The creation of my latest video took a detour. But I’m glad it did.
The original video idea was to help people extend their riding season longer into the autumn. I planned to offer some tips in support of that idea that I’ve picked up over the years. But that got me wondering how many days during the year are actually bikeable to the average person. I mean if you aren’t a bike-obsessed year-round cyclist, how many days are actually reasonable to ride in?
So off I went off search of some data to answer that question. Before I knew it, I had downloaded a big set of weather data from cities all over the world, and I started thinking bigger. A bit of vibecoding later (my coding skills are non-existent), and voila: My Bike Rideable Days Calculator. This tool allows you to set your own temperature and precipitation limits to determine how many days during the year have weather conditions for an easy bike ride, how many stretch days where a bike ride would take some proper preparation, and how many have weather that’s unridable.
I found this tool quite helpful in giving me a more realistic picture of how many days are actually ridable through the year, and I think most people in winter cities may be surprised by how many — I’m thinking of all of those people I still hear say you can’t use a bike for transportation in Calgary because it’s winter for six months of the year. In looking at the tool, even the most fair-weather of cyclists will see that decent conditions exist for big chucks of the year.
I’ve posted the tool here, so please give it a look and let me know what you think.
This is really cool!
Can i request two features? Big cities in southeast asia, and a “which is the maximum temperature youre comfortable riding in?” – currently desert cities are shown like i could ride them in august and thats just bollocks.
If you have the code released somewhere, i could send you a PR
I added a slider for maximum temperature as well. I hope that helps!
Love it! We ride until -20 (the temperature they stop letting my kid outside for recess).
Two things it doesnt quite capture:
1. Windchill: we use the windchill as out cut off instead of the raw temperature.
2. Snow accumulation: I don’t think this app could do it, but what normally stops us from riding is how long it takes the city to clear the snow from our routes, rather than the snow itself.
Still a great and fun tool!
I thought about snow accumulation, but its impact on bike riding is so dependent on the plowing habits of each city that I wasn’t sure how helpful it would be. My hope is that most routes are cleared a day or two after a significant snowfall, and you can’t take that into account in using the tool. A guy can dream, right!?