Call it the ultimate Canadian experience, pitting a rider and a mountain bike against snow, wind, ice, bitter cold and the darkness of a long Edmonton winter.
You might also call the cyclist crazy for not locking away the bike at the first hint of snow, but many Edmontonians just keep on pedalling as if winter didn’t exist.
There are plenty of reasons to bike on through the snow. With the price of gasoline topping $1.30 per litre this past summer and the price of downtown parking escalating —monthly charges at city-operated parkades jump at least $25 on January 1 — driving a motor vehicle to work on our clogged streets has become an expensive and frustrating proposition.
Then take public transit. (Please.) It works for some people, especially those whose homes and workplaces are near the LRT line or a single bus route. But try to get from northeast Edmonton to the northwest by bus, for instance. It doesn’t work unless you’ve got all the time in the world and don’t mind long waits to transfer at windswept bus stops.
Of course, there are good reasons why more than 99 per cent of Edmonton’s commuters don’t cycle in winter: namely snow, wind, ice, bitter cold, darkness and, most of all, fear.
Count me in the ranks of the intimidated. I’m a March-to-November bicycle commuter, which is a wider time-span than that entertained by most people. I have lived a 25-minute walk from work, and didn’t think the risk of skidding under a bus or wiping out on the steep hill on the road home was worth the risk.
But there was one December when it got so warm that I couldn’t resist getting the bike out again. For a few days I understood winter cycling, the triumphant feeling of cheating winter as I rode to Whyte Avenue on a Saturday afternoon to do some Christmas shopping. Then it got cold again, more snow came and I put the trusty Kona steed away until March.
Winter biking in Edmonton is still a minority taste, but one that is growing, according to Claire Ellick, the city’s transportation engineer for its sustainable transportation section.
The city’s last transportation survey in the fall of 2005 showed that the percentage of Edmontonians commuting by bicycle had risen to one per cent from .4 per cent since 1994. The number of winter cyclists is much smaller. A recent survey of cyclists showed that half say they use their bikes year-round, although there is probably some built-in bias in that survey, Ellick says.
City hall can’t keep you warm, but it does clear all the paved mixed-use trails in and out of the river valley, and Ellick says the next bicycle transportation plan (which is being hammered out right now) will include some bike lanes on main streets as well as wide curb lanes and “sharrows” (shared-use arrows on the roads to alert motorists and bicyclists that they have to share the lane).
Dr. David Jou, a city dentist, is a recent convert to winter biking.
Last winter was his first on the bike in 15 years and he’s looking forward to doing it again in the coming cold months, despite a major fall on the hill going into the west end of McKinnon Ravine that kept him limping around his patients for a couple of weeks.
“That one stretch was glare ice, and I was going too fast,” Jou says. “I just lay there in the dark for about three minutes.”
Jou starts work at 7:15 a.m., which means he is beating the heaviest rush-hour traffic.
Coming from Meadowlark, the ravine is a good portion of the ride, and he carries his bike up the stairs by Victoria Golf Course before heading to his office in Oliver.
Like many winter riders, Jou got into it to get in shape. “I think it’s great. It gives me a chance to wake up a little bit and it’s not even that difficult anymore.”
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