Are there really two kinds of cyclists? Urbanists and bike advocates often draw
a sharp distinction between sporty recreational cyclists on one hand,
who use their bikes for fun and exercise, and utility cyclists on the other hand,
who use their bikes to get where they need to go, like work, school, groceries, or appointments.
Sometimes people reference the Dutch contrast between a “wielrenner” and “fietser”, which
we’ll come back to later. We get where people are coming from here; they want to challenge the idea
that bikes are just for fun and exercise, a pervasive assumption in car-centric cities
where bikes have been marginalized and made unpleasant or impractical to use around town.
But in our city we don’t actually find this distinction to be all that relevant or useful.
Montreal has a pretty strong cycling culture where bikes are common and normalized and used
by everyday people for everyday tasks and it feels hard to separate cycling for transport versus
cycling for fun and exercise. Personally, we often bike to get to work, stores, or appointments,
but we also bike to social events, we bike up Mont-Royal for exercise and nice views,
we do day trips by bike to explore our city and enjoy nice weather, and sometimes we do
longer trips to push ourselves and see how far we can go, like biking from Montreal to Ottawa
once. None of this is “sport” in the literal sense of competition but there’s a pretty big
mix that goes beyond utility or transportation to include social, recreational, and exercise goals.
This seems to be the norm in our city. If you own and maintain a bike to get to work,
there’s a good chance you’re out there enjoying the Lachine Canal on the weekend too.
If you’re doing laps and having fun at this racetrack, you’re more likely than the average
person to bike for transportation, especially if you live in a bike-friendly part of the city where
that’s safe and practical to do. And the research backs this up. One study from North Carolina found
that recreational riding is a major “gateway” to utility riding, likely because it gives people
the basic skills, equipment, and knowledge of routes that they can apply to utility cycling
too. Another study from Ireland found that two-thirds of leisure and fitness cyclists
who participated in a non-competitive bike tour also bike at least sometimes for transportation.
But even if someone does purely bike for recreation, does that make them a different
species? All of this is focused on creating a contrast with the sporty guys in lycra,
but if you have a bike-friendly city you get lots of other, more casual types of recreation
and exercise too, like families going for a weekend ride together, or seniors who want
to stay active without being too hard on their joints. It doesn’t seem like their experience is
fundamentally that different from commuters taking the same bike lanes to get to work,
except that recreational rides are more weather dependent. We’re even going to go out on a limb
and say that the conflict with the lycra crowd is overplayed. They’re often stereotyped as Lance
Armstrong wannabes who treat city streets like their personal racetrack like a bicycle version
of the Fast and the Furious but in our city they actually seem to coexist pretty well. They mostly
use the same bike lanes as the rest of us to get to their training spots like the racetrack or the
mountain. Wearing lycra doesn’t even mean they’re claiming to be fast or competitive, just like
running shoes and a shirt from a 5K you ran five years ago don’t mean you’re a competitive runner.
When you think about it, the sharp distinction between utility and recreation isn’t applied
to other means of transport. Imagine going to a car-centric suburb and asking people if they drive
for recreation or transportation. The answer is “yes”: driving is how they get around, they don’t
make a big conceptual distinction between driving to work versus a campground or a national park.
Go to a walkable city and ask people whether they walk for transport or recreation — again they’ll
look at you funny. Walking is everywhere, they do it for all sorts of reasons from getting groceries
to strolling in the park and enjoying the weather and yes, even jogging specifically for exercise
is pretty common. Drawing a sharp line arguably makes even less sense for active transportation
because it’s inherently fun and healthy in a way that driving isn’t, at least city driving in
traffic. Lots of people in North America grew up biking around their neighbourhood; thinking back,
if you biked to school as a kid, was that utility or recreation? We’d argue that it’s a mix of both,
in a way that isn’t really the case for getting driven or taking the bus to school.
One of the differences that often gets cited between sporty recreational cycling and everyday
utility cycling is the type of bike. An old blog post from Bicycle Dutch, always a good resource,
explains that Dutch language and cycling culture has two words for cyclists. A
“wielrenner” (literally “wheel runner”) rides a racing bike for sport while a “fietser” or
regular utility cyclist is “someone in everyday clothes on a sit-up bike and nothing else”.
Again this typology doesn’t really seem to map onto the cyclists we see in our city.
More upright style bikes like this aren’t uncommon, especially if you count the extremely
popular BIXI bike shares. These are built like a tank and have some of the utility features of
Dutch bikes, like a chain guard. They’re intended for a more upright riding style although whether
that works out depends on your height. At the same time, lots of commuters and other “transportation
cyclists” in our city ride what we would call road bikes and what Dutch people would seem to call
sport or racing bikes. People here don’t really think of them as sport- or racing-specific though,
just like how running shoes and tennis shoes were originally made for athletics but they’ve
made their way into everyday life. People ride bikes like this because of the lower weight,
the flexibility in hand position for hills, or just because it’s the bike they happen to have.
And of course there are a dozen other types of bikes we commonly see around our city too.
Maybe as cycling continues to grow in popularity here we’ll start to see more Dutch-style upright
bikes take over, or maybe not — different places can have different bike cultures.
We’re fundamentally not saying there’s anything wrong with distinguishing between utility and
recreational cycling as concepts, especially when busting myths about how “bikes are for fun,
not transportation”. We’re just saying that in the real world the distinction can be fuzzy,
and that it becomes less and less relevant the more cycling is normalized and people
start using bikes for a range of different reasons. And we think that leaning too much
into the distinction can sometimes come across as reverse snobbery: “unlike those
weirdos with their lycra and helmets, my kind of cycling is casual, stylish, and European”.
There’s nothing wrong with cycling for fun or exercise or wearing athletic clothes if you find
that more comfortable. The fact that cycling is fun and healthy is a big part of why we like it,
even for utility trips. In the end, as we bike around our city we see lots of different people
cycling for lots of different reasons, and they all contribute to the city’s cycling culture.
Maybe if you purely drive places to ride then you feel like a different category from the
rest of us, but even there it’s hard to hold that against you. Lots of people live in car-centric
places where they can’t safely or comfortably bike so of course they’re going to drive.
The only cyclists we really want to distance ourselves from are those who put the rest of
us in danger, whether riding dangerously or arguing against dedicated bike infrastructure.
Thanks for watching through to the end of the video.
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