A hundred words for snow

You know the story that the Inuit have 100 words for snow? It's kind of a cliche and not exactly true, but you know who needs 100 words for snow? Cyclists. 

I thought about that today as I made my way over and through a vast variety of kinds of snow today on my way back from the office in a storm bad enough that I left at noon hoping to avoid worse. I've said before that whatever it's doing outside, I've ridden in worse but today. . . today came close. There was a couple of centimetres down on top of poorly cleared streets from the last snowfall, fine icy flakes falling and being blown into my face by the wind, and it started snowing around 10 am and it was now 12:30 or 1:00. Not enough time for the plows to really get going or keep up. 

We have one word other than "snow, with description of the situation" for winter cycling: snirt. Snirt is a portmanteau of "snow" and "dirt" and that's what it is: snow with dirt on it or in it. Mostly, in the city, it's that filthy stuff that piles up at the edge of the road, full of grit and salt and grime. It can alse be what you get on a moutain bike track where snow and dirt get churned up. 

Mountaineers get a few more words for snow and ice (cornice, spindrift, verglas, bergschrund). Maybe skiers do too. But bikers need to step it up.

Stuff we need a word for: 

Snow that has been compacted by car tires on an unplowed street, so that where the tire has passed it's got this weird, variable consistency that causes it to sometimes suddenly yank your front tire out of line. You can usually ride just to one side or the other of where the tire has passed with no trouble: but as soon as you hit snow that's been driven over like this, you're swearing and wrestling your handlebars. You have to watch for this snow: it looks a lot like the other kind of tire-tread snow, which is fine to ride in, and it's often found in streaks and patches alongside it. 

The other kind of tire-tread snow: where the car tire has gone over and left the snow chopped up so that it's less dense than the snow beside it. This makes the tire tread a little easier to ride in than the surrounding texture. 

The 1-cm pared-down snow left behind by a higher plow blade (usually found on smaller side streets with a "standard of maintenance" that involves not clearing to bare pavement). Dubious. Less easy to read than the car-tread types, mostly straightforward but also not completely trustworthy.

The stuff left behind that falls back into the road or is not quite picked up by the plow: this lies in patches in the bike travel area and can be either "slush, ride through it" or "Contains Chunks." Generally temperature and the weather of the last few days will help you figure that out. It is a problem deciding which of the two it is as you're riding toward a chunk of it and a driver is passing you with no room to swing out around it though. 

Drifted snow. For some reason unknown to me, drifted snow is more touchy to ride in than fallen snow. It will yank your tires.  

The snow that has been dragged out at an intersection by a plow and left across the bike lane/edge of the road. Either in an arc across the bike space as the plow turned onto the main street, or across the whole intersection.

The oblong ridges of snow left by parked cars that didn't move for the plow so that now the whole lane has a phantom parked car in it. 

Swooshy snow and sludgy snow: these are both newly fallen, unplowed snow, but one of them is quiet and fluffy and muffles everything and is easy to get through: the other is the same depth but drags at your tires. I think the difference is temperature and maybe crystal structure. 

Very cold snow that has been leveled by a plow or warmed and then frozen to a harder consistency: this stuff is often hard enough to ride on with no trouble. A delight. 

Eyes see bike: brain says nah

It's cold and crisp out there this week and the wind chill is intense: today when I went to work the wind chill was at -25C. It had warmed up to like -15C by the time I headed home, and I'd gotten out of the office before sunset so it was a very pretty evening when I got on the bike. And I was feeling pretty good about being outside in the clean cold for my ride home. Blowing some stink off.

Too bad about the drivers. 

Within the first ten or fifteen minutes I'd had four bad interactions with careless or inattentive drivers: people passing too close rather than waiting till it was clear, people turning through my path as though they hadn't seen me or didn't care how close they got. And then I got this, and it's been a few hours by this point but I'm still pretty rattled. 

It feels like I saw the car a lot earlier than it appears on the video, which is proably true: I pulled up to the intersection, planning to turn left. I think the car had a turning signal on, so I was watching it. And then I realized he was cutting the corner. A lot. A whole lot. Way too much. He was heading straight for where I was standing. 

I yelled "Jesus!" and then yanked the bike out of the way to one side as the car breezed right past me. "Holy shit!!" I was yelling at them. The driver - a man who was probably in his 70s - wasn't looking at me even as he passed within a foot or two of me, and I'm fairly sure he still hadn't actually seen me, standing right there, with a headlight and a bike and a purple jacket. There were three people in the car: as they passed an older woman in the back seat stared out at me in shock.

