“Postholing” is a new cycling verb I learned this week, defined to me as I lay prone in three feet of light powder at -26 C in the sub-Arctic taiga of northern Canada. For the record, the word describes what happens when your foot sinks deep into snow, as any showshoer (sans snowshoe) knows. When …
Read more “Here’s why people are riding bikes in one of the world’s coldest cities”
Back in 2013, after seeing the Finnish city of Oulu for the first time, I wrote a post called Never Mind the Plows. The idea was to focus on things that can improve winter cycling beyond the basics. Any by basics, I meant plowing. Well, five years later, as much of the winter world has …
Read more “Why boring old unsexy plows are the key to urban cycling in winter”
Montreal, perhaps North America’s most bike-friendly big city, is finally looking at ways of making it easier for people to ride a bike through the winter. Here’s what we learned on a recent trip.
Less than three months ago, everyone sounded ready to give up on making the Canadian city of Edmonton more friendly to cyclists. Even the city’s bike loving mayor. In July, Don Iveson, who was elected in 2013 as a young, forward-thinking, bike-riding urbanite, gave an interview to the Globe and Mail in which he basically …
Read more “How one city went from scrubbing bike lanes to building an entire network in weeks”
A few weeks ago, I criticized cities for failing to build sensible connections between existing bike lanes. Then I rolled over a relatively new piece of bike infrastructure in my city, and had a bit of a moment. “There,” I thought. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Here’s that new piece of infrastructure. https://www.instagram.com/p/BK2ClNDAamW/ (Just …
Read more “Here’s how little connections can make big improvements to bike friendliness”
A few weeks ago, I participated in a radio call-in show about urban cycling during which a caller expressed her fear that her adult son was going to be killed on the roads. He is a bicycle commuter who had already been struck by cars twice while riding inside a painted bike lane. I mumbled …
Read more “The folly of paint: Is it time to give up on painted bike lanes completely?”
As cities build bike lanes, they should pay attention to the gaps between them to ensure safe, connected routes.
A decade ago, riding a bicycle in Toronto and Vancouver was, in some ways, a similar experience. Two of Canada’s biggest cities, both had dense and walkable urban cores, but little in the way of bike-specific infrastructure, so riding through the city could be a harrowing experience. Both cities had thousands of cyclists who were …
The biggest argument in urban cycling of the last 20 years is pretty much settled. So why are we still arguing about it? After last week’s post about the ways Montreal managed to become one of the continent’s most bike-friendly cities, that old saw fired up again. Much of the commentary focused on the perceived shortfalls and benefits of vehicular …
Read more “Vehicular cycling is dead, just don’t bury the body yet”