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Pedal plans

Winnipeg’s ‘Bicycle Mayor’ to give city the gears on lack of infrastructure

https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2024/05/09/pedal-plans

PATTY Wiens refuses to tread lightly in her new role as Winnipeg’s top cyclist. Wiens has been bestowed with the title Bicycle Mayor of Winnipeg by an international organization that advocates for more active transportation and encourages drivers to take up cycling for daily trips.

“When you start riding your bike to work, you really start noticing what kind of infrastructure is around bikes for safety, you start noticing how people behave on the road,” she said Thursday afternoon.

The year-round cyclist applied for the role to be more involved in advocacy and petition for more, and safer, cycling infrastructure.

Wiens, 50, favoured cycling over driving to work in 2021 when she began a new job at the University of Winnipeg to save some cash on parking. After seeing what it did for her mental and physical health, she sold her car and took up the commute full-time.

Winter driving made her take notice of the city’s infrastructure she called lopsided towards drivers.

“That’s what sent me on a real advocacy journey,” she said.

The mayoral title is given to successful applicants by BYCS, an Amsterdam-based non-governmental organization with an international network of bike enthusiasts. Mayors are selected for a period of two years during which they focus on addressing the main barriers to increasing cycling in their cities.

Wiens is one of five bicycle mayors in Canada and 147 worldwide. She also serves on the board of directors for advocacy group Bike Winnipeg.

The Brazilian transplant speculates the number of cyclists is increasing due to an increased cost of living and price of fuel, but she welcomes the trend and, using her new role, plans to petition the city for slower speeds on side streets where fewer cars tend to drive and active transportation is favoured.

“If we would have more of that, we wouldn’t need to worry so much about protected bike infrastructure,” she said. She also wants to raise the profile of cyclists who use bikes for any type of transportation, whether it be for work, grocery shopping, sport or leisure.

“That’s who I want to represent … the less cars you have on the road, the better it is for everyone. Cars get around faster and cyclists are safer.”

City council’s public works committee recently approved a project that will eliminate vehicle right turns from Assiniboine Avenue onto Main Street and divert eastbound vehicles north on Fort Street, which Wiens calls a win for bike safety.

“We have this mentality here that people who drive pay for roads and it’s not true. Everyone pays for roads … yet cars get the priority,” she said.

Mark Cohoe, executive director of Bike Winnipeg, lauded Wiens’ new designation as an important step in the organization’s multi-pronged approach to advocating for a bike-safe city.

“It’s important that the bike mayor is able to tell the stories of people on bikes to help people overcome barriers to biking,” Cohoe said.

The executive director says connectivity between Winnipeg neighbourhoods is a hurdle to getting more bums in bike seats and is top of mind for the non-profit, which has been working with the city on bike infrastructure projects since 2015.

Theft is also a deterrent, Wiens and Cohoe say. Although Winnipeg Police Service statistics show an overall decrease in the number of reported stolen bicycles in recent years, 1,452 were still reported pilfered in 2023. That’s compared to 2,098 in 2018.

To combat the theft, council announced a new program in which Winnipeggers can register their bikes for free using the city’s cloud-based Garage 529 service.

Bikes registered in the database can be used by police when attempting to return recovered bikes.

“The next step is to advocate for secure bike parking, especially in the downtown area. If we have more secure parking, more people are likely to ride their bikes instead of their cars,” Wiens said.

Wiens will be calling on the city to install secure bike parking in the Exchange District and look for areas to incorporate bikes in the design for the Portage Place overhaul.

nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.camailto:nicole.buffie@freepress.mb.ca