travel

By Kathy Sinclair

GABRIOLA ISLAND, BC - There I was, near the harbour city of Nanaimo on a brilliantly sunny Saturday morning in mid-August with my fully loaded bicycle. I’d escaped the big city the night before to visit family and then spent two nights camping with a friend on Gabriola Island. The plan was to meet at Nanaimo Harbour that afternoon, then catch the ferry to Gulf Island paradise.

I said goodbye to my family and took account of my gear. Sleeping bag? Check. Camp stove? Yep. And then, a mere three hours before our planned rendezvous, I got the phone call: my friend had fallen ill and wasn’t going to make it. I hung up, took a deep breath and pushed aside a surge of anger and disappointment. No problem; I would camp alone.

Then I remembered my friend was supposed to bring the tent.

A little over two years ago Paris launched the most ambitious bike-sharing initiative in the world. In true Parisian fashion, it was audacious, stylish and modern while retaining a bit of old-world charm. Dubbed Velib, the system includes 20,600 bicycles and 1,451 stations, which translates into the outstanding statistic of a bicycle possibly being available every 300 meters.

The program has changed the way people get around in the city and indeed the face of Paris itself. Over 53 million trips have been taken on Velib bicycles since 2007. Other cities, including Montreal, San Francisco and Boston are looking to it as a model on which to base their own bike-sharing systems (Paris copied a system first tired in Lyon, France, but did it on such a scale that it seems to have become the de facto creator).

Last week I was in Paris and decided to see for myself how well the system was working after two years, and what could be expected as cities in North America try to share.

by Rob Rao

When I accepted an editorial co-op position at Harbour Publishing in tiny Madeira Park, an old logging and fishing community turning into early retirement and summer homes located about thirty kilometres past Sechelt on the upper Sunshine Coast, one of my first realizations was oh no, this is it… I have to get a car. Exploring for the first time, and in all seriousness, the feasibility of living in a camper van and the notion of a completely mobile life, I quickly recognized the truth, deep in my heart, that I was not quite the type of person who particularly enjoyed wondering where I would be taking my showers every morning. And while the question of whether to finally procure a vehicle (having never own a car of my own) eventually resolved itself with the very generous loan of a family-sized sedan by my employer, I resolved at the same time that I wasn’t going to entirely coast along that particular gas-fuelled path, either, even if I could (sorta) afford it.