*A trip to Europe opened Dutch bike enthusiast Erin Riediger’s eyes to the simple pleasures of a civilized, active and healthy daily commute to her Exchange District workplace*
*RIDING IN STYLE, PLAIN AND SIMPLE*
https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/life/cover-pedal-pushers-ins...
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.”
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 “omafiet” 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 omafiet 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 omafiet 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