My rear camera's not recording, so I don't have any video of the car slowing up after it passed me and then stopping in the middle of the street. I imagine the passengers in the car had alerted the driver to the fact he had just nearly hit someone. Or he'd replayed the whole thing in his head and realized there had been someone standing there. 

I'm not going to assume that age had something to do with it, though it might have: he did look to be an old man. But inattention did. Force of habit did. The fact that people turn their brains off and fall into habit and subconscious processing did. And the fact that for whatever reason, people on bikes don't have the salience that people in cars do. Guaranteed he wouldn't have cut that corner that hard if I'd been in a car. And I am pretty convinced that he just. . . . didn't see me. 

And this is why I act at all times as though the people in cars are oblivious to me. When they get mad at me for being alarmed because they're rolling through a left turn at me, and yell "what's your problem you dumb bitch? I saw you!" they don't understand that I have to assume they didn't. I have to assume they looked at the road ahead of them, their eyes saw a person on a bike, and their brains just said, ". . . . nah."

The good stuff

I've been grumpy on here lately so allow me to sing the praises of the first snow. 

This past week, the snow came down to (more or less) stay. My studded tires went on Wednesday night, on an evening I suddenly had free from judo class because the storm was too bad. Thursday, I went out for groceries in steadily falling small icy snow. Studded tires are the absolute greatest. My car's winter tires weren't on yet (because I keep forgetting about my car) so there was something very freeing about riding along unconcerned, sure of the footing of my bike. 

Saturday night I was at a friend's until really late. It was snowing when I set out for his place at something like 6:30 pm, and already dark, of course. But the fresh snow was very sharp, icy, and sparkly in the light from my headlamp. It was a very pretty ride. And I knew several more centimetres were due down that night. 

Somewhere between 1:30 and 2:00 am, I left. The driveway was 10 centimeters deep or so. My friend said if the roads were really bad I could always crash in his spare room, but I figured it was only a matter of about seven kilometres home and I'd be fine. 

I was only really bothered by the suburban street immediately outside his place, as it turned out. When cars have been through even a few centimetres of snow, it compacts it in weird, unpredictable ways that twist your front tire and mess up your steering. I was getting a little annoyed with it after a block, but then I turned off the street to join the network of asphalt pedestrian paths that run through his neighbourhood. And for a bit at least, they'd even been plowed within the last couple of hours. I left happy, zoomy tire tracks in a thin layer of fluffy snow while more flakes fell around me. 

Stepping out of my friend's place, the whole neighbourhood had seemed lit up. Almost twilight. I guess the falling snow, and the snow on the ground, were just bouncing the available light around. It was nearly two in the morning and felt like day. 

A little further on, the path looked like it hadn't been plowed in a while, and it was a good thing I'm very familiar with it and knew where all the turns were. The snow was several centimetres deep, but fluffy, so although it was a little harder to pedal than usual, it didn't cause any steering problems. I just left deeper tracks behind me in the snow. 

Turning onto the cycletrack along Conroy Road, the plow had returned within the last couple of hours, and here I really zoomed. Everything was quiet. There were only a few cars on Conroy, which is a four-lane arterial, and the ones there were had been muted by the snow. I could see really well in the bright, weirdly lit up night, I felt visible with my lights and my dark jacket against the white snow, and my tires were muffled by the thin layer of snow on the path. 

This is what I love about that first snowfall. Especially at night. In November it's cold and very dark and often rainy, and the cars have winter tires on so they make more noise, and it's honestly not that much fun. But then that first snow happens, and you're bombing along through the snowflakes on quiet paths, and the cars are silenced, and the nights are bright, and the chill in the air wakes your cheeks up.

People will say you're "brave" for riding in the winter. I suppose I should tell them how nice it can be. 

The Door Into Summer

 

This dumb, dumb city. 

Designing and planning absolutely everything as though it is always a 23-degree day in June around here. 

Source: Crafting Ottawa's new O-Train Stations: Building Tomorrow

Building intersections that are a pain in the ass to maintain in winter: I highlighted here all the curbs waiting to be smashed into by a plow blade and piled over with snow, including two pointless little concrete pads that are, I guess, supposed to act as "separation" for the cycle track? 

Bronson and Sunnyside at Carleton U

And last week, the William Commanda Bridge over the Ottawa River was barricaded for the winter. This week, they blocked off the Rideau River pedestrian bridge at Carleton U. I am not surprised, by this, mind you, nor am I disappointed: I expected it. I'm just kind of dully angry about it. 

