Waterloo’s bike mayor is fostering community to get more people on bikes

When Arcy Canumay first immigrated to Canada from the Philippines in 2004, he initially took up cycling as a way to get to work faster. His bike was one of his main methods of transportation until the birth of his second child, when he had to buy a car to get the baby home from the hospital.

Canumay’s cycling advocacy started around 2016, when he started volunteering with the Sustainable Waterloo region and found out about their TravelWise program, which aims to reduce the number of people driving to work alone.

The importance of advocacy in the cycling community

In 2019, while looking for work related to sustainable transportation, Canumay stumbled upon the BYCS website. BYCS (pronounced “bikes”) is the organisation that runs the bike mayor network across the world. He reached out for more information and started the process of becoming Waterloo’s first bike mayor.

“I was so excited to start in 2020,” Canumay said. “It was volunteer, so it wasn’t paid work, but this is something I really love doing.”

Canumay’s focus in his advocacy has always been building community and making connections.

“My priority was to collaborate with organisations in my city in Waterloo,” Canumay said. All bike mayors are given the opportunity to choose what their priority will be during their term, and Canumay felt working with organisations to promote cycling was his priority for Waterloo.

Canumay’s first goal as bike mayor was to organise an event. As he started during the winter, he decided on a screening of the film Motherload, a documentary about a mother’s journey to using a cargo bike. The event was a success, but would be the last before the pandemic hit.

“I think biking really was a great thing to help me not lose my mind,” Canumay laughs. The pandemic put a pause on anything Canumay could do as bike mayor until outside gathering restrictions were lifted.

“I just reached out to the real mayor and said, ‘Hey, I’m the bicycle mayor, why don’t we do a bike ride?’” Canumay said. The mayor agreed and this was the beginning of many bike rides and conversations with various elected officials around the Waterloo region.

Helping cyclists ride safely

These conversations led to the establishment of a 30 km temporary bike lane between Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge.

“I would say that was the highlight of my first year as bike mayor,” Canumay said.

One of Canumay’s main focuses is promoting cycling to underrepresented groups, especially new Canadians, particularly by introducing them to organisations in Waterloo to get them into cycling. Last year, Canumay participated in a welcoming day for new immigrants to Canada.

“I could relate to their faces. When I was new in Canada I was like ‘where do I start, what questions do I ask?’” Canumay said. “So I was trying to help them, but through cycling.”

Most recently, Canumay was invited to a meeting of European bike mayors, where he was struck by the story of Kyiv’s bike mayor, Oleksii Khvorostenko, who is still using his position to organise deliveries of food and other necessities to residents.

“It’s so awesome that you continue to be a bike mayor,” Canumay says of Khvorostenko. “And that hit me that, hey, being a bike mayor is important.”