Anyway, I will post your comment, but I wanted to make a separate note to you because your message touched me and made me feel quite sad. I don’t want you to think in anyway I was judging your father’s cycling skills in my post–in any case I know next to nothing about what happened. I am a member of a Toronto group called Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists (ARC) and as I recall when we held the cyclist’s memorial for your dad (as we do for every cyclist killed on the roads in Toronto) we did try to get in touch with the family, but not sure we were successful.

Like you I have had many close calls on bicycles, and know from first-hand experience that trucks are not safe things to be around on the roads. In fact one of the main things ARC has fought for (with little success, unfortunately) is for Transport Canada to mandate sideguards on trucks, which would prevent a cyclist (or a pedestrian) from being pulled under the wheels of a truck. Who knows, if the truck that killed your father had had a sideguard he might be alive today.

Anyway, Thanks for your comment and again, sorry for any misunderstanding or pain my writing may have caused.

Jake

However, it may be germaine that a google of “Jane Pitfield” gives you BikeToronto’s rating of her among the first five hits. I suggest cyclists are among the most active of the city’s constituents.

A google of “mayor david miller” does not yield anything like the same results. I am not sure what this means.

A couple tv cameras showed up and spent a long time filming us as we waded into the curblane with our banner: “A Cyclist was Killed here last week” and our fluttering candles. Some of us turned on the news that night to see if we made the cut, but it does not appear that we did.

The big news that night was not a gang of unruly mourners standing in the rain, but the two contenders for mayor, David Miller and Jane Pitfield, mugging for their own share of the spotlight in a debate held at the University of Toronto.

Did we mention this collision, the one that killed the cyclist on Eglinton at Leslie, took place in Jane Pitfield’s ward? Did we mention the fact that a simple device guarding the space between the wheels on the truck would likely have spared the cyclist’s life? Did we mention these guards have been mandated for years in Europe, and were specificlly recommended by the Toronto Coroner in a report issued nine years ago?

Yeah, I know we did.

It was shitty, there in the rain at Eglinton and Leslie. But I would rather have been there than sitting cozy in the audience at the mayoral debate. I only wish I could figure out some way to put the issue on the agenda at the next one.

A friend drew up the appropriate scenario:

But if it were a movie, Jimmy Stewart, not M. Ghandi, would lead a peloton of citizen cyclists onto Queens Park Circle. He’d shout, “These are our roads and they aren’t going to take them away from us this time!”. The film’s car wranglers would create automotive chaos in back of the bikes for the cameras as the cops scrambled in front to block their path. A solid cordon of police prevents forward movement then, and Jimmy Stewart cries, “Everyone stick together now and put your bkes down and sit on the road! We haven’t broken any laws, they’ll have to haul us away!”. His best girl pleads with her father the minister of transport and makes him recant his libertarian pro-business past and he immediately drafts a bill requiring sideguards on all rucks. He introduces it to the house, cut to the girl as she bails Jimmy and his mates out of jail and the now friendly cops shake hands with them as they leave.