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Why Canadians Can't Bike in the Winter (But Finnish People Can)
- evolve2k 4y agoThe video has some great comments across North America and Europe, definitely worth a read over once you’ve watched the video.
- Mathmanjetson 4y ago[flagged]
- LinuxBender 4y agoThis video aligns with my experience. The highways around me in the Western Rockies are plowed 24/7 in the long winter but the bike paths end up with 2+ feet of snow/ice on a warm day and upwards of 5 feet in blizzards/squalls and the snow trucks only make it worse. People ride their snowmobiles on the bike paths in the winter. Nobody rides their bike on the highway in the winter as cars/trucks rarely slow down and the wall of snow made by the snow trucks don't give the bicyclists anywhere to go.
- xgkickt 4y agoCan't even bike safely in the summer in my smallish city in Canada. No bike paths, with roads that keep getting wider with increased speeds, such that the city recommends riding on the sidewalk, and then you are supposed to dismount to cross the road every block. Cycling in Los Angeles where near misses were a daily occurrence felt safer.
- brailsafe 4y agoIn some Canadian cities, no transportation method works very well in winter, not even moving to a more interesting urban area because there's sometimes no way to do that.
- atdrummond 4y agoI’ve seen people avidly biking in Yellow Knife in winter.
- acchow 4y agoI love this YouTube channel. They did a series summarizing the findings from Strong Towns - US-style suburbia is fundamentally unsustainable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ...
- systemvoltage 4y ago> US-style suburbia is fundamentally unsustainable. Why? Personally, I'd like to live in American suburbia and backcountry. No crime, peaceful, plenty of resources and space, safe for kids, and cheaper than urban cesspool. Small towns are fine but they need good economy.
- acchow 4y agoWatch the 7-part series and find out
- systemvoltage 4y agoCan you summarize it? I don't have the time for that.
- throwaway787544 4y ago
- systemvoltage 4y agoI just don't have the time to watch a 7 part series mini-docuseries to "inform" myself. I've lived all over the world (yes, Europe as well) and personally find American suburbia amazing for the reasons stated above. Americans on HN think that there are no cars in Europe and everyone just bikes in beautiful small towns. Europe has 250 million passenger cars.
- 4y ago
- 8bitsrule 4y agoCanada: 10M sq.km. Pop. Density: 4.2/sq.km Finland 0.338M sq.km. Pop. Density: 16.4/sq.km Finns are packed in tighter, more cost effective. How many kids outside of CA cities are gonna get their bikeways plowed whenever they have more than 4cm of snow? But snowplows ignoring bike trails? Oh yeah.
- Bakary 4y agoWhat's the density of the Québec-Windsor corridor?
- tomjakubowski 4y agoBecause of how human populations are presently distributed, comparing population densities of two countries is really mostly comparing how much of each country's land is in truly depopulated swathes. Unless the countries you're comparing are, like, city-states, or oppositely they both lack urbanization, population density tells you very little about density as actually experienced by the inhabitants. Think of average class size vs. median class at a university. The majority of students' class experiences are class sizes are smaller than average. The average is dominated by the rare classes which are huge. Likewise, the vast majority (80%+) of Canadians and Finns live in cities or suburbs. These places are far denser than the national average, and occupy tiny portions of the total land area, in both countries. So to that 80% of the population, the density they live in is nothing like the national average. https://ggwash.org/view/amp/65370 https://ggwash.org/view/amp/65370
- kumarsw 4y agoI recall some figure that 90% of the Canadian population lives in a thin band extending a few hundred miles north of the US border. So average population density is very misleading.
- dghlsakjg 4y agoThe stat is that 90% of Canadians live within 150 miles of the us border. Over half of all Canadians live at a lattitude south of Seattle. Most of Canada's population live in the small area between Toronto and Montreal. What I'm saying is that population density using Canada as a whole is a dumb statistic. Where there's people in Canada, there's lots of them, and most of the land area is literally uninhabitable by almost any standard.
- grecy 4y agoI biked to work everyday for 4 years in the Yukon. It gets fun after -40c/f. But yes, I illegally road on the footpath in winter, being near the cars was certain death if you slipped on the ice. Actually Whitehorse has the highest rate of bike commuting in Canada, despite the cold & dark.
- doubled112 4y agoDoes it get cold and stay cold up there? It must. -40 sounds pretty brisk. Most of my winter cycling was in south western Ontario. My biggest issues were because it wouldn't stay cold. When it thaws, then gets cold again there's ice everywhere. It also seemed to cause all of the fluffy snow to turn into a crunchy layer of ice, which is much less comfortable to ride through and fall into.
- grecy 4y agoI used to, but it changing now. My first couple of years it would stay below -30 for a few months. Now it gets up to +10C in the middle of Jan randomly. I put studs into my tires and actually never slipped on ice once (though I sure have on foot...)
- nicbou 4y agoMy Canadian home town is not even walkable in the winter. You can't plot a route from home to the mall because some parts have no sidewalks at all, and snowbanks force you into muddy snow and traffic. I've attempted it and a concerned driver stopped to tell me how dangerous it was.
- aaaaaaaaata 4y agoDid they apologize at some point during the interaction?
- egberts1 4y agoBullshit. I biked everyday in the snow for I was THE newspaper boy in Ontario where the snow banks reaches 8’. It was way cheaper than Ski-Doo Arctic Cat’s or Panther’s gas expense. Took a Huffy frame, slapped a pair of knobby tires, some BMX handlebars, and strapped pedals; it was wild! Although, it may have been the fact that I’m Finnish. Never mind.
- d13 4y agoMe too. In Ontario, all winter, through the 80s to mid 90s.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoCanada is notoriously mediocre in every aspect of government and life in general. So it is not a surprise that this is the case. Perhaps the worst out of all the developed countries.