Montreal’s Velorutionary Bikeshevik Robert Silverman Dies Aged 89

“Bicycle Bob” Silverman of Montreal, Canada, died on 20 February, aged 89. He is credited by many as the founding father of Montreal’s strong cycling culture.

The largest city in Canada’s Québec province, Montreal is considered the best cycling city in North America. It is where, in 2009, modern big-city bike-share schemes took hold, and it has more than 400 miles of cycleways, 150 miles of them separated from motor traffic.

A two-mile curb-protected cycleway in the Central Business District was named for Claire Morissette, the cofounder—with Silverman—in 1975 of bicycle-advocacy group Le Monde à Bicyclette. There have now been calls for another city center cycleway to be named for Silverman.

Many of the campaign tactics employed by Le Monde à Bicyclette are still used by advocacy groups around the world, including “die-ins.”

Montreal’s first such demonstration–modeled after play-dead protests in the Netherlands from earlier in the 1970s–used black humor, urging protestors to “Come die-in with me.”

A placard at one of these 1970s die-ins demanded “vélo pour la vie”—“bicycle for life.”

“When I became a bicycle advocate [in the 1970s], for the first time I had a reason to live,” the English-speaking Silverman told me in 2017.

“I have dedicated my life to making the world a better place via a simple solution: the bike!”

Militant ecologist

Le Monde à Bicyclette—literally, “The World of the Bicycle,” or Citizens for Cycling, or just MAB—was a motley collection of francophone nationalists and anglophone anarchists who, after several years of campaigning, successfully persuaded the left-leaning politicians of Montreal to provide for people on bikes.

One of the key asks of the anti-automobile activism group was a city center curb-protected cycleway, and this was built in 2007, replacing a car lane. It was named for Morissette, who had died from cancer earlier in the same year. Signs on the Piste Claire-Morissette state proudly that she was a “militante écologiste.”

Morissette was the creative brains of the organization; Silverman was the lead actor. To protest at the lack of a safe bridge crossing for cyclists over the St. Lawrence River, he dressed up as Moses and, clasping the Ten Bicycle Commandments (“Thou shalt not Kill, Thou shalt not Pollute . . .”), he attempted in vain to part the “Red Sea” for a gaggle of waiting cyclists. The local media loved this and similar stunts the group pulled, such as attaching wings to bicycles, attempting to fly over the river, and towing bicycles on rafts behind canoes. In 1990, Montreal built a pedestrian and cyclist bridge and added bike lanes to other bridges.

Perhaps because many members were comfortably bilingual and Silverman was a poet at heart, MAB used words as weapons, although always humorously. MAB’s guerrilla protesters were “vélo-Quixotes,” “vélo-holy rollers,” and “vélorutionaries”; they fought against “autocracy” using “cyclodramas.”

Silverman wrote poems and songs for the group’s newsletter, such as this one from 1976:

Forward bicycles

Listen to the echoes

The future of bicycles

It’s the end of cars

Le Monde à Bicyclette Wants to change the planet

Le Monde à Bicyclette Will save the planet

It’s the end of the scourge

No more plots

No more pollution

For it is the revolution.

Cyclo provocations

A statement from today’s Le Monde à Bicyclette said that Silverman was now “pedaling in peace.” No funeral details have been released, but there will undoubtedly be a celebratory bicycle ride.

In the 1970s, the group’s longest-running cyclodrama was when activists carried bulky items onto Montreal’s metro—a ladder, skis, a papier-mâché hippopotamus—while those with less bulky bicycles were refused access.

After three years of these “cyclo-provocations,” MAB won the subway access for cyclists it had sought. MAB also constructed car-sized wooden frames for placing over moving bicycles to demonstrate how much space Montreal would save if it catered to cyclists, and not just to automobiles.

“Motorists got really mad at that,” remembered Silverman, with a twinkle in his eye.

Always willing to suffer for the cause, Silverman was sentenced to eight days in the clink for refusing to pay a small fine levied after he was caught illegally painting a cycle lane on a residential street. (He was released after two days.) 

Modern big-city bike-share schemes were born in Montreal. The municipally-owned Bixi (a portmanteau of “bike” and “taxi”) bike-share scheme was modelled on the Vélib scheme in Paris, and an earlier one in Lyon. Bixi was originally owned by the city of Montreal but losses eventually forced the company into bankruptcy. The international division has long been profitable and is now known as PBSC Urban Solutions, with the motto: “Changing the world, one city at a time.”

London’s “Boris” bikes were supplied by Bixi, and they were originally exact facsimiles of the muscular machines first used in Montreal.

In a poem about Silverman, Morissette wrote that “Bicycle Bob” was “a disturber, a fanatic, an epic bikeshevik.”

“By tens, hundreds, thousands, people are proud to ride,” she added.

“You make our dreams come true, thanks to you we can breathe.”