How cyclists respond to bad weather: Lessons from 100M rides

There is no one transportation mode which works for every single person in every situation, including cars. That's why a healthy city supports a mix of transportation modes, and an emphasis on density.

> Again, you’d be forgiven for thinking this can all be explained by acclimatisation. Folks in Dublin, say, are used to miserable weather, so it makes sense they’d be happier to ride in it. But according to Dr Bean and co, it’s more complicated than that.

> Seville and Valencia are both rather dry, and yet rain in those cities doesn’t make that much of a difference to cyclist numbers. Why? Well, as the researchers speculate: “The difference could be that Seville and Valencia have large [bike share] systems and safe cycling infrastructure whereas Melbourne only had a small system not useful for commuters.”

> It might be that good, safe cycling infrastructure is enough to encourage people to ride even if the weather is bad. But when bike share infrastructure is bad (e.g. like it was in Melbourne), and the weather is bad, that’s a recipe for lower cyclist numbers.

I think this is just a matter of variance masked by their use of relative (vs absolute) units. I'll bet Chicago had storm/flood/tornado warnings on many of those days. Is the weather in Dublin, Seville, and Valencia as extreme as Chicago, Vancouver, & Melbourne?

I did some three and a half season commuting one year (my bike couldn't handle substantial snow, if I had a fattire I would have done most of the snow days). This is in a northern midwestern state so it is -20 F to 100 F in full seasonal range. Non-assisted, I'm in good shape.

You'd also need information on whether they have showering facilities, secured parking for the bike, a permanent locker/space for the commuting clothes, backup rainsuit, toiletries, towel.

For my 5 mile commute, generally I lost nothing in time assuming the usual gridlock for the cars and parking in a garage. Showering was basically timeshifting with a bit of PITA.

But the big issue is that, compared to busses or even a really cheap used car, it doesn't really save that much money. You need to buy a lot of weather-specific clothing, the maintenance of the bike surprisingly adds up, flat tires are a big PITA compared to a donut wheel, and the rain is so hard... it just gets everywhere it seems.

And bikes always seem to steal about 10-15 minutes at either end, mostly due to security/storing/getting out of storage. Bike locks are a PITA. Bikes run into everything like doors as you hold them open.

So if city governments are serious, they need to get parking garages to pony up free secured storage space, incent those Planet Fitness places (which have the largest number of urban locations for a semi-public shower) to offer subsidized free or near-free access to shower and a free/near-free locker and/or subsidize work showers and lockers and storage. Subsidize/incent a bike rescue/repair service. Then there's the usual bike lanes/trails/crazy driver problem. In for-profit-healthcare America, biking is a substantial risk.

That said, for my 5 mile commute, I far preferred biking over driving, well, as long as it wasn't raining. Bundling up down to 25 degrees F had no effect on my enjoyment.

I also lived in a downtown and when it's nice enough to bike, it transforms living in a city substantially. You can hop on a bike (with the usual 10 minute annoyance) and basically teleport somewhere else in the city in 5-10 minutes. You can't do that with a car and parking, or walking.

The other big issue with urban bike transport is that it is almost impossible to take a left turn safely. And if you really want to make biking in the city nice, "superhighway" bike lanes with no lights make things so much easier. A lot of old railway lines going through cities can become these.

Nothing crystallized the (and I hate using this word) privilege-inducing psychology of cars than the difference in effort between getting going on a bike from a red light and a car. One involves almost a full-body mini-sprint that uses all your muscles, the other involves releasing a couple muscles in your shin to drop a pedal about a half an inch. The psychology of having a device with 100-500x the power output as a human controlled with the smallest of muscular movements coddles you, makes you impatient, and introduces a distinct and dangerous bully complex to the car-bicycle relationship if that person has any insecurity.

Heck the boring company should probably have started with a small-scale bike commuting tunnel as a POC. I also wonder if building elevated bike trails is really that expensive if we threw some civil and materials engineers at it for a bit.

Almost everything I stated was for the scooters too, it's just that they are slow and ridden by utter morons about 50% of the time, which shows I guess they are tapping a new market, since bike riders would never use them in that manner.

> And there’s a practical benefit here too. As the world faces a reckoning with climate change and sustainability, individuals and governments are looking at how they can do better. That’s brought cycling back into focus as a clean, accessible mode of transport – which can have far-reaching implications for the way that cities are built.

People who use bikes/bikeshares rn are early adopters, they probably got an unusually high willingness to deal with bad weather, go longer distances etc. I'd be more interested in data that show how the "average person" responds to this.

Also I'll remind ppl that when they talk about bikes for transport it just wont work for America. Our population is way unhealthy, it isnt a great option.