Wheeling through Toronto: A History of the Bicycle and Its Riders

Highlighting an important yet often ignored part of Toronto’s transportation story, Wheeling through Toronto chronicles the history of the bicycle and reveals a way forward for a world in climate crisis. 

Throughout its history in Toronto, the bicycle’s place on the roads and in public esteem has fluctuated wildly: flaunted as fashionable, disparaged and derided, rescued from looming obscurity, and promoted as a way to respond to the challenges of the day. What is it about the simple bicycle that it can be so loved by some yet despised and detested by others?

Wheeling through Toronto offers a 130-year ride from the 1890s to the present to help answer this question. Albert Koehl, a Toronto lawyer and leading cycling advocate, chronicles the tumultuous history of this mode of transportation from the bicycle craze at the turn of the century, to the rise of the car and the motorway in the 1950s, to the intensifying cry for active transportation in the 1990s and into pandemic times.

In an era of catastrophic climate events, Wheeling through Toronto highlights how the bicycle should be celebrated not only as hope for the future, but also for its affordability, for its contribution to clean and healthy mobility, and because it brings happiness and joy to so many. Drawing on archival materials, newspapers, and personal interviews, and full of fascinating vignettes, this book presents the story of how we got here and what Torontonians need to know as we pedal forward.

Albert Koehl has been an environmental lawyer, and a former adjunct professor of law, for thirty years, dedicated to issues of transportation, energy (mis)use, and climate change. His writings and interviews are regularly published in a variety of media. He has represented (pro bono) cycling groups before courts, tribunals, public forums, and at city hall. Koehl’s name has been called “synonymous with cycling in Toronto,” his work inspired and sustained by a commitment to social justice and the belief that how we get around should be based on fairness and respect for each other and our community, instead of on power and wealth. Among his proudest achievements at home or abroad he counts his leadership in the successful, decades-long fight for a Bloor Street (-Danforth Avenue) bike lane that transformed this dangerous arterial into a model for safer, happier, and more climate-friendly public spaces.