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Text of the page (random words):
ed by kathryn hunt at 1 54 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest thursday february 6 2025 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 posted by kathryn hunt at 4 32 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest thursday january 9 2025 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 posted by kathryn hunt at 5 07 pm 2 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest thursday december 12 2024 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 posted by kathryn hunt at 1 21 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest tuesday december 10 2024 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 ...