Author: Bernhard
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In Toronto, where I do most of my biking, bike ridership is growing, but a fully-fledged bike culture has yet to emerge. I mean this in as broad a sense as possible. There are certainly cyclists, and bike scenes, and various cycling-subcultures. But cycling has yet to become fully integrated into the fabric of the…
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Steven Herrick at the Guardian wonders: Why do people make fun of spandex bike clothing? It is a peculiar phenomenon for cyclists. When people find out that I’m “a cyclist” (which is often how I get introduced in social settings by friends), I routinely get asked, “You’re not one of those people who wears tight…
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After struggling for years to come up with a relatively focused topic to write about, I’ve finally stumbled upon one. It was actually pretty easy, I just combined my two favourite things: bicycles and philosophy. So, yeah bicycles are cool, but what’s the point of philosophy? I return to this question periodically at times of…
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Recently the Conference Board of Canada released a study that claims that upwards to 90% of Ontario road costs are covered by drivers. The purported findings of the study were gleefully touted by all major news sources, and if one was careless enough to read appending user-comments, one could expect that they were rife with…
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Like most issues, people engage with transportation mainly in an individualistic way. Hence most “debate” about transportation infrastructure, as in this predictable piece, merely amounts to recounting a set of personal anecdotes such as seeing cyclists riding on sidewalks, without extrapolating any broader insights beyond expressing one’s peevishness. Maybe this is just systemic – people are…
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The insinuation that cyclists do not pay for roads (with the further implication that motorists are paying for cyclists’ use of roads) is a well-worn refrain from motorists who are unenthusiastic, to say the least, about sharing road space with people on bicycles. The main thrust of the cyclists-are-freeloaders argument stems from the notion that…
Velosophe 