The thing I like about Bixi is the chain and gears are all covered, so I could wear my dress pants and dress shoes and not worry about getting grease all over them.

A co-worker took some photos of me with the bike.

Saw over 100 other cyclists on my way to work today.

I love crowds of cyclists!

The mornings are getting warmer, and the number of cyclists out there on the roads with me is going up.

It’s hard to tell from the small cellphone photo, but there are at least 8 cyclists in front of me.

That guy directly in front of me had some sweet bags… the courier one was a stylish Star Wars one with an icon of Darth Vader and the words “The Power of the Dark Side”.

This morning was very sunny (yet very windy – a head wind… let’s hope it stays around for the ride east on the way home this afternoon…) so I snapped another photo.

It doesn’t do the view justice, but you can kind of see what I mean about being able to watch new downtown condos reach a little farther into the sky every day.

Today, I snapped a photo of Bay St, looking south from Wellesley.  This has been an ever-changing view for the past couple of years as tons of new condos have been popping up into the sky.

I really like biking Bay in the mornings because of this interesting, urban view (Bay is one of the few places outside of the bank towers downtown where Toronto feels like the massive urbanity of New York).

The forecast can be for rain, but checking the radar, you can see if it’s a ton of rain or just intermittent rain – and perhaps plan your commute accordingly.

I ride in the rain a lot, but most often in the late spring and summer when the rain is refreshing rather than cold… so at this time of year I try to avoid it.

This morning I saw that the rain would be ending for 30-60 minutes … giving me just long enough for a leisurely ride downtown to work while staying mostly dry.

It was misty out, which was refreshing, and I snapped a cellphone photo of the fog as I crossed the Bloor Viaduct.

Usually, the Viaduct offers a great view of downtown and it’s fun to watch all the new condo towers rising a bit higher every day.  Today though, it was just foggy misty white… and the sidestreets north of the Danforth I took on the way to the Viaduct were nice and hushed and quiet in the fog.

15 minutes after I got to work, it started raining again.

Looking forward to biking home in +9C temperatures.

It’s great seeing lots of bikes on the road these days, even as morning temperatures drop.

Is it also weird that I want to get a new cell phone just to be able to take better quality photos?

Here’s the view shortly after I leave home on my way downtown.  A sidestreet north of the Danforth, near Woodbine:

This is the view east from just west of Wellesley and Church:

Why do I like this view so much?

Wellesley and Church is a great vibrant urban neighbourhood downtown… it’s a mix of a ton of things that make Toronto great: large numbers of people, diverse cultures, chain retailers and independent stores, highrise buildings and low-rise homes.

The Wellesley bikelane is my favourite bikelane in the city … they put it in last year, striping off parts of the road that were already well used by cyclists.  Before the bikelanes, there was still just 1 car lane in each direction… but cars sort of went all over the place.  Now, cars stay in their lanes (for the most part) and cyclists have a clear ride.

Lots of people.   There are always lots of cars, cyclists and pedestrians in this area.  Just behind me when I took these photos is a crosswalk across Wellesley between Yonge and Church and I always have to stop for people crossing the street (which I’m glad to do).   Traffic is slow, and that makes things interesting.

The condo at Wellesley and Sherbourne.  That tall building in the background was finished last year, and improves the eastern view considerably (in my opinion).  Like all the other condos going up downtown, it’s a building that makes a big visual impact and impression of a thriving dense city.  The more people living downtown, the more people-friendly our city will be.

Plus, the condo is built on the curve of Wellesley between Jarvis and Sherbourne, so you can see it for a long way.