Happier Abroad Forum Community

And as it appears, nobody seems to listen to me when I tell them that bicycle riding during the winter has seriously harmful and sometimes even fatal consequences. Even last year, at the height of the polar vortex in Chicago, people were riding bicycles like they thought it was 82 degrees outside or something.

Even dressed in the "right layers", you only get maybe 15 to 20 minutes or so of insulation from the deep freeze. Until your sweat saturates your clothes and causes them to lose all of their insulation, and leave you exposed to the deep freeze. Sweat is made of water, and water is an excellent conductor of temperatures, and when your sweat saturates the outer layers, it can actually conduct the deep freeze right through those layers right to your skin. Not to mention ice patches will send a cyclist flying right over and into the ground. Even if you are on the sidewalk and you fall in a grassy area, the deep freeze easily makes the ground soil itself as hard as steel! And yet it appears people still continue to want to kill themselves by riding in the deep freeze as if, according to them, it will never, ever warm up ever again.

To me, people who ride bicycles in the deep freeze are exactly like people who, when they come to a railroad crossing where the red lights are flashing and the gates are lowered, instead of stopping and waiting for the train to pass, they stomp on the gas and weave wildly around the lowered gates, even when the train is less than 20 feet from the crossing and barrelling forward at 50+ miles per hour. Unaware and/or uncaring that, not only is it illegal to cross the tracks when the gates are down (in Illinois, there's a $500 fine for doing that!), but even a passenger train will plow right through you and your car like a farmer's tractor towed plow through a sandcastle. Not to mention trains can not stop quickly, either; with the brakes applied, a passenger train can take up to the length of ten football fields to come to a complete stop. Freight trains take even longer; even up to 1.5 miles, to come to a complete stop after applying the brakes!

Not to mention too, every time I post on the Internet warnings about the severe consequences of bicycling in the deep freeze, I often get scolded pretty badly by the replies. And to me, those kinds of people are exactly like the kinds of people who continue to weave around lowered gates at all railroad crossings until they actually get hit by the train.

Uhm.... You're kidding, right? People since the beginning of time have had to travel in snow to get where they needed to go. What about people in Scandinavia? Russia? Alaska? What about military units marching through winter? HOW DID THEY SURVIVE?! OH MY GOD THINK OF THE CHILDREN!! I could argue more, but it's pointless, the entire history of humanity has people going outside in the cold wearing, just clothing, to do stuff. Sometimes they get hurt or sick, but most of the time they do not. The world can't stop for 3-4 months out of the year because it's snowing out. Also, you can get hit by ice or fall off your bike? You can die in a fiery car crash in your safe metal car if you mess up or encounter unforeseen stuff. Personally I'd rather get hit by small chunks of ice or fall off my bike (as long as I'm not hit by a car on my bike/off my bike) any day of the week compared to even a mild car wreck.

This I feel is one of the biggest problems of America. Everyone wishes to impose their own fears or things they find uncomfortable on someone else. Just because you cannot ride a bike in winter without feeling uncomfortable does not mean other people should not do it.

That said, the only legitimate problem with riding a bike in winter is that roads get narrower due to all the snow piling up to the sides, thus creating problems with space as there's no shoulder left. So municipalities could use wider plows/etc to try to help the bike riders out, but they don't pay gas tax, road tolls, or tickets, so I'm assuming most municipalities care very little about cyclists in any fashion.