The night began with a celebration of how far city cycling has come, as 150 people gathered at the Gladstone Hotel to launch Dandyhorse, an artsy magazine for Toronto's burgeoning ranks of eco-hip bike enthusiasts.
It ended with news of another cyclist dead after a conflict with a car driver, and on Bloor Street of all places: a long-contested route for its lack of bicycle lanes.
Yvonne Bambrick, head of the fledgling Toronto Cyclists Union, couldn't bring herself to spread the dark news when she received a text message four hours into the festivities.
"I decided not to share it with anyone and waited until I got home to read through the information," Ms. Bambrick said. "I didn't want to spoil it."
Cycling in Toronto has been on a steady roll into the mainstream in recent years, with more people taking to their two-wheelers for environmental, economic and health reasons. Ms. Bambrick's group and the new magazine are seen as signs of this maturity. At the same time, the city has lagged in providing bicycle lanes, seen as a key component in improving safety and thus heading off conflicts between cyclists, motorists and pedestrians.
"There are lots of good reasons to use a bike, and we've got more and more people making that choice," Ms. Bambrick said, "but we really need to address proper integration of cycling into our transportation network, and we're barely scratching the surface on that right now."
As the city provides roads for motorists, sidewalks for pedestrians and transit for commuters, many cyclists are frustrated with the lack of similar accommodation. This frustration, added to the sheer danger of sharing road space with cars and trucks, can make for an alienating mix.
"I think when you're vulnerable you tend to be a little bit more defensive," said Matthew Blackett, a nine-months-a-year cyclist and publisher of Spacing, a magazine that fosters debate around the use of Toronto's public spaces.
That defensiveness, often taken for hot-headedness, can quickly surface in a cyclist who has just had a collision or near-collision with a car, as Mr. Blackett has learned from experience.
"It's not aggression, like coming at them, but it's just like, 'Holy shit, did you just see what you did?' " he said. "And I don't think that's a hothead cyclist; I think that's any person who's seen their life flash before their eyes as the rear wheel of a truck rolls by their head.
"That's going to happen, and that may be how the incident starts with Michael Bryant and the cyclist."
High-profile tragedies aside, Mr. Blackett said the car-versus-bike rhetoric that often follows is overheated and distorts the reality: that most motorists and cyclists share the roads without incident each day.
Accommodating cyclists need not be framed as a "war on the car," as it was this year when city council decided to replace the middle reversible lane on Jarvis Street with curbside bike lanes, Mr. Blackett said. "It's about providing safety for people."
Nowhere has the lack of cycling lanes been more loudly and repeatedly noted than on Bloor Street, where Monday night's horror played out. Coveted for its crosstown, east-west reach and lack of streetcar tracks, the Bloor-Danforth corridor has the added benefit of a subway line beneath it, negating, to the minds of many in the cycling community, the need for on-street parking. Many merchants, however, want the parking to stay.
Adrian Heaps, a councillor who chairs the city's cycling advisory committee, said a consultant will be hired this fall and report to council next spring with a business case for bike lanes along Bloor, which he hopes will reassure merchants.
"Cyclists in this city are actually ahead of where public policy is at this point, so we're playing catch-up," Mr. Heaps said. "However, we've made exponential gains over the last couple of years, and I'm hoping that we're going to reach that point of equilibrium over the next couple of years."