In Ottawa, the snow usually falls to stay around the beginning of December. It melts, generally, toward the end of March. A third of the year, it's snowy here. 

We do not adequately fund snow clearing for the streets. We blow through the budget constantly. 

We do not maintain pedestrian paths, bridges, stairs, or bike lanes. (Oh, sorry: there are 980+ kilometres of bike infrastructure; 60 of them are cleared of snow.)

We have a train system that breaks down when it's cold, icy, or snowy. Sensor switches on the tracks shut the system down because they mistook snow on the tracks for a person in the first winter. 

Streets get cleared well before sidewalks, prioritizing cars and forcing people to walk or roll in the road.

The bus stations have heaters - nominally. When pushing the button does anything, it turns on a glowing electric coil that is mounted up on the glass ceiling, for 15 minutes. 

The LRT stations, famously, caused slips and falls in their first year because they were open to the weather, and the tiles used on the floors were slippery when wet. 

The water fountains in the LRT stations froze and overflowed. 

We close the pathways and stairs around Parliament Hill, probably the most iconic location in the city, for "health and safety reasons." 

Time and time again I look at the design drawings when the City proposes some new feature, and it's a drawing of green grass and blue skies and people sitting on big concrete blocks and steps, sipping their ice coffee, and strolling along the wide pavement. Ottawa, it seems, is constantly looking for the door into summer. And at the same time we get all the people who comment on every design yelling "it's winter eight months out of the year here! Why are we building this bike lane?" 

It's winter for about four months of the year, to be honest, but still, that's four months of the year that are left out of our plans, left out of our budget, and left out of our networks. Come that first snowfall, it's like the City of Ottawa says, "Well, that's it, wasn't that a nice run, everyone inside now. Get inside. Get in your cars. Public spaces are closed now; we will reopen in April."

I mean, come on. Ottawa is a winter city. It's the seventh coldest national capital in the world, behind places like Talinn and Helsinki and Ulaanbataar. It's a place where, theoretically, we celebrate winter. We have Winterlude! We have the Skateway! We have the Rink of Dreams outside City Hall! There are pop-up skating ovals in all the city parks! We are Canadians and we love the winter! Right? 

Apparently not. We close major, beloved pedestrian bridges because of concerns about salt and safety. The Commanda Bridge was "not designed for winter use." Well, why the fuck not? This is a winter city, after all. So, can we groom it for skiing? It connects right up with the Kichi Sibi Winter Trail (a really great amenity that only exists because of grassroots volunteers). . . but nah, the City's not going to do that either.

An actual winter city would recognize that, for one thing, people might visit in the winter for the experience - maybe even for Winterlude? - and, for another, the people that live here need to continue to live our lives, even if it snows. That people need sidewalks and bike paths and cool places to congregate and enjoy the winter. Imagine strolling across the river on the Commanda Bridge with a hot chocolate, enjoying the views of the islands and Parliament Hill up on its escarpment. Imagine a student spending their first winter at Carleton walking across the bridge to go sledding in Vincent Massey Park. Imagine people walking along the canal pathways to the Beaver Tail stand at Dows Lake and then going skating. Imagine people being able to bike to work or school all year - because I can tell you, riding a bike in the snow can be really fun and connect you to your neighbourhood and environment. Imagine an urban ski and snowshoe network that really celebrates that snowy Canadian self-image.

But what we get is this. 

Hummus is lefty nonsense: or, Everything is partisan now

 

Last Sunday was the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims. There was a big gathering at Queen's Park in Toronto (obviously: Doug Ford is actively in the process of making roads more dangerous) and someone I follow online posted a video of the crowd. 

Someone else replied with a gif of Donald Trump dancing with the text "TRUMP WON 2024."

The original poster replied with "I don't get it." As far as I know the Trumper didn't answer.

I mean, we do get it, nonsensical though it is. The guy I follow was just trying to get the Trumper to make it explicit. On the face of it all he can say is, "I posted a gloating gif celebrating the victory, in an election held in another country from yours, of someone who I believe will make progressives suffer, and I did that because you want people not to die in traffic crashes." 

In what (alternate from ours) universe does that string of logic make any sense? Taken at face value, he seems to be saying that a Trump administration will result in more people getting killed on the road. Ha ha, suck it, libs! Our loved ones will be mangled by cars! MAGA!

