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Remembering (and Riding for) Jack Roper

By Meg Campbell

20110812jackroper02.jpg
Photo by Martinho from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

At 8 a.m. today, a group of cyclists met at Bloor and Spadina not for the usual reason—to present a Critical Mass to the city and show strength in numbers—but instead to honour the memory of one of their own. Led by members of Advocacy for Respect for Cyclists, and joined by his friends and family, they were riding for Jack Roper, the 84-year-old cyclist who died a week ago today when he collided with a car.
The group, numbering a couple dozen riders, made their way to the site of the accident at Greenwood Avenue and Plains Road, to solemnly mark with their presence and the placement of one of ARC’s white “ghost bikes” one more site in the city where a cyclist’s life has ended, added to a list of too many others. Dave Meslin, founder of the Toronto Cylists Union, noted about the sites ARC has marked over the past 15 years: “There have been two common factors at each memorial. A) a cyclist was killed. B) There was no bike lane.”
For more details about the memorial for Roper, read Ben Spurr’s full report for NOW and Meslin’s tweets from earlier today.

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Comments

  • tyrannosaurus_rek

    Maybe it's time to think of suing the city for inadequate bike lanes.

  • http://twitter.com/gilmourtaylor Geoff Gilmour-Taylor

    Not in this case. There's a bike lane one block south, along Cosburn Avenue.

    It's simply a dangerous intersection. You get drivers coming down Don Mills Road (often off the DVP), then having to make a quick set of turns to get onto Greenwood, and it's easy to get distracted or go too fast. It's effectively a two-way stop there (I didn't realize it was 4-way until I read the article). I walk by there often, and I won't cross Greenwood, except at the lights at Cosburn or Mortimer.

    I think the only solution is to block access to Greenwood from Don Mills; northbound access is already forbidden. Cllr Fragedakis suggested on-street parking, but I'm worried that would just lead to people crashing into parked cars.

  • edcantor

    …

  • Anonymous416

    The other thing in common is that newspaper reporting has been sure to note

    1) Whether the deceased was wearing styrofoam on their head
    2) That the deceased 'collided with' the vehicle

    In this case, the first is a distraction and the second pure spin.  It's like reporting someone's face colliding with a baseball bat and asking whether they were wearing a jock cup at the time.

  • http://twitter.com/di0nysys Andrew Smith

    With Rob Ford around more of these will occur :(

  • http://twitter.com/gilmourtaylor Geoff Gilmour-Taylor

    Went by there on the way home from work today. The bike is still there; the flowers are wilted. The flashing light to help remind people to stop at the stop sign was off. A car went through the intersection southbound and a cop pulled them over. North of Mortimer, just after the bend in the road, there was one of those “This is your speed” carts, but it was shut off, too.