Home of the Winter Cyclist
And Other Crazy People.
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And Other Crazy People. |
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So you have convinced yourself that you want to try winter commuting by ICEBIKE, but would like to know what you are up against?
Just how often will you be riding in winter conditions, with snow and ice to contend with in addition to the usual problems of cycle-commuters? Motorists are convinced that every day from the first fallen leaf till the tulips bloom is one endless arctic nightmare. Windshields need to be scraped, cars won't start, every snow storm snarls traffic. Ride a Bike!?! Are you nuts?
Until you are out there every day, or you go digging through a mountain of statistics, you may have nothing but horror stories to go on when planning your winter commuting.
Luckily, some ICEBIKERS are the driven type who keep bike logs. One such cyclist is Bob VonMoss who bike commutes year round in Chicago.
Bob kept logs of his winter of 98/99 ICEBIKE Commutes to get a handle on just how often he was Really ICEBIKING. Here's what Bobs logs show:
| "Last Fall I started keeping track of the ICEBIKE
days to or from work to get an idea of how much ICEBIKING there really is around here. I colored in the days on a calendar and wrote the lowest temperature during the ride, based on weather service temps on their web page. "An ICEBIKING day is defined here as a day when the temp is at or below 32F/0C." The low temps are not the weather service low temps for the day, just the low temp *during* the ride to or from work.Also days off or holidays aren't counted, nor are Saturdays." |
Chicago
ICEBIKING
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If you plot the number number of commutes and the average commute temperatures you can see that most ICEBIKE Commutes occurred in January, even though Decembers rides averaged slightly colder. The coldest ride was minus 12, in January. The average low temp on the commute days was 20.8 F for the entire winter. (Remember, this sample only includes true ICEBIKE days. Days above freezing were not included).
In Mid-continental North America, if you bike commute on about 22 days a month, you can expect to ride in below freezing weather about half of the time in the dead of winter.
You can plan on temperatures 15 degrees (f) below freezing as an average. If you planned to "wimp out", January would be the month to do it, but even January is not that bad.
You will probably find that if you make it through December you will realize that it's not as bad as you thought. Stick with it day by day, perhaps skipping only the brutally cold or windy days. Once you stop, its hard to get motivated to start again.
While it's not often really miserably cold at these latitudes, there are still plenty of ice days. Knowing that half your rides for three months are likely to be icy can help you justify that set of studded tires or winter tights.
The better you deal with the temperatures and the ice, the more enjoyable the ride and the less likelihood there is that you will wimp out. After all, had Bob whimped out, we wouldn't have these nifty stats to present to you.
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