But in fact the guy probably didn't answer because he just wanted to hurt someone. He saw someone who he assumes rides a bicycle because they were at an event against traffic violence. He decided that that person must be a woke snowflake, who must be crying into their spirulina shots over the American election, so har har, Trump won, cry harder about. . . . road deaths. 

It is so exhausting. Why does a mode of transportation, or a tasty chickpea and tahini spread. . . mm, hummus. . . I should make some hummus. . . 

Why does that stuff have to have anything to do with this bullshit MAGA cult? At least on this one front - transportation - just leave us out of it. Deciding that riding a bike is "left wing" is just chowderheaded at best, and downright dangerous at worst. How many MAGA-heads in trucks have deliberately threatened bikers with their vehicles because of their weird political rhetoric?

Rob Ford called us "bike riding pinkos." Doug Ford definitely thinks there's "Ford Nation" and then there's "those cyclists making the roads worse for everyday Ontarians." Meanwhile people on bicycles are just trying to get around. They're going to school or work or heading out to pick up milk or drop the kids off at daycare or whatever. You don't have to sign up for the Communist Party's newsletters to do that shit. 

I know I'm preaching to the choir, but also I am very, very, very tired of it. Hey, here's a meme. 

Anecdata, vibes, and envy

So, the stupid gridlock law is in the legislature now, and the one thing that gives me a flicker of hope is that there are a lot of people out there pointing out all the reasons it is a dumb law that won't fix gridlock. The CBC posted an article summarizing studies from around the world that show safe biking infrastructure does not impact traffic negatively, improves business on main streets, and improves emissions levels. Toronto Today just posted an article quoting the Bloor Street BIA (Bloor being one of the places Doug Ford definitely wants to rip bike lanes out of) as saying that removing the lanes would be "disastrous" for business.

There have been rallies in Toronto and Ottawa so far, the latter organized by my favorite Ottawa councillor Jeff Leiper. Here's CTV News Ottawa on that:

But that's not what I came to talk to you about. 

Came to talk to you about the anecdata.

I am glad, I guess, though it makes my blood boil, that they included streeters in that video with people who are against bike lanes, just because, just vibes, just - agin' em. They give Dave Roberton (vice president of Bike Ottawa) and Jeff a lot more time to talk, and they show the two anti-bike people saying, eloquently: "I think it's great, rip them all out so there's more room for us," and "I just hate bike lanes and they shouldn't be in the downtown, which is where they are." 

Razor sharp reasoning and logic there, kids. 

So in the interest of catharsis, here's some stupid shit I've heard anti-bike-lane people say in the last week or so and my simplest answers. 

"I am a tradesperson and I need my car to get around town." 

Okay. No one is stopping you. 

"What about diabled people and the elderly?"

Leaving aside the fact that plenty of disabled and elderly people can and do ride bikes or otherwise use bike lanes (like, with wheelchairs and scooters and trikes and whatever), no one said everyone has to ride a bike just because there is a bike lane. We're not going to build a bike lane and then outlaw driving. And not for nothing, but just about everyone I hear make that argument is able-bodied.

"We want drivers to be able to get around our cities."

Okay - do you also want me to be able to get around my city? And if not, why not? I work. I shop. I go out. I participate in our economy. So, shouldn't I also be able to get around? 

"What if the bike lane runs in front of a church, and there is a funeral, and they need to bring the coffin out of the church and into the hearse, which is parked in the bike lane?" (I am not kidding, I heard this one.) 

Look, if I'm riding along in a bike lane and there is a funeral cortege lined up along the curb, I will stop. send up a thought for the departed and their family and friends, and if they are actively loading the coffin I'll probably wait till they're done? Maybe walk on the sidewalk? Weird fringe reason to object to the lane just generally being there though. 

"But that bike lane is taking up a lane that could be used for us!"

That bike lane has a whole bunch of people on bikes in it who would be in the traffic lane with you if it wasn't there, and I know you wouldn't be sanguine about that. Also, this isn't "my simplest answer" but if you would like, read up on induced demand. 

"We just have too many people moving into the city and we need to build more roads."

Maybe you're trying to pretend your problem isn't with immigration. But okay, fair. If we've got a booming population we don't need to build more roads, we need to build denser housing that people can afford closer to the middle of the city. Kills two expensive birds with one stone: we already need the housing, why also build the roads? Also, see above about induced demand.

"Bike lanes cause pollution because cars are backed up!" 

