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Cycling Sophistication

A trip to Europe opened Dutch bike enthusiast Erin Riediger’s eyes to the simple pleasures of a civilized, active and healthy daily commute

By Eva Wasney

It’s a warm and windy day in early September and urban cycling advocate, Erin Riediger, has agreed to spend her lunch hour touring me through a section of her daily commute.

We meet on the sidewalk in front of her east Exchange District office and chat about the route while she unlocks her bike — a simple black cruiser with a touch of superficial rust (or “character,” as she likes to call it).

Riediger, 32, is wearing chic ankle boots and a dusty pink jacket that matches the hue of her bike bag and front tire. She doesn’t look like a cyclist. And that’s the point.

“The Dutch mentality is that you should dress for the destination, not the journey,” she says.

Wearing the trendy office attire of an architect while riding her bike to and from work at Number Ten Architectural Group is a form of everyday advocacy for Riediger, who believes wider representation is necessary for cycling to become a mainstream mode of transportation, rather than a subculture.

From her vantage, the majority of regular cyclists in Winnipeg fall into two main camps: enthusiasts who ride because they like bikes and recreational cyclists who ride for exercise and entertainment.

Like most people, Riediger learned to ride a bike as a kid, but drifted away from cycling as an adult because she didn’t identify with the local scene.

“Some of my friends had faster road bikes and rode with traffic,” she says. “I felt like that was a little risky for me, and it just wasn’t really my personality.”

A post-university trip to Europe in her 20s gave her a new perspective.

“As I travelled around, I saw people in everyday clothes biking, and I thought, ‘That’s kind of cool, I could get into that.’”

She returned home and bought her first “grown-up” bike with the intention of reducing her car dependency. Riediger became a full-time bike commuter and accidental cycling advocate when her 1997 Honda CR-V bit the dust four years ago.

“I decided to just not get it fixed,” she says. “Owning a car didn’t really improve my lifestyle at all, whereas I’ve found that cycling has.”

The decision to spend 30 minutes a day biking to and from work boosted her mood, cut her transportation costs and allowed her to explore the city from a different vantage point. The decision also garnered local media attention and framed Riediger as an outlier in a city with a deeply ingrained car culture — something she looks back on with a laugh.

“It’s just kind of hilarious because it’s almost like the price to participate in society is owning a car,” she says. “And it doesn’t have to be that way.”

“Owning a car didn’t really improve my lifestyle at all, whereas I’ve found that cycling has.” – Erin Riediger

The route Riediger has plotted for our afternoon bike ride takes us from the Exchange District to The Forks by way of some of the city’s newest protected bike lanes.

In 2019, the city completed construction of a two-way protected lane down Garry Street, connecting the grid of bike lanes in the Exchange with the well-established cycling thoroughfare on Assiniboine Avenue. The Garry corridor feels like something that’s been air-lifted from a larger city. It’s a modern, well-planned route that provides safe separation from cars and pedestrians; but it’s fleeting.

Our journey from Point A to Point B takes about 15 minutes to complete. It’s a short trip that offers a glimpse of Winnipeg’s potential as a cycling city and a stark reminder of the infrastructure and political will needed to get there.

“A lot of times for people in those decision-making seats it’s easy to take that path of least resistance,” Riediger says.

While cycling infrastructure is still lacking in most parts of Winnipeg, she’s seen a gradual shift in the right direction from city hall.

“Now, people are realizing that if you really want to see more people using (bikes) as a tool of transportation you need that protected bike lane and you need the proper infrastructure… and it needs to go places people want to go.”

Beyond protected lanes, Riediger believes Winnipeg’s cycling culture would benefit from a wider variety of bikes on the road.

“If you can’t get a bike that’s really easy to ride that you can wear any clothes on and that can carry the stuff you need to carry, then you can’t really replace your car,” she says.

It’s an epiphany Riediger experienced for herself last year when she purchased a Dutch-style commuter bike from the Plain Bicycle Project — a local organization that has been bringing shipping containers full of used bikes from the Netherlands to Winnipeg since 2017.

“When I got my Dutch bike, I started using it even more and just biking for everything,” she says. “I was an idiot for not getting one in the first place… this is the type of bike I’ve always wanted and I’ve been trying to modify other bikes to be more like it.”

