Originally Posted by
Machka
It's Christmas holiday time ... Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day ...
Tell us how you've managed your Christmas (and other holiday) preparations in a car-free or car-light way. Will you be celebrating Christmas or ringing in the new year by going for a ride? Are you going on a car-free or car-light trip somewhere?
Our family Christmas trip, as usual is best described as
car-enslaved with an 800 mile one-way drive to
The Motor City where the car is King, by way of Toronto, to return tomorrow. This year though, maybe
car-indentured might be a better term because we stayed two days in Toronto, totally-car free.
Originally Posted by
Jim from Boston
… For the past two days the family and I have been visiting Toronto, and I’ve rented a bike-share bike, similar to our Hubways. I think if you were to distill the best features of New York and Boston, you would produce Toronto, at least for cycling. There’s the exciting and interesting environment of cavernous downtown streets, but easy access to pleasant neighborhood cycling…
The rental bikes were very heavy, but well-maintained, and tires properly filled. The three gears were quite suitable for the terrain and soon became pleasant to ride… the bikes are conveniently available, for about $8 for 24 hours… 30 minute single-ride limits, but an extra half hour was only $1.50. I had become accustomed to renting from bike shops when away. But Bike-Share Programs like this are the way to go; so much more convenient and cheaper …
My son was particularly interested to visit the various ethnic neighborhoods for which TO is famous.
Though we walked and took the fabulous subway and streetcar system, cycling would be the ideal way to explore. Finally, to show how accepting the city is of cyclists, they have codified special dispensations to cyclists that in Boston are still
de facto rather than
de jure.
This Christmas morning I drove to my brother’s house intending to borrow his bike to do an hour cycle ride, but it started to rain. Though I brought rain gear on the trip, there was not enough time to turn around and get it. So I did a couple of posts to LCF instead.