Light up your bike

Halloween: Elise Cote

ur neighbourhood loves Halloween. From the over the-top decorations to the fireworks and drivewayO parties, neighbourhood culture is at its finest here on Halloween.

Ever since we got a family cargo bike in 2019, we have included a bike in our celebrations. My kids love zooming around with me on our bike to look at creepy decorations and dressing up to join Capital

Bike’s Costume Ride. On Halloween night last year, we decorated our electric cargo trike with sunflower stalks to go with my son’s scarecrow costume and used it to get around as a family of four. I find it hard to describe how an electric cargo bike has changed my life, but enjoying

Halloween by bike is a good example. To be able to transport ourselves faster than walking but at a human scale rather than in an unwieldy, large, enclosed vehicle allows us to interact with the people and environment around us while seamlessly moving between play spaces and socializing back to roadways. All this while our silly antics and decorated bike bring joy to people around us. Of course, there is another side to all of this excitement and joy: dangerous road conditions and driving. Even on Halloween night, with tiny trick-or-treaters flitting from house to house, some people still drive too fast or don’t choose to leave their vehicles at home. We have to keep our eyes trained on our children at all times to ensure they will not be hit by passing drivers. With better infrastructure and more bikes (and fewer cars) Halloween by bike could be even better than it already is.

For ride details check: capitalbike.ca/rides-events/ or the events calendar on the Capital Bike mobile app.

Ride Safely in dark and low light. Light up your bike!

Photos from top: Elise pilots the family’s Halloween bike; A unicorn and a ghoul ride from house to house; Elise cycles their family through the neighbourhood. Photo credits: Elise Cote.

Introducing Capital Bike’s ‘The Locker:’

Eight months ago, I never would have expected The Locker, Capital Bike’s attended bicycle parking service, to be so successful. Before 2022, Capital Bike had never parked more than 400 bikes in a year. In the last year we’ve parked over 8000 bikes and have partnered with the City of Victoria to offer the region’s first permanent bike valet, as a pilot. When I first applied for a co-op position at Capital Bike, I had never heard of a bike valet program. It seemed like a great idea, but how could we turn our tiny program into something that could serve dozens or even hundreds of events in a year? Would event organizers be willing to pay for it? I had infinitely more questions than answers. The first things I tackled were the bones of the program: costing, data tracking, and a standard valet procedure. Working with our Bike Valet Coordinator, Lise Jensen, I studied our existing program and compared it to what other cycling organizations across the world are doing. I took the best of what I found, with the goal of developing a bike valet program that is truly world-class.

a Bike Valet Program

Sam Holland, Program Developer

As soon as we had a working structure and process that we were comfortable with, I started to reach out to events. I spent much of my time explaining how valet bicycle parking works to event organizers who had never heard of something like it before. Email after email and call after call seemed to be going nowhere, and I was getting very frustrated. Then we got our first event of the season: the TC10k running race in downtown Victoria. The North Quadra Community Day and the Selkirk Waterfront Festival quickly followed, and it grew from there. Before I knew it, I was fielding calls and emails from companies and events that I’d never heard of, asking for our service. For most of the summer, we had events every weekend. When our service wasn’t at events, we’d get complaints from the community! Capital Bike finished the summer with a world-class, newly-branded bike valet program. We can park thousands of bikes at a single time, at multiple events. I’m truly proud of the work we did this year. Looking to the future, I hope you will see us all over the South Island, making it easier for more people to cycle to more places, more often.

Photos from left: A Locker user with key tag on their helmet, photo credit: Lise Jensen; The Locker at Rifflandia, photo credit: KZPhotography; The Locker at a Pacific FC game, photo credit: Harrison Mundschutz; Bike tags and claim tags. photo credit: Jay Wallace; The Locker at the Reconciliation Day Powwow, photo credit: Jay Wallace