building community around creative and fun commuting

(cross posted on metronauts.ca)

A couple years back, I was looking for an easy way to commute from my home in Little Italy to my office near Dundas Square.  I had learned very quickly that most commuting isn’t fun – even biking during rush hour, as I came to realize, involves sitting in two-wheeled traffic.  This didn’t make sense to me: given how much time I spent travelling, why shouldn’t I have fun on my way to wherever I was going? For really circuitous reasons including a love for Michael J Fox and a then-shaky belief that you can still learn new things after you turn 25, I ended up one day teaching myself to ride a longboard.

A longboard differs from a conventional skateboard in several dimensions, including its length, wheel diameter and width, and size of its trucks (or axles).  Whereas a traditional skateboard requires the front wheels to be lifted from the ground in order to change direction, a longboard’s geometry allows for long, s-turns that come pretty close to surfing or snowboarding on concrete.  (As a tradeoff, most longboarders are unable to do any skateboard-style tricks with their boards).  On a longboard, the rider is able to generate much more speed than on a traditional board, which means a longboard is more functional for use as transportation.  And that is the really short story about how I ended up as a commuting longboarder.

A healthy city is a playful city, one that inspires the creativity of its citizens to consistently reinvent themselves and their contribution to communal life.  Suddenly, I was a longboarder.  It consumed me: like a hipster Forrest Gump, whenever I was going somewhere, I was longboarding.  I’d coat check my longboard at bars; I’d tuck my longboard under my desk at my office.  One time, I even longboarded down Bathurst Street, took the ferry to the airport, put my skateboard in the overhead compartment, and flew to Montreal.

While bicyclists and pedestrians make up the vast majority of sustainable commuters in Toronto, we must remember that a vision of sustainable travel should include skateboarders, rollerbladers, longboarders, and everyone else who wants to make the journey as much fun as the destination.  Our issues are similar to other sustainable commuters: longboarders are always watching out for crisscrossing streetcar tracks, poorly maintained roads, stray rocks and gravel, and even aggressive, overtaking cyclists.  Dealing with these hazards – and the aggressive rush hour drivers – is especially dangerous when travelling quickly on a vehicle that doesn’t have brakes.

And so, in an effort to increase awareness, every year since 2003 the Toronto Longboarding community has organized the Board Meeting, a “non-commercial, and non-competitive celebration of non-polluting commuting”. Events organized in a similar spirit had existed for cyclists (i.e. Critical Mass), but, when initiated, the Board Meeting was the only longboarder exclusive event in the world; since that first event, the Board Meeting has spread to eleven chapters across Canada.  Not only is it a great way for longboarders to assert their legitimacy, it’s an excellent example of a community allowed to manifest itself on the streets of our city in the name of fun.  The Board Meeting is promoted exclusively by word of mouth – longboarders spot other longboarders and pass along a web URL – and, in a tongue-in-cheek gesture, all riders arrive at the meeting point sporting a button down and a tie.  Together, we ride through the city, a chain of more than 300 riders that snakes out for more than a kilometer at times, hooting, hollering, and high-fiving everyone we pass.

It may be civil disobedience, it may interrupt traffic in busy downtown Toronto, but it’s certainly lots of fun, and a celebration of the ways that strangers in a city can bond over shared interests. Like the incredible pillow fights and streetcar parties organized by Toronto’s Newmindspace, the Board Meeting is symptomatic of a healthy city beaming with creative civic pride.  As we work towards a vision of a sustainable future, my hope is that it includes commuting experiences that are predicated on fun, civic engagement, and community.  And nice big S-turns on a traffic-free street.