Request Username
Can't sign in? Forgot your username?
Enter your email address below and we will send you your username
Throughout its history in Toronto, the bicycle’s place on the roads and in public esteem has fluctuated wildly: flaunted as fashionable, disparaged and derided, rescued from looming obscurity, and promoted as a way to respond to the challenges of the day. What is it about the simple bicycle that it can be so loved by some yet despised and detested by others?
Wheeling through Toronto offers a 130-year ride from the 1890s to the present to help answer this question. Albert Koehl, a Toronto lawyer and leading cycling advocate, chronicles the tumultuous history of this mode of transportation from the bicycle craze at the turn of the century, to the rise of the car and the motorway in the 1950s, to the intensifying cry for active transportation in the 1990s and into pandemic times.
In an era of catastrophic climate events, Wheeling through Toronto highlights how the bicycle should be celebrated not only as hope for the future, but also for its affordability, for its contribution to clean and healthy mobility, and because it brings happiness and joy to so many. Drawing on archival materials, newspapers, and personal interviews, and full of fascinating vignettes, this book presents the story of how we got here and what Torontonians need to know as we pedal forward.
Highlighting an important yet often ignored part of Toronto’s transportation story, Wheeling through Toronto chronicles the history of the bicycle and reveals a way forward for a world in climate crisis.
- Imprint: Aevo UTP
- Published: May 2024
- Pages: 400
Albert Koehl, an adjunct law professor at York University, has been an environmental lawyer for non-profit groups and government for thirty years. He is a leader on road safety in the city and a co-founder of Community Bikeways, Bells on Bloor, and a variety of grassroots coalitions. He has represented cycling groups (pro bono) before courts, tribunals, public forums, and at city hall – and was iBike TO’s Cycling Advocate of the Year, TCAT’s Active Transportation Champion, NOW Magazine’s Cycling Hero, and Share the Road’s Wheels of Change award recipient. At home and abroad, Albert has carefully observed the impacts of transportation decision-making on the well-being of communities, social justice, and the health of the planet.