists around is not just about safety, it is also about building community and creating social interaction.... [this website] lets people organize their own groups for free and provides features that are geared especially to the needs of cyclists. Consider it "bike pooling", like the car pooling websites out there.Darren and I will be giving Herb some feedback today, and I'll link it for you the second he tells me it's okay to do so.
Another aim of this mysterious site (I bet you're all atwitter with curiosity now, right?...) is to facilitate the coincidental and non-coincidental minor "critical masses" that happen around Toronto every day. It happens with cyclists, but also pedestrians too, and is built around the notion of "safety in numbers", kind of like a big buddy system. Haha.
This brings me to a really good article that recently appeared in Maisonneuve about Montreal's misguided attempt to curb jaywalking in Canada's most renowned city for pedestrian "misbehaviour":“It’s really hard to control pedestrian behaviour.” Pedestrians aren’t sheep. They will go where they want, when they want, as long as it’s safe—and in many cases, that involves taking a calculated risk by crossing the street mid-block or against the light. “If it’s safe to cross, they will,” says Pfeiffer. “It’s also about safety in numbers: you’ll get a huge platoon of people crossing [against the light] at the same time and they just assume that a car won’t run down twenty people.It's hell on cyclists, because people don't see someone riding on a bike as a threat, but the cyclist knows that pedestrians are unpredictable. If it helps make our streets more human and less mechanic, then "go, jaywalkers go!"
Discuss this topic and a lot more on the BikingToronto Forum
