Having had several days where the weather has been good and the sunlight has brought out the very best in Vancouver tonight’s bike parade was a rather gloomy affair.

Sadly few modern cities of steel and concrete can look at their best in under darkened skies. However a real brightness was brought by the volunteers from the Hub in their bright yellow shirts, but oather than that it was a bit dour. A shame, because I had already done much of the route in the sunshine over the last few days and it was great and for some of the delegates this will be their main bike excursion around the city.

The other thing that ruined the photography was the lack of many interesting participants from the city, I was really hoping we might get some of the cycling sub-cultures out on the street. Our delegates were somewhat uniform because they are almost all on the Bixi public bike sharing machines from Montreal and wearing the uniform black Lazer helmets issued by the organisers to encourage us to comply with the mandatory helmet law here. (Although many didn’t comply.) Thank heavens for some Dutch humour – they always say laughter is one of the greatest weapons in advocacy. Well done.

So limited photography of the kind I like, you will have to go back the Vienna RadPaRade for some real cycling diversity. But a few shots – we did enjoy ourselves and for those that had never done a Velo-city bike parade with 800 people in a close road convory were really enjoying the novelty.