History
Before the widespread adoption of private automobiles by the middle class in the mid twentieth century, bicycles were relatively popular in Canada, although Canada's snowy winters posed a problem, especially before there were industrial-sized snowploughs in every city. Travel by horse and carriage (or sled) or streetcar were more robust. As Canadian suburbanized cars became the main mode of transportation, and cycling shifted to being something done for fun or sport. The advent of the mountain bike in the later twentieth century made off-road cycling particularly popular.
In the twenty-first century with longer and longer commute times between suburbs and central business districts, many middle-class people have been moving back into the city, in a process of gentrification, this has created a more more dense urban environment less like the mid-century New World norm and more like Old World cities where cycling commuting is more popular. This has led to a new era of cycling advocacy and conflicts with motorists over funding and planning decisions, and space on the road.
Read more about this topic: Cycling In Canada
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)