On Potato Omelets and Winter Cycling
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 03.22.08
Snow Sidewalk: Nadya Peek / Flickr
Alex Marshall of Streetsblog discusses how cultural norms affect us and keep us off our bikes in winter in North America, comparing New York to Amsterdam with a side dish of Spanish omelettes.
::Streetsblog
As we head into spring and the warmer months... I’m sure I will once again start riding regularly. But maybe next winter, or the one after, I may make different choices. Cycling as transportation is increasingly popular in New York, and as this popularity grows, I suspect we will reach a tipping point, to use Malcom Gladwell’s famous phrase. I look forward to a future, perhaps not so long away, when even the fairest-weather riders like me venture out in even the worst of weather, doing so as easily as taking a bite of an easily-made potato omelet.
I've made the transition to pretty much an every-day rider, and this winter I missed only about 4 days of my 15-mile round trip due to weather. Granted, here in NYC it was pretty mild (we had only one significant snowfall), but I still managed to bike through a couple of serious cold snaps. As the Scottish say, there's no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes.
After a few years of everyday commuting, I've found that the number of days that rain (for example) keeps me off the bike is much, much smaller than the actual number of days when it rains. A good internet weather radar map can show if a storm is just passing over, or is permanently pouring, and in many cases leaving 5 minutes earlier or later can avoid me getting soaked. And when it's raining, it's often not raining hard enough to get me wet.
Ice and substantial snow is a different matter, but rarer than you'd think.
I live in Edmonds, near Seattle. To be honest the weather would be almost a non-issue if it wasn't in addition to the hills in this area. I love that the Dutch have had such success with cycling but the place is basically flat.
I have a 15 mile round trip to work with 1,000ft of climbing. I do it every day, occasionally twice in a day for offsite meetings. I'm 48 years old. When I started four years ago, it took over 9 months to go from a soft pudgy grad student to a comfortable everyday rider. The only way I could stay with it is because we sold the car. Remove the alternatives if you want to stick with it.