Just off the shore of Toronto, in Lake Ontario, lie a couple of islands that are a car-free paradise (with a bit of Coney Island dropped into the middle of them).

To get there, you have to access Toronto's waterfront, which the city has hidden from it's downtown populace behind a freeway, railroad tracks, wide fast streets, and a wall of Los-Angeles-style condo towers that you can only enter through the parking garage. But once you get through all that, the waterfront is pretty nice, and has a mostly well-connected waterfront path along it. It's a little boring, because those condo towers are showing their backsides to the waterfront (parking garages and concrete walls disguised by trees), but hey, it's got water, grass and trees. People make the trip.

From here you take the ferry across to the Islands. On the other side, you land in a pretty-but-cheesy parkland recreational paradise, with snack shops and paddle-boat lakes and fountains whose bottoms are painted sky blue. You know the kind of place. It's packed on warm weekends with city dwellers escaping the heat and the city, picnicking and barbecuing. I was there on a Monday, so it was nice and quiet.

There's a bike rental shop, and about half of the passengers on my ferry walked directly there. These bike rental places, on beaches and in parks around the world, are a nice proof of concept that People Like to Ride Bikes. Forget all the reasons why they don't, in real life. In a nice place, they ride.

I stood around and watched everyone gleefully pedal in circles before heading off down the paths. Then my mom and I hopped on our own bikes and went exploring.

The part of the island that is not devoted to day-tripping city folk is a car-free residential paradise, with small old houses on little streets, beautiful gardens meticulous and anarchic alike, and few things locked up or stored out of sight. It smells lovely, looks lovely, it's quiet…and there are bicycles piled EVERYWHERE. I've never seen so many and such a variety of cargo bikes and folding bikes as among the 200-something houses on these islands. (Check out that wheelchair trike! And a Bakfiets. Most houses had at least three bikes parked in the garden.)
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The residents I talked to on the ferry estimated that 70% of the islanders don't have cars stored on the mainland. Since they have to be permanent residents to live there – no vacation houses allowed – that means they all do their shopping and other errands on the mainland, and that 70% do it exclusively by bike and transit. Hence the great cargo bike selection. About the same proportion of households send someone across the water to work or school every day, which explains the heaps of bikes locked at the ferry docks on the island and in transit on the ferry itself.

My mom and I biked in circles, enjoying the freedom of car-free streets and checking out all the cool stuff in people's yards. Here she is taking her one-speed off-road:

We went to the end of the old breakwater (which connected to the mainland until a big storm washed it apart, making these islands into islands) and took a touristy photo (below).

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I was just loopy with how nice it all was. Mom returned her rented bike, and I went off to the other side of the island to kill some time.

I came upon a public school a few minutes from the ferry dock, that serves locals and city kids (it's a science magnet). Ten kids and a teacher tromped by in plastic rain slickers and galoshes, holding empty plastic aquariums, heading for the shore. And I was just thinking about how nice it must be to put your kids on the ferry and then know that they're walking to school and back in a safe, no-traffic environment, or better yet to live on the island and just let them wobble off on their little bikes every morning for the mile-long ride without a second thought, when I rounded a corner and came upon…

…SCHOOL BUSES. Giant, bright yellow, Laidlaw school buses. Two of them. What were they doing there? I was horrified and mystified. They were too wide to even fit down the residential streets on the island. But more important than How, Why??? I thought kids got bused to school if the distance was too far or the streets to unsafe for walking. Here I was in Traffic Safety Paradise, a 15 minute walk at most from the ferry dock, what could they possibly be for?

I went into the office and asked. I'm pretty sure noone has ever walked in and inquired about the school buses, who rides them, and where to. I got a weird reception.

The answer is really disappointing. They're for driving the city kids, 130 of them, to and from the ferry dock every day (30 students live on the island). I didn't ask why, I really didn't want to know. It was just going to make me more upset. In case you think it's a safety thing, here's a picture of the route from the school to the dock, on which I was passed by one vehicle – a golf cart:

Back on the ferry to the mainland, I asked one of the bike-trailer-toting residents about the buses. She said "Oh well it's too far to walk, that's why they bus them." I pressed her a little bit, and she conceded that well it wasn't really that far, and the island kids walk or bike past the dock to their homes, and the students at the Montessori school on the island walk when the weather is warm…but, she said, "They're the city children, so, you know…"

I'm sure the parents and school administrators would scold me for forgetting Stranger Danger, or bad weather, or kids-getting-into-something-and-making-everyone-miss-the-ferry problems. But I don't buy it. Those can all be overcome.

What will it take to overcome this expectation that children will go everywhere by car or bus? That 15 minutes is too much time to spend on a walk? That being outside is a pain rather than a pleasure? I can't think of anywhere in North America it would be easier to overcome all of this – so much so that the entire island-school-ferry deal could have been a Potemkin-villiage contrived for the sole purpose of letting kids walk to school. That's how perfect it is.

Meanwhile, these islands and the car-free neighborhood are so appealing that the waiting list to buy a house there (it's managed by the government, and houses are sold through a land trust at appraised value) has been closed at 500 people. About 3 or 4 turn over each year. Hundreds of people want what these people have, even if it means, as it will for a majority of them, giving up the car. This island represents a chance for them to get a car-free neighborhood not through incremental change in their neighborhoods and cities, but all at once, and without giving up the big metropolis that pays their salary and provides everything else they need.

I got back on the ferry feeling sad and disappointed, but was cheered up again by the dozen people riding with bikes and trikes and empty trailers into town, and the crowd with groceries, nursery plants, and briefcases on their bikes waiting to board the ferry at the other end, on their way home.

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