On A Tour of Toronto

I'm going to complain a lot here, you have been fairly warned.

A nice story, I am sure we all know what being Hung, Drawn and Quartered means. Well actually I suspect most people don't. But anyway the part about being Quartered really disturbs me. You see the traitor would first be hung, not long enough to kill, just long enough to break the larynx so the traitor could not say anything politically unacceptable. Next the traitor is put on a rack and is drawn, that is to say they get stretched, now bone it turns out stretches more than flesh so the flesh rips from the bone and tears apart. The traitor is quartered, that is to say, his arms and legs are chopped off. The traitor's internals are removed and set ablaze while still connected to the brain, at last the heart of the traitor, still beating, is removed held up for the assembled masses to see and it is declared "behold the heart of a traitor". Finally, the traitor's head is chopped off.

I describe the circumstance of the deaths of some of England's finest traitors to give an example, specifically, I would rather be hung drawn and quartered than ride down Kingston Road on a Saturday late morning. (Okay, I'd rather ride down Kingston, but given the choice I'd have to pick none of the above most any day.) I had come up with an ITT route through North Eastern Toronto that avoids Kingston road completely. I had run ITTs since April. Suddenly someone else is running ITTs just North East of the city that require riding up Kingston Road. Oh well, I'd rather do my own thing than go up Kingston, so that's exactly what I did.

Another complaint, I am going to complain about a certain candidate for mayor of Toronto who set up a very large booth at The Taste of The Danforth on Saturday. Rocco Rossi has postulated that bike lanes slow down traffic. Now I have spent a long time today both riding and, ugh, driving. And I can say with some confidence, the reason traffic does not move has nothing to do with bicycles or bike lanes. The reason is a lot more politically, expensive, than blaming cyclists, the reason traffic gets snarled so often? Parked cars. Think about it, a bike lane, heck two lanes, one in each direction, mean hundreds, maybe thousands fewer motorists at the cost of one car lane, the best numbers I have seen is that a multilane limited access expressway can handle a maximum of about 3000 cars per hour. Of course a major signalled arterial road can probably handle only a small fraction of that, perhaps one thousand cars per hour? But how many bikes can stream down a bike lane in an hour? Now a parked car, just one parked car, particularly an illegally parked car, or even better an illegally parked car in a bike lane, can impede all those cars while Franny runs into the Bakery or while Billy is doing his banking. Of course the cyclists lives are endangered and motorists are even more frustrated, then their normal surly SOP, but hey, at least Billy didn't have to park legally, walk around the block and heaven forbid actually take more than ten steps to get to the ATM.

Yes, on today's ride their were cars in the bike lane. Arrrgh!!

None-the-less today's ride was good, I burned hard for two and half hours and when I got home I hurt, in a good way. In a way I'm rather glad I skipped the ITT, my ride, despite the parked cars, was a lot better.

Oh yes, I know, I promised Thi I'd describe the trip home from The Forks of the Credit, no I'd rather not. Ian Wilcox, who came out with me, said the Forks are magical, I think they are beautiful. But I also think that if Thi wants to see what riding in the Forks are like, he's just going to have to come out riding with us there one day.