Submitted by John Allen, CRW Safety Coordinator
The video below, from the Boston Bike and Ped Advocates Facebook page, was only the first to point out that cycling in winter is a challenge, but it doesn’t have to be this bad!
Boston has had an unusually cold and snowy winter, and I suppose that most CRW members have put away their bikes for winter, are enjoying the luxury of a winter vacation in a warmer climate, or are sweating it out on a trainer indoors.
Some of us actually enjoy the challenge of riding in winter. I am like that.
I got used to winter cycling early when I rode to classes at Middlebury College in Vermont. I rode all around the town and even took short recreational rides in winter. Traffic was light and roads were cleared within hours after a snowstorm—if milk trucks do not get to the farms every day, the farmers have to dump milk. Once the sun came out after a storm, roads were soon clear and dry.
There were slippery spots: I took a few falls, but never got hurt beyond a few bruises.
I have experienced some serious winter weather since I moved to the Boston area. Indeed, I lived and rode through the blizzard of 1978. As it was getting started, one dark evening, there was only a dusting of snow on the streets but the wind was furious. That blizzard taught me a safety message that has stuck with me ever since: wind may slow and even stop you, but gusts do not come on so quickly that they knock you over. You will steer into it to keep your balance.
As I rode home from Allston to Cambridgeport in the blizzard, I was first confronted with a headwind so strong that I had to get off my bicycle, stoop down and walk. Later, the wind came from the side and there were moments when my bicycle faced diagonally into the wind, drifting crabwise. After I got home, the house shook all night, and for the next few days I traded my bicycle for cross-country skis. I avoided skiing over parked cars in the interest of harmony with my neighbors.
Climate change has mostly given us milder winters, but it also leads to extremes including this winter’s bitter cold and heavy snowfall. I am not nearly as hard-core as CRW’s Century Joe Repole, and I don’t ride much for recreation in winter. But I do ride for local transportation.
The harder I ride, the warmer I get. My main impediments to winter riding are two: cold hands and feet, and that I can’t just sit down for a rest stop on grass covered by 12 inches of snow. Cold hands and feet may, however, be due for a technical solution. My wife goes birding and has purchased electric hand warmers and electrically-heated socks. Unfortunately, sitting down in the snow doesn’t invite a technical solution.
The city, inner suburbs and town centers offer multiple routes between most points, so winter riding is easier than on the country roads. This winter has offered a reminder of what I used to go through every year. The main safety issues I confront are about slippery surfaces and narrowed roads.
To avoid an icy surface, it is even more important than usual to stay out of the gutter. That often requires controlling a travel lane when you could normally allow motorists to pass safely. On my way from my home to downtown Waltham recently, I found myself pulling aside to allow a queue of motor vehicles to pass on a one-lane street which normally has ample sharing width. There was ice in the gutter, and plowed snow narrowed the street. When snowbanks narrow streets, you may find it more advantageous to ride on a main street where motorists have another lane in which to pass you. Main streets also tend to get cleared of snow sooner, and motor traffic helps to clear it.
Under slippery conditions, slow is safe, so you can put a foot down before you would fall over. An older, eventually disposable bicycle is preferable, as it will rust. It must accept and be equipped with full fenders, to prevent slush from gumming up the brakes and drive train and to reduce salt spotting of the eyeglasses or goggles which keep the sting of cold air out or your eyes. Safety requires open eyes.
After extreme snowfalls like this winter’s, piles of snow may be too high to see over. This is also less of a concern on bigger streets where there is more room to pull away from the edge and see farther into driveways and cross streets.
These challenges of course require you to be confident with lane control, and communicate well with motorists.
The most insidious challenge in winter riding is black ice. Streets are crowned so meltwater flows to the gutters. A conventional street allows snow to be plowed to the curb, and meltwater to run into the gutters, mostly. But crowning isn’t always perfect, especially after construction work, and rain followed by a drop in temperature can leave the entire street coated in black ice.
Black ice requires vigilance: it is visible only as shinier patches on the street, same as the meltwater that can produce it. If the temperature continues to drop and rain turns to snow, that may hide black ice. I’ll ride through an inch of snow that fell on dry pavement in sub-freezing conditions, but I’ll not ride where there may be hidden black ice.
Streets and paths that have been plowed, but are not clear and dry, are a particular challenge. Rutted tire tracks from slush that has refrozen are especially bad.
I bought a pair of studded snow tires for my city bike a few years ago and tried them out. They do greatly improve traction on ice, but I quickly gave up on them. They slowed me way down, and there were too few days that they would have made rideable.
Studded tires will make better sense on an e-bike, where the cost will be in range rather than speed. Do you want to go to the trouble of switching tires, or the added expense of keeping an e-bike just for winter? My hunch is that most people won’t, and will just wait out the few days till the streets are clear, as I do.
A tricycle is another option to reduce the risk of a fall, but with a tradeoff that it is clumsier to carry over snowbanks, wider, and has three tire tracks.
Let me finally mention special bicycle facilities.
Streets with painted bike lanes aren’t a special problem. If snow is plowed into the bike lane, the street is narrower and you must more often exercise lane control, but there are no unusual issues.
Shared-use paths can be usable in winter if they are plowed, but many are not, and even when they are, they usually are not salted. They are not usually crowned, and do not drain well; snowmelt puddles in them and freezes. You can’t rely on them for your daily commute unless you have studded tires. Barrier-separated bikeways are something else entirely. A parking-separated one can be plowed if parking is prohibited and violators are towed. If the barrier is with a curb or flexposts, plows will leave a snowbank upslope, spilling meltwater during a thaw. The meltwater refreezes into black ice. Only heavy and repeated salting can prevent that. The law of unintended consequences rules, yet some people in the bicycling community have even praised the snowbank as an enhancement to the barrier.
To keep a barrier-separated bikeway clear of black ice, drain grates have to be between the bikeway and the rest of the street, and both must slope down toward the drain grates. The reconstruction is expensive, but Copenhagen does that.
North American bicycling advocates and engineers seem to think that they have solved bicyclists’ problems without spending the funding to make a bikeway work year-round. They are designing what are in effect recreational routes, evidently because they can imagine riding in winter. Often the bikeways narrow the normally traveled part of the street, degrading that option.
If you go to the Boston Bike and Ped Advocates Facebook page, you’ll see a lot of complaints about winter maintenance of special bicycle facilities, or the lack of it—mostly the lack of it. The video at the head of this article was only the first in this winter’s onslaught of articles. Some bicycling advocates have taken to hand-shoveling out separated bikeways, for which I don’t hold out any high hopes unless they can recruit an army of helpers equipped with snow shovels and garden spreaders loaded with rock salt.
Finally, you might read a couple more comprehensive articles about winter riding:
Take some inspiration and additional advice from some other winter riders including intrepid CRW member Emily O’Brien.
And here’s the lowdown on commuting in winter from John Brooking, in Portland, Maine, in case you don’t think that Boston is cold enough.
