Love this website, the layout is great and the explanations are simple and straight-forward.
“The weather is bad”: This one is the least convincing of them all.
Where I live it’s 90°F (or higher) with 90%+ humidity at least six months out of the year (more like 9 lately though) and it rains heavily at random in random locations on any given random day. When the weather report says, “50% chance of rain” what it really means is that all day it will be raining down on 50% of the county for ten to twenty minutes at a time (LOL).
The argument that website is making is that if the weather is that bad it’s too awful just to go outside (which is 100% accurate haha)… Therefore the weather preventing cycling is a myth? WTF? It’s silly.
I grew up in a place with weather like that. And I loved the rain for walking or biking. If it got too intense I’d find shelter. Now I live in a place, and when the noble weather prognosticators say 50%, they mean “flip a coin”, maybe it will, maybe it won’t. Which to me seems a very different interpretation of what percent precipitation means. And I still love to ride in it, because it is such a treat when it does rain. I figure since it’s my main transport, the gear to keep me comfortable on the bike is part of my ‘transportation allotment’. Ya definitely need some warmies in this climate, in the Winter. Come Spring, and the warm weather people start riding again. I’m Citizen Smiley Face all, “nice to see folks riding again.” We have some social bike groups/rides, and the numbers have a predictable sine curve over the course of the year.
Yea, I think there’s some truth in that argument when it comes to temperature - I know I can adjust to pretty hot or cold weather after a while. But yea, no matter how much I love biking I am less likely to do it in the rain or snow, where it’s not only more uncomfortable but also more dangerous.
Ice is an issue, no lie. shady side of things it can stick around. Had a rider go down on ice (I don’t think it was consensual) on a ride last week, on a skinny tire fixie. He said he was fine; Winter has it’s padded clothing, after all. I suddenly got a whole lot more cautious. lol.
Around here, winter routinely hits -20C, and we can have heavy snow at short notice. Riding in weather like that means (a) studded tires (and extra $400), winter riding gear, and likely a place to shower at work. Also, the skill to ride on snow, which is non-trivial. Winterizing your bike is another story.
-30C (and colder!) is pretty much out.
You can get studded tires for $80-150 easy
The absolute cheapest trustworthy tires we could find here were from Amazon, at $140 per tire (cdn.). Most started at $200 and went up.
Wow, this is awesome! I do wish that they’d list citations when mentioning studies in some of the explanations though. :)
Which ones? I haven’t looked at all of them but a lot of them have a “Further Reading” section below, which is the citations.
The example below mentions studies from the Netherlands in the 70s and the USA in the 2010s. One paper is linked from the Dublin Institute of Technology and the other is a dead link.
https://cyclingfallacies.com/en/3/shopkeepers-rely-on-people-driving
I do appreciate that section at the bottom though!
