The land with no snowploughs
The main roads have been ploughed, but there’s still a sizable amount of ice on the traffic lanes, and cars + busses with chains are grinding the top layer into tiny ice chunks, which are mixing with blown snow and snowmelt to make a slush that’s much like a foam filled with bbs. Terrifying to ride on, even with studded tires (I’ve already had one fall where the bicycle slid sideways off a ridge of ice onto a mass of slush which kept the studs from reaching the road surface – the front wheel was already sliding sideways and it didn’t stop until after it (and me) reached horizontal.)
Ugh. Maybe I need to set aside some time to make a snowtrike?
Comments
Graydon Saunders
Sat Jan 14 05:39:08 2017
As I am sure you know, bicycles – anything with two wheels – have inherent stability problems on low-or-no friction surfaces.
Thing is, trikes don’t fix enough of this; they won’t tip over, but they can have the whole set of “ok, sure, you braked hard enough to lock the wheels. You’re on a re-sublimated ice surface, which is optically flat. If the studs were big enough to stop you they’d be big enough to stop the wheels from turning when you pedalled” problems.
There’s somebody around here (meaning close enough to where I live I’ve seen them five or six times) who has a large unicycle with a studded winter tyre. This seems to work but I wouldn’t care to advocate for it.
It might be best to stay in until the roads are dry.