Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Complete Streets or Total Sheets?

The new challenges of winter riding seem appear every other day this month.

After our big snow last week the street department dumps a lot of deice and sand on the street.  Then they plow it all to the side of the road.  

This would be fine if the temperature stayed above freezing but we are in a freeze-thaw cycle right now.  The deice keeps deicing and the water flows back toward the street and refreezes into sheets of ice.

This is a shot looking back (west) on 57th Avenue this morning.  If you look hard you can see sheets of ice that formed between intersections.  



Below is the same principle, but it made small icy sections about 6 feet apart with a slight side slope toward the road.  You can often dodge the big sheets in the bike lane, but these little gems are hard to get around.  The studded Winter Marathon tires just buzzed confidently across all of these this morning.  I have just over 480 miles on them since putting them on in early December and they are not showing much wear - I expect they will last a few years at this rate.


On the bright side, it was not a slushy mess that cars could spray up on me as they blew on by.

See you on the road.

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