How long can you stay alive without a bike lane?
Artist Marie LeBlanc Flanagan has designed an arcade-style video game that invites players to try their luck at cycling Toronto’s city streets without bike lanes.
The simple game, dubbed “Loser Lane,” allows users to make just two key strokes — left and right — as they maneuver their cyclist avatar through Toronto’s city streets.
Dangers that can end the game include cars, car doors and streetcar tracks.
As a cyclist, the artist said she was infuriated by Premier Doug Ford’s announcement that he would be removing bike lanes from Toronto streets so she poured her energy into creating the video game.
“I work through my issues by making playful little experimental things,” LeBlanc Flanagan told TorontoToday.
She said she’s often felt cycling in Toronto was akin to playing a video game but with higher stakes.
“Loser Lane” is a death march by design.
Players are usually dead within a few seconds. The words “Thanks Doug” then flash on the screen.
“It’s intentionally difficult,” LeBlanc Flanagan said. “There is no way to keep living — something will always get you.”
“Its inevitable you'll get hit, which is like reality.”
As far as she knows, the longest anyone has stayed alive in the game is around 90 seconds.
LeBlanc Flanagan said she was hit by a truck while cycling in Toronto once and went flying, although she said it was an accident on the driver’s part.
More recently, she wound up in the middle of a verbal altercation between a cyclist and a driver who were arguing over who could take up road space on a street without a bike lane.
“They were shouting ‘I need one metre,’ ‘No, I need one metre,’” LeBlanc Flanagan recalled.
“The infrastructure pitted people against each other,” she said, adding that it felt like “cosmic irony” this incident happened the same day she published her video game.
