I'm a Winter Bicycle Commuter

On the Pleasures of the Studded Tire

If you’re a regular reader of Straphanger, you’ll already know I’ve never owned a car. (Never wanted to, since the days I worked 40 hours a week as a delivery driver in my early twenties. That experience left me road-weary for a lifetime.) The money I saved by not buying, licensing, warehousing and fuelling a couple of tons of steel, plastic and glass—about $10-$12,000 a year—meant that I was able to set aside enough for a downpayment on our apartment in an old, highly-walkable, transit-rich neighborhood, on a street that probably would otherwise have been unaffordable to us¹.

My winter bicycle, crushing snowbanks with studded tires.

I do, however, own four bicycles. I’ve got an old Bianchi road bike, probably of mid-1980s vintage, that I use for tooling around the neighborhood, as well as for longer trips across the city. I’ve got a fancy-ass Specialized Roubaix, with a carbon frame, that sleeps in the basement. When the weather is fine, I take it up Mont-Royal, the hill-girdling park in the city center, and then whip down at 60 km/h, sometimes several times in a morning. Then I’ve got a beautiful, jet-black Batavus, a Dutch omafiets (or “grandma” bike, though it seems to work for grandpas too), which I bought when I became a father; both of my sons did their time in a baby seat on the back, and, even now, they sometimes hop a ride on the rattrap, “dinking,” or doubling, which is a national pastime in the Netherlands. The Batavus is heavy as hell, and riding it feels more like being on a mule or a donkey than a racehorse: it’s a reluctant starter, a comfortable coaster, and not that good at stopping (those back-pedal brakes…).