Cathrin Bradbury: At 69 I tried the e-bike and roamed around Toronto. For folks like me, is it the future?

I rented an e-bike for the month of September — it’s adorably French, teal blue, and compact enough to be mistaken for a regular two-wheeler — so that I could get to Lake Ontario and ride for miles along our Great Lake Waterfront Trail, which can make you feel like you’re in Paris, there’s so much beauty all around. Or maybe I’d head for the new white-and-red Port Lands Bridge, rising lightly like a metal bird, on my way to Cherry Beach. I wanted to hear the waves crash. I wanted an open view. I wanted to connect with a part of the city I’d turned my back on for too long, living in the annex as an aging non-driver.

And I wanted to get there on my own pedal power, with a little more kick to go the distance than my 40-year old Nishiki 12-speed was going to give me.

Clearly, I wasn’t the only one with this idea.

The e-bike explosion began with the coronavirus pandemic, when fleets of mostly young men raced through the streets to make sure our Szechuan noodles were delivered piping hot, or else get docked in pay. Then, they wore the halo of essential workers. Now, as Toronto and other cities around the world scramble to build infrastructure to accommodate them, not so much.

Copenhagen and Amsterdam, with their long-established biking populations, are out in front making room for bikes of all kinds: The Danish capital devotes entire train cars to the mostly e-bike workers commuting into that city. But even car-mad Mexico City, the largest city in North America, has a booming bike-sharing program, and Los Angeles, astonishingly, is planning a car-free Olympic Games. 

“I’ve spent most of my life looking at what other cities are doing and then trying to bring that to Toronto to help make it a better place to get around,” said Kevin McLaughlin, owner of Zygg E-bikes, the shop on Sorauren Avenue where I rented mine. Twenty-five years ago, he introduced car sharing to Toronto via AutoShare; now it’s bike sharing. The place he’s watching currently, as a passionate e-bike supporter, is Paris. “It’s the new Amsterdam.”

Mayor Anne Hidalgo made a statement last March that Paris has made a “major and radical rupture: the end of car-dependence.” Cycling is now said to be more popular than driving in the centre of Paris. Fifty thousand parking spaces have been removed and more than 100 streets have been permanently closed to cars. At the same time, the city added 20,000 bike parking spaces and 700 charging stations for e-bikes. Paris will spend 250 million euros to complete 1,300 kilometres of bike lanes by 2026. Toronto will invest $105 million in 500 kilometres of bike routes by 2030. 

There are all kinds of reasons why we can’t be like Paris, I know that. Our city was built for cars, theirs was not. We’re underserved by public transit, while the vast spider web of the Paris Metro is there to catch all the non-drivers who don’t want to bike. But there are plenty of reasons for us to try. 

I chose Cherry Beach as my first long ride. On the trip there, however, from my home in midtown Toronto — and none of this will be news to anyone navigating the city — I first needed to: withstand the other the bikes, e-bikes, scooters, skateboards, and mopeds ringing for me to give way on the single-lane Bloor Street bike path; veer onto the sidewalk from an unprotected bike lane on College Street to avoid being clipped by a massive black pickup truck (not a working truck, but a style statement driven by a teenage girl); zig into racing traffic on Adelaide Street to bypass the cars and trucks parked in the precious bike lanes; make steady eye contact with drivers who often merely slowed down at stop signs; and dodge jaywalking pedestrians.

A 30ish woman on Sherbourne Street was clearly doing the mental calculation — “old woman, bike, I can beat her” — before she stepped directly in front of me on the protected bike lane. Moving at 25 kmh, my dramatic stop nearly sent me over my handlebars.

I got as far as that pretty Port Lands Bridge on my first shot at the lake, then discovered the Cherry Street bridge was closed. Too daunted to go further, I rode back through the same obstacle course, and found the pedal-assisted ride home was easy on my legs but hard on my heart, which was raging at all the bikers and drivers and pedestrians who’d ruined my ride. I imagined gliding free and easy along the Seine on my French e-bike and became sad about my failed outing.

But McLaughlin, who is 57 and hasn’t owned a car in 30 years, “for environmental and for hassle reasons,” isn’t complaining. “I’m over the moon with where we are in Toronto. I can bike up Bayview in a protected bike lane. I never dreamed that would happen in my lifetime.” He rides his own e-bike 12 months a year, says he never arrives at work “sweaty or tired,” and hopes to covert more Torontonians to the e-bike commute.

His primary Zygg rental customers are couriers, parents who don’t or won’t own cars and want to e-cargo their kids to school, and people over 50 who are coming back to bikes and have more time to ride them. Some have parked their cars, at least in the city, for good, often for environmental reasons; and others just want more assistance as they get older to do the big hills and head out on longer rides.

“It sounds corny”, McLaughlin said, “but what I say is, you’re 15 or 20 years younger on an e-bike.”

