Last night at the Gladstone the Bike Awards for 2009 was a good night crammed full of cool people, awards, politicians and beer. It was an interesting extreme of the City presenting it's official Bicycle-friendly Business Awards (which seems to often have non-profits get the awards for some reason) all the way to the Bike Pirates giving an award to possible-mayoral candidate Adam Giambrone who gamely accepted the nice looking bike statuette and gave a stump speech about how he was late because he was pushing for the Scarborough LRT and bike lanes.
The I Bike T.O. award was given to Ajith Aluthwatta of CultureLink. Ajith helped to spur a great project starting up to do bike outreach to newcomers. Ajith was typically humble and wanted to share it with the committee of CultureLink and bike union members that helped to bring it to fruition.
The I Bike TO judges (along with James Schwartz of The Urban Country) gave it some deep thought, and in the end decided that Ajith and the newcomer project represented a large missing piece in Toronto's cycling "scene". If we want to break out of the scene and be taken seriously in Toronto, cycling must be seen as viable by newcomers as well as established Torontonians as well as the small groups of mostly white folks who are actively involved. The award shows that other people are interested as well and want to push for better cycling for all.
See below for Tino's photo set:
