by Evan Watt and Zach Dafoe
“Cycling is community.”
This is Alex Stieda, a keynote speaker at the 2024 Winter Cycling Congress hosted right here in YEG.
An Edmonton local, cancer survivor, and heavily-decorated tour-de-France victor, Stieda was among hundreds of people gathered for the four-day conference: panelists, advocates, urban architects, and enthusiasts hailing from Canada, Finland, Alaska, and Slovakia, to name a few places.
Stieda, a champion of the city of champions, lent his voice to make it clear that this congress was about a lot more than just what it takes to ride a bike through the winter months.
“It’s a real, special bond,” said Stieda.
“Something that’s so special that we have in our in our cycling community.”
Brian Torrance is a director at EverActive Schools, an organization who was a major player in putting this event together. As a member of the cycling community, he, too, believes in that bond—that Edmonton has an “amazing community of advocates” and that community brews some serious big-picture conversations about sustainability, accessibility, and equity.
“It’s absolutely an equity conversation, too,” said Torrance. “We’re trying to have that conversation around creating opportunities for everyone and then creating consistency and normalcy of some of those other alternate modes of transportation.”
Despite Edmonton’s purported intolerance for cycling infrastructure, YEG Mayor Amarjit Sohi made an announcement to commit $100-million back in 2022. During his appearance at the conference, Sohi described the ongoing project as “catching up.”
Presentations held during the conference explored how cities like Turku and Oulu in Finland—urban centers in climates similar to YEG— can act as case studies for how a city can ‘catch up’ in terms of its cycling infrastructure.
Stella Aaltonen works as a project manager for the city of Turku, Finland. She recognizes that the path toward less car-dependent infrastructure is imperfect, and stresses the role that the everyday person has in its development. Instead of taking a top-down approach, she recommends one informed from the bottom—one created with a people-first attitude.
With any new system, Aaltonen says, “we are not making it so that it’s perfect before we launch it…[if] we keep it so long for ourselves that it’s already actually not good enough. So we take the version that we make, go out, and ask for feedback: what to improve, what would you like to see?”
This is a sentiment echoed by Doug Gordon, a panellist at the event and a host of the podcast, The War on Cars.
Gordon believes the resistance to cycle-friendly urban design is rooted in consumerism and an obsession with car culture. He feels that pointing to financial barriers to infrastructure development only goes skin-deep, that “people’s mindsets are stuck the way they are because of the environment built around them.”
“No matter where you go, that is the biggest challenge you face is breaking that mindset.”
Eeve Rynish, an attendee travelling from Fairbanks Alaska, says that breaking the mindset is what it’s all about: “A big part of people don’t know that some of this infrastructure is already here and it’s going to continue to grow, it’s like a big shock,” she said, adding that one of her main objectives here is to learn how to advocate and educate.
Luckily, hers is a community that already knows how to share the road, with “snow machines and mushers breaking trail” on a volunteer-maintained cycling trail. The small size of the northern town means that cycling is, in many cases, more efficient than driving a car.
The attitude of individual responsibility to get involved, to educate, and to advocate were common themes in most—if not all—attendees. The conference really is about having those conversations and challenging what public space could be, should be, and who it serves.
As Doug Gordon said, at the end of our interview:
“The war on cars will be won in places like Edmonton where people think it can’t be.”
Skunkt 
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