I hate to break it to you, but even though it’s a sunny start to November, winter is coming, and probably sooner than we’d like. Cycling is good weather is already a contentious topic for some reason, but today we’re going to talk about the main reason why many view biking investments in our city as a non-starter.
If you start a conversation about bike lanes in Ottawa, it’s only a matter of time until a skeptic brings up our snowy winter. How long winter lasts exactly depends on who you ask. Some people will exaggeratedly quote that winter lasts ten months of the year, some say eight, others just say we have snow and it’s “too cold to bike” for most of the year. “Nobody would use them,” the argument goes, “they’d sit empty most of the year.”
This might even sound reasonable until you think about how Ottawa works in most every other way.
We already pay for seasonal things
Ottawa loves winter. Every year we turn an 8 km stretch of our canal into a massive skating rink. This is a place where people can enjoy themselves with a recreational skate for a few weeks out of each year. There are also plenty of people who use the Canal to get around while it’s open, I did so myself for a couple of years when I lived and went to university near the canal.
The Rideau Canal is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and keeping the Skateway swept, cleared and flooded is expensive: the National Capital Commission budgeted about $1.55 million for a single season in 2017 (which I’ll be honest sounds suspiciously low). That works out to roughly $62,000 per skating day for that year. A long season with more days where the canal is open can bring that down closer to $20,000 a day. These are estimated budgets from the NCC, but they show the kind of money we as a city can spend on winter activities. Hockey is, of course, Canada’s national winter sport, and we have municipally-funded rinks all over the city. Some rinks with permanent boards occasionally get used for roller hockey in the summer, but most sit idle or rebecome grass once the ice melts.
This works the other way too. Think of all the playgrounds, soccer fields, and baseball diamonds across the city. That’s a lot of land, it’s expensive to maintain, and is all used only when the weather is good.
We pay for summer-only and winter-only infrastructure all the time, and you don’t hear the same calls of “wasteful” in these cases. Interestingly, cycling is actually different from both, because people can and do cycle in every season. People who ride through the winter can certainly attest to that. The main catch in winter is that someone has to maintain the safe travel routes.
Bad weather is bad for driving too
Throughout the winter, we get hit with a significant snowstorm at least a half-dozen times per year. On those days, getting anywhere is a huge challenge and can be quite dangerous. Those are the days when you can even get stuck in snow on your own street and need to be dug or pushed out. This kind of snowfall is typically when the City declares a “significant weather event” and asks everyone to limit their travel until the roads are cleared.
Travelling on streets and roads that haven’t been cleared is miserable, whether you’re in a car, on a bike, or even on foot. Generally, you don’t want to travel for a long time or distance in this kind of weather no matter how you’re getting around. The difference between these methods, especially where I am in the suburbs, is that we clear roadways for cars quite quickly, and mostly don’t for cyclists or pedestrians. To the city’s credit, this is a work in progress, and it is by no means a simple problem. In 2022, Bike Ottawa pointed out that the City’s winter cycling network was about 50 km, compared with 12,900 lane-kilometres of road cleared for cars. Fast-forward another 4 years, and this hasn’t changed much. Today, the City lists about 60 km of winter cycling routes, most of it in the core, plus “some key segments of multi-use pathway in Orleans, Barrhaven and Kanata.” Every extra kilometre of winter maintenance of paths is fought for, tooth and nail. Every kilometre of car infrastructure is maintained all year, no questions asked.
Winter cycling in Orléans is a mess
In Orléans, winter cycling mostly means riding on the road. That’s fine for me, I grew up cycling with traffic, but it stinks for anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable mingling with cars. This applies to almost everyone. To be honest, I feel less comfortable now than ever, due to the rise of impatient, distracted, and selfish drivers (who affect the other people on the road just as much as they affect cyclists sharing the road).
Our city councillor helped to get a couple hundred metres of path through the park near my house cleared in winter, starting a few years ago. With that one short stretch maintained and kept clear, I have a nearly direct route from my front door: my street (plowed, but not always down to the pavement), the path, and then a main road that gets plowed regularly and connects me to the rest of the city. The new bike lanes on the 174 overpass are cleared in winter too. A few hundred metres of off-road winter maintenance is what makes year-round riding easy for me.
That said, winter is not the only excuse people make to avoid making investments in cycling infrastructure. In the piece I’m working on next, I’ll be talking about other reasons people cite to frame biking as difficult or impossible in Ottawa.
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