Riding side-by-side, there’s a noticeable difference between our bikes. I’m hunched over the handlebars of my road bike, while Riediger is sitting in a comfortable upright position atop her “Omafiets” or “grandma bike.” The simple cyclers are designed to be used by anyone (including grandmas) and come equipped with everything from fenders and a rear rack to a headlight and a drink holder.

“There’s another plain bicycle,” Riediger says excitedly, referring to a woman pedalling past on her own Omafiets as we cross Main Street.

There are nearly 700 of the Dutch bikes on the road in Winnipeg, but spotting a fellow rider in the wild is still something of a novelty — one that’s usually celebrated with a wave and a ding of her bell.

Riediger has turned her newfound Omafiets fandom into a podcast called Plain Bicycle. The six-part series dives into the motivations behind the grassroots project of the same name and features interviews with Dutch cycling experts.

While recording a podcast with no prior experience has been challenging, the project has served as a creative outlet amid the coronavirus pandemic, while most of her usual hobbies — hot yoga, shopping for new records and competing in Harry Potter trivia events — have fallen by the wayside.

It’s also become a way to share her passion for transportation and people-first city building with a wider audience.

“Transportation culture has a lot to do with the way that architecture and cities are formed,” she says. “When you build around the car, you’ve got these wide roads, the storefronts aren’t as important because people aren’t going slowly.

“We just have to stop prioritizing cars, we have to start thinking about multi-modal (transportation)… cars have a place but they’re not everything.”

Like many born-and-raised Winnipeggers, Riediger had dreams of leaving home and moving to a big city. Instead, she’s decided to focus on making Winnipeg a better place to live, one bike ride at a time. 

“I think there’s just… there’s a lot of room for growth, which makes it interesting as someone who wants to advocate for better things.”

eva.wasney@freepress.mb.ca  Twitter: @evawasney

 

Freedom fighter

Leigh Anne Parry is on a mission to empower and improve the lives of women by giving them the skills to join Winnipeg’s male-dominated bicycle-riding community 

By Julia-Simone Rutgers

I’m coasting down the bike lane on Sherbrook Street on a plain, black Dutch bike, carrying Plain Bicycle Project co-manager Leigh Anne Parry on my rear panier rack.

She guides me through traffic and along the sidewalks as we make our way to Gordon Bell High School for a bike lesson, the same kind she gives to dozens of women in their 20s and older who are interested in learning to ride.

Normally the lessons, currently on pause thanks to COVID-19, would take place in the schoolyard at Ecole Victoria-Albert. On this fall morning, however, we coast languidly along the path looping Gordon Bell’s soccer field.

“These bicycle lessons have been in the back of my head for a while now,” Parry explains.

Inspired by a woman in the Netherlands for whom bike lessons and Dutch bikes are a lifetime project, Parry — whose work with the Plain Bicycle project stretches 3 1/2 years — decided earlier this summer to begin running sessions to make cycling more accessible to the Dutch bike’s key customers: adult women.

“It’s something that can be freeing for the whole family,” she says. “Empowering women empowers the whole family’s ability to take different modes of transportation.”

First things first: balance. We start sitting on the bike seats, feet flat on the ground, and begin to walk. The trick is to get comfortable balancing by gaining momentum and lifting the feet, practising little coasts down the path.

For me, most confident on a hard-tailed mountain bike, the gentle ride and upright stance is a comfortable change of pace. It’s part of the reason why, Parry says, the bikes appeal to new riders.

Parry, 33, got invested in biking in university, she says. She grew up outside the city, but moved into Winnipeg for school and was gifted a bike to ride around. After using it as her main mode of transportation for some time she got a fast-paced job as a bike courier.

“I started to ride with a particular kind of work purpose, I got to explore the city a lot, I got more comfortable and confident riding a bicycle, especially in traffic,” she says.

“Then I was working as an urban farmer and had a big trike that I would deliver vegetables on; I’ve always integrated bicycles into my work life because I find it very useful and I think it’s a good idea.”

Using the bike as a tool for her everyday activities, Parry became familiar with the city’s strengths and weaknesses in bike infrastructure, and began to notice the biking community was dominated by men who felt comfortable enough to weave with traffic on the city’s busy streets.

“Women are sort of an indicator species for how good your infrastructure is in a city,” Parry says.

