Toronto
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Next ride
Date: Saturday 15 June 2013
Time: Gather at 12 noon for socializing, body painting, bike decorating etc. Bring food to share if you wish. Ride starts at 1 pm, following a route along several major streets in the downtown core.
Location: It starts at Coronation Park (by the waterfront at the centre of the park)
Posters/flyers
This was the poster for the 2012 WNBR Toronto ride.
One version is a PDF for printing to paper, the other is a smaller PNG image for web and email. Spread far and wide!
Sign up for updates using the form at the World Naked Bike Ride website.
Facebook has unfortunately proven to be worse than useless; Facebook's Groups like its WNBR Toronto Group vanish without warning simply because Facebook's website belongs to Facebook, not to any of us, and for no other reason. So in order to stay in touch be sure to sign up to get ride updates directly at World Naked Bike Ride, and/or check this Toronto WNBR wiki.
Route
Start: Coronation Park by the lake. South of the CNE's Princes Gate. Meet at 12:00 noon, ride 1pm. Bring water and sunblock, and perhaps a picnic lunch.
Route The clockwise route passes many of Toronto's landmarks and popular areas. Coronation Park on the waterfront has always served us well as a picturesque and practical gathering/staring point - the 2012 ride will be starting from there as usual. At the suggestion of some riders, the tail end of the ride is changed to scoot west across Queens Quay back to the starting point at Coronation Park. There would also be the option for a contingent to "peel off" at the foot of Bay Street, get dressed in the park by the water and head over by ferry to the beautiful Toronto Islands for an evening at Hanlan's clothing optional beach.
Below is the route:
What to bring
- Water
- Sunscreen
- Decorations
- Signs for yourself and your bike
- Posters
- Costumes
- Body paints
- A personal picnic lunch including beverages for the day
- Bicycle helmet – let's be good role models!
- Footwear.
Legality
Remember, it's perfectly legal for women to go topless in Canada anywhere that a man might, which includes cycling on city streets.
Furthermore, the Crown has acknowledged that participating in an orderly event naked is not illegal, so long as you are wearing something, such as shoes. (<- Those links now work! June 2012)
And you will also be happy to know that we had a polite and respectful bicycle police escort from 2005 to 2010, who kindly stopped traffic for us on busy left turns, and who did their best to keep us all together as a group.
Photos, Movies and Audio
It would be great if someone could take the time to research for missed media from 2011 and previous years - there's probably a lot of interesting material to dig up. Any volunteers? Many blogs have been left out on purpose where they've simply re-used photos from sources already listed here and don't say anything new and so are not of primary interest - though blogging about the WNBR is always encouraged!
2011 saw a surge of interest in the WNBR, perhaps in response to the unfortunate swing towards anti-humanist and anti-sustainability agendas in both Toronto's municipal and federal governments since 2010. Sometimes it feels like we're going backwards, like cycling uphill with a headwind; all the more reason