"A Great Ottawa Tradition"

Reading Time: 4 minutes

This year was Citizens for Safe Cycling’s 5th time that we organised “Lights on Bikes”, the brain child of Alex deVries, who figured we needed to organise something to get the word out on bike lights and safety. We realised that we need to use some kind of a ‘coat rack’ to hang the event on, which became the switch from Daylight Saving Time (not “Savings”) to the standard time (not winter time). Nancy Biggs came up with the name which has been a hit too.

“My brother was over from Toronto to do a couple of bike rides. We cycled two days of about 80 km and rarely did we have to share the road. He was blown away.”

Last year, we were freezing, but this year was -relatively speaking- warm. We noticed that the number of bikes passing must have been around 700-800 in two hours. We are not sure, as we didn’t count the totals, but given the fact that we gave about 900 bike lights away (450 front and 450 rear lights) and the fact that many have lights anyway (who we didn’t stop of course) I don’t think I am too far off.

Success

Which begs the question: what is success in this situation? Is it the fact that hundreds of cyclists now bike with lights through town? Or is it a failure in the bigger picture as obviously hundreds of cyclists were biking without lights. Let’s just not care. The feedback was super, we got a chance to talk to a number of cyclists and got some feedback like:

“I love this event, it is a great Ottawa tradition” – a happy cyclist

And to me, that sounds like a great slogan for the 2016 Lights on Bikes event. Here are about 20 pictures of the event. With thanks to Safer Roads Ottawa and Ottawa Police for the support, the volunteers who helped with attaching the lights and Felicity and Don for running the show for Citizens for Safe Cycling tonight. Thank Don for bringing the trailer out.