It is a common misconception that biking in the winter is “clearly” an impossible activity to do.
BUT- I already know what you’re going to say: “It’s unsafe,” “It’s too crazy,” or “I 100% care about saving the planet! Stop Complaining!” (Now off to my 2 ton, gas-guzzling Escalade, and I’ll keep trusting my Mom that it’s always the person’s if they get hit.)
But people have a point in that HERE, in Orchard Park it’s not really safe to ride bikes, not now or even in the summer. And that’s the case with a lot of US towns and cities, even in more progressive ones, such as NYC and Los Angeles.
But what if I told you that it’s kinda your fault also?
Let me explain.
A lot of cities used to look great: they all looked how European cities do, with safe walking and biking spaces, and dense neighborhoods and shopping areas that built a better sense of community. Despite the fact that this was all fine and that cars didn’t need all of this space for traffic control, regular people were fine with local governments bulldozing these areas anyway. These areas most often included housing areas that could have been saved, giving shelter to thousands of people, who were somehow completely fine with the wasting of tax dollars towards thruways, if we just thought of using various alternative types of transportation to get around, like by bus or train–or bicycle.
So, what does this have to do with me, you, and winter cycling? Well, all of this bulldozing didn’t just go through cities; it went through villages and the towns, too. And since all of this new infrastructure was overwhelmingly friendly to cars, we followed suit, but we didn’t really care. We, the citizens, passed off good infrastructure as easy and just added more lanes to fix traffic. It just adds more to the problem. The problem for urban activists is not the road itself, but the balance of the road among different forms of transport. When cars, bikes, buses (and if you really have the money, trams) all have comfortably sized spaces for them on a street, the environmental impacts of these now slightly larger streets are canceled out by the now spread-out traffic, which causes much more of an environmental impact by themselves with everyone forced to use one particularly environmentally unfriendly form of travel. And these streets don’t have to be so large–take a Google Maps walk through Amsterdam or Delft, a smaller city in the Netherlands.
But car infested streets create another problem–winter cycling.
Winter cycling is hard already to cope with, even in places with better biking infrastructure.
Because all of the snow is thrown around the “bike lane” (painted lines on the side of the street), winter biking is useless. And riding on the sidewalk, where the snow is mushy and not really meant for the biker, is nearly impossible.
Now, it’s the fault of the local street cleaners to clean that stuff up because otherwise the place is unsafe, forcing people to make the choice to walk or drive, not paying attention to the values or the health conditions of the people using sidewalks. These values are likely being environmentally friendly and being logical on how they get to places with those values. They can’t even ride the bus to get to their grandparents or to the city without waiting an hour for the bus to come and an extra five to get there and get back combined!
Ah, the street-designing incompetence: funny how it doesn’t match with our professed values.