“Women statistically take less risks because they’re usually depended on a lot more and their stakes are higher, and they feel less confident being an aggressive rider in among the traffic.”

In the Netherlands, she explains, 60 per cent of bike-riders (she prefers to avoid “cyclist” as a term) are women. In Winnipeg, by contrast, women make up closer to 30 per cent of the cycling crowd.

“I started to ride with a particular kind of work purpose, I got to explore the city a lot, I got more comfortable and confident riding a bicycle, especially in traffic.” – Leigh Anne Parry

That number is something Parry is slowly setting out to change. Biking is more convenient for women, she says. It’s a quick way to “trip-chain,” or make multiple stops close together: dropping the kids off at school, visiting the grocery store and getting to work, for example.

“It’s also something that can be really empowering and freeing for women to have that sense of independence and to be able to do all of those errands and runs on their own, on their own transportation, quickly and easily,” Parry says.

Lately she’s seen an “inspiring” uptick in older women — those over 50 — learning to ride, especially with the comfort and ease of the “Omafiets” or “grandma bike.”

“Our intention is to integrate this kind of bike into the market,” Parry says.

“That message, I think, landed with older women who had been thinking and considering their abilities and maybe a shift in their life a little bit… it creates this other sense of independence.”

After we practise our balance, including getting our feet on the bottom and top pedals while we coast and pedalling backwards to brake, Parry explains the mounting and taking-off process. With one foot on the top pedal, we slip up onto the seats and press down, pushing us through another curve in the path.

Parry explains that in her class sessions, usually attended by 15 to 20 people each, the women she teaches often begin to help each other; once they’ve mastered a stage they support one another, building confidence and camaraderie among the avid learners. Most learn to ride in one or two sessions, she says.

“It’s very beautiful — people are helping each other out, they’re teaching one another how to ride. They were coming in there saying they weren’t feeling confident and they were scared, and then they leave feeling really excited that they were successful at the stage where they’re at,” Parry says with a smile.

“People are very courageous and ready to go.”

From there, riders move on to Phase 2, which consists of turning, lifting hands off the handlebars to signal and shoulder checks. Normally Parry would teach this on an obstacle course until riders can confidently do all three at once.

They’re key steps for city riding, where bikers need to navigate traffic, bike lanes and more to stay safe on the roads. Parry wants to instil confidence, so the women she teaches can start integrating cycling into their day-to-day lives.

“The next steps are going to be really exciting because when they start to be able to use it for their transportation, when I see them riding around downtown with their kids on their back, that’s not only going to be great for them but also for Winnipeg,” she says.

“If you see more people on a bicycle — and not just white men in Speedos and helmets — you can start to see yourself riding a bike, so it changes other people’s lives, too.”

The more people, and particularly adult women, who become empowered to ride, the safer the streets will become, Parry explains.

“I think when you’re learning to ride a bike, especially in a place that is not bike-friendly, you might end up thinking that you can’t do it and you’re the issue,” she says.

“But you should be allowed to get to your grocery store easily and safely, even if you’re not a confident rider; you should be able to do it beside somebody that you’re teaching how to ride a bike, or your kids or your partners, these are sort of normal and common practices in a place where you see most people riding a bike. So keep your imagination open, and your ability to see the possibility of change within your city and ask for it and demand it.”

Part of Parry’s cycling classes have involved working with central Winnipeg groups such as the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Manitoba, teaching cycling skills to moms, newcomers, youths and those typically not visible in the cycling world.

Abiba Salamu attended three of Parry’s sessions through IRCOM this summer. Never having biked before, she can now ride around a little on her own, and is able to help others start pedaling, too. She’s still a beginner, but one day she’d like to be able to go for rides to the store or around her neighbourhood for fresh air.

For Salamu, the community was the best part of the classes. Even as she waits anxiously for the classes to start again, she’s staying in touch with friends she made in the field.

“I was so happy…through that I found my friend that I’m still talking to now, on the phone, greeting each other, all that.”

At the end of the day, for Parry, the classes are about instilling hope — something she possesses in spades.

The future of the project is wide open; she crosses her fingers excitedly describing a major grant that could be on the way, bringing hundreds of new bikes into the shop.

“It could get really big and I want it to get really big,” Parry says with a smile. “I had the opportunity to prove to myself that I could do it, so now I think anything is possible.”

julia-simone.rutgers@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @jsrutgers