Drive Don't Cycle

The cult of the expert with the hegemony of bureaucracy. Father Robert McTeigue

Back in the 1990’s I worked as a registered nurse in a series of Calgary hospitals. My first job was on the gastrointestinal surgical floor at the Holy Cross Hospital which was on the southwest side of the downtown area. In those days downtown was pretty quiet, especially in the early morning, and I loved riding through the centre of the city on my bicycle on the way to work dodging and weaving across traffic lanes as the wind blew through the deep valleys created by high rise buildings. Soon enough the wards and patient treatment areas at the Holy Cross Hospital were moved and the entire series of buildings was given over to the bureaucracy that managed the regional health department. Bureaucracies have two jobs: the first is to maintain the bureaucracy and the second is to grow the bureaucracy.

Cycling to work at the Holy Cross was a continuous juggling game as I worked shifts. Night shifts I drove both directions being too tired to cycle home at the end of the shift and unwilling to ride to work at 10:00 pm at night. Day shifts were easy, I cycled both directions, while afternoon shifts Doug and I had a system worked out whereby he drove to his office job downtown with his bicycle in the back of our wagon. He would park near the Holy Cross Hospital, unload his bicycle and ride across town to his office. After work he would ride home, while I would ride to the Holy Cross for my afternoon shift, throw my bicycle in the back of the wagon, and drive home at midnight when I finished work. So we both carried changes of clothes in panniers on our bicycles as well as massive amounts of food to get us through our respective work days.

From the Holy Cross, I moved to work in the Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Clinic at the old General Hospital which was on the east side of the city down in the Bow River valley. There was no more shift work so I could cycle everyday, which I did, rain, shine, winter storm, minus 30 degree Celsius days, through afternoon thunder and hail storms and along the unplowed and frequently icy streets and paths of Calgary. I could make it to work in about an hour if conditions were reasonable, but I had days when it took me at least 1.5 hours to get to work due to icy and snowy conditions (this was before the pathway along the river valley was plowed in winter and studded bicycle tires had not been invented).

Coming home I almost always had to ride into the Chinook winds which blow through Calgary year round. These warm winds (warm is relative) sweep down over the Rocky Mountains to the west and generally blow at a steady 25 to 30 knots. Getting home to my house, which was uphill from the river valley and to the west was almost universally into a steady head wind. I had days when it took me 1.5 hours to ride home as well, and, as I frequently ran out of food, I often had hypoglycemic attacks while riding that made me vulnerable to falling off the bicycle into the road traffic.

My clearest memory of the craziness of my bicycle commute obsession was falling into the bus trap between Scenic Acres, where Doug and I lived, and Silver Springs, the next suburb to the east. Bus traps are big trenches dug in the ground that can be spanned by the wheels of a full size bus but a car or regular vehicle does not have a wide enough wheel base to span the trench which is about a half a metre deep. They are used to stop cars and private vehicles from zooming around urban neighbourhoods. I was riding to work on my usual route which took me past a bus trap on a road between Scenic Acres and Silver Springs on a snowy day in the early morning. As I rode past the bus trap, my bicycle hit black ice and slipped sideways. I fell into the bus trap and the bicycle landed on top of me. At that moment, the number 37 bus which I took on occasional days when even I wouldn’t cycle, chose that exact moment to come rumbling along the road, and I managed to get both my self and my bicycle out of the bus trap just seconds before the bus drove over the trap. I had given serious thought to trying to lie flat in the bus trap because buses, like trains, are slow to stop, particularly if the driver is not expecting to encounter a human and a bicycle at rest in the bus trap. I can still remember clearly the look of extreme consternation on the drivers face when he realised he had almost run over a cyclist.

There were lots of other crazy days. One day, riding up the penultimate hill on my way home, I hit black ice again and flew off the bicycle out into two lanes of traffic. Another day, after a terrifying ride down icy and snowy roads to gain the bicycle path that ran along the river valley I found the entire pathway covered by a glassy, solid 5 centimetres of ice, as smooth and slippery as the local ice hockey rink. The Chinook winds had melted the snow on the path but the banks on either side of the path had prevented the melted snow (in other words, water) from draining away and, as night fell, the entire pathway for at least five kilometres had frozen solid with 5 centimetres of hard water ice. Crampons would have been more use than a bicycle. I pushed the bike all the way to work. I was a bit late that day.

Multiple days were marked by thunder, lightening and hail during the summer months. Sometimes I just kept riding, other times the hail was big enough that I would have to seek out shelter until the storm passed over. Strangely, I never really worried about being hit by lightning perhaps because I had been hit by lightning on a climb of Mount Athabasca already.

Winter riding required multiple layers of clothing such that moving was difficult. I had lined lycra tights which had a goretex layer stitched to the front (a unique item made by Mountain Equipment Coop which were absolutely brilliant but of course disappeared from their inventory when the bureaucracy took over and the only thing MEC reliably sold was yoga clothing). On very cold days, I wore another pair of full goretex pants over the top of these, and put shoe covers on my leather hiking boots (sneakers were too cold) which MEC also made at the time. The shoe covers also were a genius item but they too disappeared once MEC became a store that sold almost exclusively barbeque clothing (a term coined by my mate Robin Tivy). On top, I wore a long underwear (prolypropolene at the time) long sleeved top, a lightweight fleece, then another jacket (home-made) that had a thicker fleece layer with a windbreak layer stitched on as an outer. A muff for the face (otherwise you would get frostbite), a homemade beanie (called a toque in Canada), my bicycling helmet, a headlamp (plus lights on the bicycle), and two pairs of mitts, an inner fleece layer and outer wind break layer. It took me about half an hour to dress and undress at either end of the commute. Ski goggles were sometimes useful to prevent your eyelashes from freezing.

The most batshit crazy thing I remember about this time was an online survey tool that MEC developed and published on their website. This was, of course, the early days of the internet, so it was a pretty rudimentary questionnaire which purported to measure your environmental impact. Mine, disturbingly, was rated high. You might wonder, how it could be high considering I never drove a single kilometre during the week and prepared all my own food. I even did my weekly shopping on foot, carrying a large backpack up to the local store and bringing it home loaded with the weeks groceries. It was big backpack (80 litres – I still have it).

I don’t remember the exact wording of the quiz or the summary response but the gist of it was I was an environmental disaster because I was using up too many calories riding my bicycle to work and walking to the shop, and the recommendation was, unbelievable as it might sound, that I should drive to work! Such is the madness of bureaucracy and the environmental movement. Interestingly enough, within a year of my starting work at the old General Hospital, that group of building also became the home to more bureaucracy and our entire clinic moved to the Foothills Hospital. This had the inadvertent effect of lowering my environmental impact because I could cycle to work in a mere half hour.