A Tale of Two Bike Shows

Toronto hosted two bike shows this past weekend: those being the Toronto Bicycle Show and E-Bike Expo and Gremlins’ Vintage MTB Show. The former returned to the CNE after being held at the International Centre near Pearson Airport in recent years, while the latter was next to Blood Brothers Brewery on Geary Avenue. I went to both shows yesterday morning and here are my thoughts.

Toronto Bicycle Show

As some folks noted on Reddit and on Jun’s blog, I found the bike show had gone downhill since I last attended years ago before the pandemic. There were only a few local vendors such as Popawheelie, Wheels on Bloor, Pedalinx, D’Ornellas, and a Waterloo based vendor. There were a few e-bike vendors, a couple of bike clubs, some cycle tourism booths, and other vendors including some which had nothing to do with bikes. Unfortunately, there weren’t any cargo bikes or Bromptons.

Having said that, there were a few bikes that caught my attention. EZBike – which recently moved into the former Urbane Cyclist space by College and Spadina – had several e-bikes including folding ones. One in particular – this Blutron EB350F – can run on throttle alone or pedal assist and can be bought pre-owned for $349 or new for around $499 which goes to show how low cost they can be. While the ride quality is not bad, I wouldn’t get one. However, EZBike sells other brand e-bikes such as Aventon and Velotric, while they are working on brining in Bosch.

EBIKECAN in Richmond Hill started in 2022 and sells a range of their house brand e-bikes. One that intrigued me was their Aurora GRX gravel bike which has the Shimano GRX 11-speed groupset and looks slim for an e-bike. While the ride is very good, its 44-lb weight is more than double that of my Brodie RoMax Adventure 1.0 and its 90 km range makes it only suitable for shorter gravel rides.

The Specialized S-Works is quite the beauty in dark red. One thing I noticed with this and many other high-end bikes is they come with Garmin bike computer mounts built in.

Vélo Québec was promoting their “Le Québec à vélo” digital platform which will officially launch on April 14. Not only does it allow you to see bike routes, repair shops, food, and accommodation on one site; it also allows you to filter them by region, duration, and kind of riding (e.g. road, gravel, touring, fatbike, etc.). It tells you the percentage of the route on bike paths, percentage on gravel roads, and cell service. I hope Ontario by Bike and Share The Road can team up to provide something similar for Ontario or even better, get Vélo Canada Bikes to expand this initiative nationwide! Ambroise told me this was inspired by similar initiatives in France and Germany.

Blacksmith Cycle had this sweet Bridge brand road bike.

The Toronto Bicycling Network was selling discounted memberships and jerseys at their booth. I seriously need to do one of their group rides soon.

D’Ornellas in Scarborough showed these Felt IA2.0 (white) and IAX (turquoise) triathlon bikes which are very aerodynamic and look like they were from the future!

If there was one vendor that ruined the show, it’s Emmo. They showcased several heavier scooter e-bikes pictured below and e-motorcycles which really should require licensing and insurance despite Emmo claiming you don’t need them. While I’m OK with pedal assist e-bikes – especially for cargo bikes – I do not feel comfortable sharing bike lanes and trails with these e-motorcycles.

If that wasn’t ridiculous enough, Emmo even showcased an enclosed mobility scooter!

The bike show had a test track which you could test ride certain bikes before buying.

While the bike show had a few highlights, I encourage Benjamin and other show organizers to regroup and work on improving the show in future years to include more local vendors and cargo bikes.

Vintage MTB Show

To get to the Vintage MTB Show, I took the RapidTO bus-bike lanes on Dufferin Street for the first time since installation. While they only go to Dundas right now – which will be extended to Bloor in time for FIFA – I was floored with how built-up Dufferin had become from King to just north of Queen.

The Vintage MTB show is co-hosted by Gremlins’ Bicycle Emporium from London, ON and Toronto’s Boneshaker MTB club. The exhibit was small, but still worth stopping at and had four collectors contributing to the show. One wall had some mountain biking photos along with a row of bikes from the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Several jerseys were placed throughout the room, while two of the walls had bikes placed four high.

One bike I liked was this green camo 1989 Brodie Romax; long before that line was converted to drop bar gravel bikes.

There were four Brodie bikes lined up in the middle column of that wall including the green camo one.

A tandem Ritchey bike was hanging from the ceiling.

The merchandise table including some apparel and bells.

One last photo before heading out.

There were a lot of people out on Geary yesterday for the Geary Art Crawl.

With temperatures being 12’C that afternoon, it was a nice day to be out for a ride even if one of the bike shows was a letdown. Be sure to take advantage of the warmer weather when you can since the weather will be near freezing again on Thursday!