Marjorie Nichol has been riding a bike for almost 70 years, and her current bike for 40, same as me. “No one steals it because it’s pink,” she told me on the phone. After she retired as a producer at CBC, she and her husband began to go on long rides, “but at 72 some of the hills were getting bigger.” She tried an e-bike but felt she didn’t get enough exercise, so instead added a motor to her pink model. “I just love it.”

 As a working mother Nichol used to drive her three kids around the city in a minivan, often back and forth to the hospital to treat her son — for asthma. “I’d ask myself, ‘what’s wrong with this picture?’ ” The worst thing you can do for our health and safety is drive a car, said Nichol. “Imagine if all the people making our deliveries were in cars? Every time you see someone on an e-bike they are making the city safer, not more dangerous. I say God bless them every time.”

This is an unconventional view of the safety of biking in Toronto: most older people drive instead of bike because it seems safer, because in a collision with a car it is a cyclist who dies. Of the 30 people who have been killed on our city roads so far in 2024, the CBC reported last week, 12 were pedestrians, eight motorists, four motorcyclists — and six cyclists.  

E-biking is not without risk, but Nichol is right: the solution is fewer and better regulated cars, not fewer bikes. Her switch from mostly driving to mostly biking and then going electric was motivated by environmental considerations, but by happy coincidence “it turned out to be so much more fun than driving.” She described herself as a “super coward” like me, who would never cycle on wide-open thoroughfares like Avenue Road, “even though I live on Avenue Road.”

 In 2019, Nichol and two other women got together to co-found Cycle55+ (you can find them on Facebook) — “just the three of us talking about how we ride.” Holly Reid, another founder, was involved in seniors’ advocacy for better bike lanes. “I’d look around me at the meetings and think, there’s a lot of grey hair under these helmets,” said Reid, herself 67. “We all wanted to feel safe and comfortable on Toronto streets.” Now Cycle55+ organizes about five rides a year to help men and women explore the city by bike.

 “Can I come?” I asked, excited as a kid, but the next ride is after my rental is over. I told Marjorie that I wanted to go far but wasn’t sure of the way. Her answer: “All you need is an attachment for your phone on the front of your bike, and then turn on Google Maps. It’ll change everything.” 

 “Not a cloud in the sky,” I said to myself at 7 a.m. Sunday on the Labour Day weekend. I entered the “Great Lake Waterfront Trail” route on my phone, and then attached it to the new holder on my e-bike handlebars. I folded some Kleenex for the road, to go with a small snack, water, sunglasses, sunscreen, and credit cards. As I sat down to tie my shoelaces, I remembered the years when I would hop on my bike with nothing but my hands and feet to go wherever, for however long. Time changes most things.

As I rode under the blue-domed sky I got to know my e-bike. For all its compactness, it was much heavier — by almost 20 kilograms — than my nimble Nishiki. I averaged about 25 kmh, which was more speed than my physical effort merited. I had the sensation of moving fast and not moving at the same time. I suppose it’s a lot like driving a car. The less work I did, the more I became a passenger.

It was a smooth trip on bike paths all the way to the Great Waterfront Trail and then — so fast, so fun — I was exactly where I wanted to be. On one side was the lake, as far as I could see, and ono the other the beautifully treed waterfront park. I rode beside the lapping waves, grinning my head off, until I got to the wire fence of the massive construction zone that was once Ontario Place. Eating up acres of lakeshore. I managed not let that boondoggle ruin my ride and made my way further west to Sunnyside Beach.

I sat there for a while, looking across the water to see if I could locate my hometown, Grimsby, on the other side. You sometimes can on a clear day, people say. Encouraged by the thrilling speed of the e-bike and the beauty of the day, I decided to go further, up the Humber trail in a loop back home. This would eventually add about 20 km to my ride (I got lost for a while), not something I would have considered sans motor.

  More people were out as I pedaled north. The paths were full of families with dogs and strollers and runners and bikers like me. Most of the e-bikes were bigger and more powerful than my own, but they throttled down on the shared paths. Groups of men my age on regular bikes chatted happily as they peddled past. A girl riding a bike for the first time veered from one side of the path to the other as her father ran behind her with his hand resting on her back. “Looking good,” I said, smiling at her. She stared straight ahead and remained serious. It’s still Toronto.

 One man talking about some legal details on his phone took up the whole path, as did a woman also on her phone a little later, as if the rest of us were intruding on the personal space they’d created on their devices. They were the only two people on my two-hour ride who didn’t make way, as they missed out on the best part of living in our city.

What’s a city but a community of people who’ve chosen to live in proximity with each other, looking out not just for themselves, but fellow citizens. I’m going to try to rage less about who’s clogging the roads and hogging my space and breaking the rules, and instead try to channel my road rage onto the roads themselves, and how we make them more accommodating for everyone, however we get around. I hear Paris has some good ideas.