A sad end to the Yellow Bike’s tale
by Greg Dubé

When Tina Hahn set out to make a film about BikeShare, she thought that she’d be documenting an inspiring community effort to make bicycles more accessible. But her cameras started rolling no sooner than the program announced the end of its six-season run.

With her film in jeopardy, the Gemini-nominated filmmaker decided to take a new direction. She and former BikeShare program manager Maogosha Pyjor set off on a round-the-world journey to learn what makes bike sharing work. The result is Symmetree Media’s “Tales of a Yellow Bike,” slated for upcoming festivals and broadcast on OMNI in English, Spanish and Mandarin.

The Community Bicycle Network’s BikeShare program was by all accounts hugely successful—it garnered local awards and recognition from around the world. Its premise, inspired by a similar initiative in Amsterdam, was also wonderfully simple: to make a fleet of about 150 yellow bikes available to members at hubs scattered around the city. The client base was diverse, including both affluent white urbanites and patients of Toronto’s Centre for Addition and Mental Health.

Hahn doesn’t even try to contain her admiration. “It was a great little program.”

BikeShare’s only stable funding—a small portion of University of Toronto’s student fee, won by referendum—simply wasn’t enough. By 2006, a lack of cash forced the program into hibernation and most of BikeShare’s modest fleet found itself condemned to storage in whatever space was available.

One bike was spared a dusty fate, given new life as Hahn and Pyjor’s travel companion. While “The Lady Klien” was an important symbol, Hahn says her rusted yellow collaborator was a fussy traveller and was even suspected by Colombian authorities of trafficking narcotics.

In their visits to four continents, Hahn, Pyjor and The Lady Klien discovered that successful bike sharing often requires the support of government—but that means more than grant money. Former Bogotá mayor Enrique Peñalosa drew attention to the need for political determination to make transportation democratic and sustainable: “When we talk about cities really we are talking about a way of life... and it’s difficult when you try and change ways of life,” Peñalosa told them.

“To have bikeways or to have infrastructure to protect cyclists is not a cute architectural feature—it’s a right! [T]his is a symbol that a citizen on a $30 bicycle is equally important to someone in a $30,000 car. It shows that this person… is a citizen and not some nuisance on the road.”

“Can you imagine [a politician] in North America saying that?!” Hahn wonders rhetorically.

This isn’t to say that the entirety of our political leadership is unsympathetic to the cause, but promoting a culture of cycling in North America is no easy feat when our cities are desperately cash-strapped. “In Toronto, we have a mayor who’s maybe committed to these environmental things,” Hahn contends, “[but] he’s caught between a rock and hard place because of the finances available to him.”

The resulting shoddy infrastructure means that cycling becomes largely a recreational pursuit for the young, the healthy and the brave. As Hahn points out, there are a lot of people who are afraid to bike here.

Nevertheless, she sees a future where fuel prices, regional population growth and thickening smog will leave us little choice but to take cycling more seriously. Cyclists today, she argues, recognize these emerging issues and are thinking ahead toward the future. As for BikeShare, it’s hard to say what that future holds, but Hahn thinks a more sustainable way to make cycles accessible is helping people build their own, a model in which CBN is currently dabbling.

Still, she’s wistful for the days when communal yellow cycles dotted the roads. “It’s so sad that The Lady Klien’s brothers and sisters won’t be travelling with her around the streets of Toronto.”

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A version of this article appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of dandyhorse (www.dandyhorse.ca)