I do spend a lot of time touting the reasons you should ditch your car, so I suppose it’s only fair that I talk about the downside to bicycles. This week seems like a good time to do it…

…I missed my bus.

Two or three times a week I have to travel an 18 mile round trip to work. Given the distance I usually do this on the bus — It’s a great time to listen to all those podcasts that have been piling up. This is a usually an acceptably good getting-to-work system. However, you are subject to the vagaries of the public bus system. You have to get to the stop 5 or 10 minutes early, because sometimes the bus comes early. You have to hope that the bike-rack on the front of the bus isn’t already full (it only has 2 slots, but since I’m near the end of the line it is pretty much never full). You generally hope that there aren’t any/many crazy people on the bus — I find that earphones work AMAZINGLY well at keeping people from talking to you. Really none of this is all that bad, but, for the first time this week I missed my bus. I had forgotten something and had to go back to the house. Had I been driving to work in a car this would have cost me 5 minutes, rather than half an hour.

…I was caught in the rain

It finally happened. A week or two ago I was biking the afore-mentioned 18 mile round trip and it started to rain when I was halfway home. I became soaked, and very cold. One common question that I get when I tell people that I went car-less is: “What will you do when it snows?”. They have it wrong. It’s not the snow that gets ya, it’s the cold rain. I’d much rather be dealing with snow than 35 degree rain. Snow is slippery, but cold rain cuts to the bone. That having been said: It wasn’t that bad. I just kept peddling and had a hot chocolate when I got home (yummy). It’s also worth pointing out that it’s been 5 months since we bought the electric bike kit and I only now got caught in the rain for the first time.

…Today it’s snowing

Finally: As I’m writing this it is snowing. A lot. Today is the first day that it dropped below freezing here in SW Denver. This temperature drop came on the wings of a pretty good snowstorm. As I write this we have over 3 inches, and it’s sticking to every surface (it’s not melting on contact).

As I mentioned before, everyone seems to think that bikes can’t handle the winter. At least in Denver, I believe this fear to be basically unfounded. The pavement stays uncovered most of the winter. When it snows a lot, as it is today, I’d stay off the road just as much as I would in a car. The real question is what to do with yesterday’s snow. I have to admit that I’m not sure how much the snow will hamper my biking, but I’m happy to bike full steam head first into the winter months and figure it out. Not to sound too high-school-counselor-ish, but: it’s really your attitude that matters. If you think you can’t bike in the winter, you won’t try. If you think you will grab the winter by it’s nether regions and force it to submit to your bicycling will, you will find a way.

It will probably be a different story when I move to Minnesota.

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