The twenty-first century has witnessed a new wave of serious bicycle history, following a boom in urban biking for adult transportation—what one historian has called a “cycling turn” in mobilities scholarship. As part of this turn, several books—including Fucoloro, Biking Uphill in the Rain (2023); Friss, On Bicycles (2019); and Finison, Boston’s Twentieth-Century Bicycling Renaissance (2019)—have recounted the surprisingly rich bicycle histories of individual North American cities. The problem for many of these single-city case studies is often significance: What larger story can the experience of a single city tell the rest of us?

Koehl’s clearly stated thesis and purposeful survey successfully transcends Toronto’s individual case, focusing on how strangely divisive bicycle transportation has been as a mobility practice. “What is it about this simple machine that it should be so loved by some yet despised by others?” he asks (p. ix). The answer is that it is not the bicycle itself—the object—that has mattered, but its users—children, immigrant groups, and nonautomotive outsiders—and their lack of policy influence. “Our transportation system wasn’t shaped by a simple, dispassionate assessment of choices between available technologies but by public perceptions of the user,” Koehl answers (pp. ix–x).

Wheeling Through Toronto serves as a broad indictment of municipal leaders in Canada and the United States who have indulged in vibes-based transportation decision-making throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Their decisions might be cloaked in a dispassionate language of engineering and planning, but they actually reflect prejudice and presumption about public space and those who can claim it. The book’s subtitle calls attention to the “bicycle and its riders”; for Koehl, it is the powerlessness of those riders that matters. [End Page 569]

An environmental lawyer, adjunct professor, and experienced cycling advocate, Koehl has produced a readable and well-sourced history of both Toronto cycling and the institutions of local governance. The book is periodized into six eras, with the pandemic as an epilogue. The first five eras are largely explored through primary sources: mainly journalistic coverage, but also nuanced and insightful use of trial transcripts, city directories, legislation, and government reports. With an extensive reading of newspapers and magazines, Koehl also characterizes the relative absence of stories as they disappear from the press. The last chapters are from Koehl’s critical perspective as an advocate, personally knowledgeable about the geography of the city and its government institutions.

Unique contributions of this work include a focus on utilitarian or transportation cycling, excluding recreational or competitive riding almost entirely. Koehl also excels at critical readings of legal sources to portray the plight of victims of traffic violence, whether in the case of an early bicycle advocate ironically charged with reckless driving, the dying utterances of telegraph messengers, or horrific details of a coroner’s inquest and misleading media coverage in 1979. Throughout, Koehl chips away at our self-soothing myth that there is any such thing as a safe motorcar (p. 152). The strengths of this work lie in these primary sources and clear writing; while the work fits in well with mobilities scholarship regarding automobility (particularly in the way it understands cycling as a precursor to the early automobile), for the most part it is not explicitly situated in that secondary literature, nor in histories of technology. It would seem, however, that Peter Norton’s Fighting Traffic (2011) has shaped Koehl’s understanding of “motordom.”

While the University of Toronto Press hardcover presents as a thick tome, the page design is readable and spacious. Big full-bleed images—and the occasional two-page spread—supplement the uncluttered layout. Adding to readability for a general audience (but frustrating for scholars), the text uses unnumbered notes keyed to pages; occupying a quarter of the total page count, the endnotes are discursive and sufficient for scholars to find sources.

Koehl describes a path for Toronto that is distinct from…