No, cars cause pollution because they burn fossil fuels. And a whole lot of people IN those cars chose to be there. Sure, some people actually can't walk or bike or take transit. But the vast majority of people stuck in that traffic jam had the choice to be there. I have watched friends choose not to. A good friend just got an e-conversion for his bike because his mental health demanded he not sit in that traffic jam or wait for that delayed or cancelled O-Train. 

"Bike lanes shouldn't be downtown."

Why not? That's where the people and the shops and the jobs are. 

"I just hate bike lanes." 

. . . Um, okay I guess? Can you explain why? Because that's a really weird attitude when you think about it. And you might find yourself coming down to something kind of embarassing if you really sat with why you feel that way. Something like "I think people on bikes are a threat to my manhood" or "I don't want anyone else to have something that I don't use" or "People who aren't stuck in traffic like me make me jealous." And all of those kind of sound like a you problem, something you should maybe work on within yourself. 

Anyway, all that said, I'm off to write to my MP and try to say all this a bit less snarkily. And leave some pointed comments on the Environmental Registry of Ontario's website. 

Reducing Gridlock and Saving . . . WHO. . . Time?

Doug Ford hates bikes. Same as his brother did. It's apparently just an unreasoning, gut-based loathing. It's got the same vibes-based feel as the comment section of the Post whenever there's a story that involves cycling. Problem is, the people in the comment section aren't the premier of the country's most populous and urbanized province. 

Next week, the Ontario government is tabling the childishly named Reducing Gridlock and Saving You Time Act in the legislature. (Seriously, these people can't even name their laws as if they were grownups.) This staggeringly dumb law will require municipalities to seek the provincial government's approval to build new bike facilities if they might have "a negative impact on vehicle traffic." 

(don't mind me, just adding a screenshot from the ontario.ca website)

Based on gut feeling, they have decided (according to Minister of Transportation Prabmeet Sarkaria), that bike lanes installed during the pandemic, when "fewer vehicles were on the road and their impacts on traffic were unclear," are causing gridlock. Because of course they must be. Do they have data? Of course not. Would they listen to data? Continue dreaming. Sakaria's making this announcement in fucking Etobicoke. People in the godforsaken suburbs of Toronto will clap like seals for this. 

I keep having to stop while writing this to take a breath and calm down. It's not particularly helpful just to rage at stupidity. 

But the whole pausing-for-a-breath thing doesn't really work, if I'm being honest. Not when the next thing Sarkaria said was "This is why our government is bringing informed decision-making and oversight to bike lanes as well as taking steps to increase speed limits safely [you bet those italics are mine]."

Oh, and they're also requesting a review of every bike lane built in the last five years, to see if they can maybe strip those out as well. The "built during the pandemic when there were fewer cars" thing is window dressing. You know what dropped during the pandemic and never recovered? Public transit ridership. You know what had bounced back to 2016 levels by May of 2022? Car commuting. So unless we bolted off to design, approve, implement and construct thousands of kilometres of bike infrastructure between March of 2020 and about a year to a year and a half later, your argument is invalid. Your gridlock - inasmuch as it has increased since 2020 - is being caused by people not taking transit.

Source - Statistics Canada

Yet we're going to ban most new bike lanes, rip out some existing ones maybe, maintain road widths, and increase speed limits, all to save drivers time. And people are going to die. And no driver's time will actually be saved.

If you're reading this you probably don't need me re-litigating the data on induced demand, actual causes of gridlock, correlation of increased speed limits and pedestrian deaths, actual impact of bike lanes on traffic speeds, etc., etc. I just want us to sit for a moment with the sheer carbrained, knee-jerk hatefulness of this. 

You can't fix gridlock by making it easier to drive. The data are in on that. Every time you disincentivise transit and cycling (and scooters, and walking) you push another person into a single-occupancy car choking out fumes on a bumper-to-bumper commute to Barrie or Scarborough. All you can do with this bullshit law - and all they want to do, really - is get more votes from their SUV-driving suburban base, which is ironic, given the Conservatives are supposed to be all about small government and now every municipality in Ontario is going to have to come to Queen's Park with their proposals for bike lanes for approval. The paperwork will pile up. The bureaucracy will pile up. Projects will stall out. Car traffic will continue to clog the roads. And - again - people on bikes and on foot will die. 

But they said this law would Save You Time (where "You" is understood to mean "drivers/Conservative voters/suburban Torontonians," not, you know, all the rest of us). And to a whole lot of people that'll sound real truthy. And the facts do not matter as long as they're sticking it to those bike riding pinkos.