Get around round round, I get around...
Wednesday night, in antcipation of Boston’s first snowstorm of the year, I put the 700 x 40C tires on my old hybrid. It was still clear when I rode in Thursday morning, but the blizzard came on very quickly while I and my coworkers were out for lunch.
Even as early as 2pm, Boston’s roads were a complete logjam. No one was moving, anywhere in the city. Later, it wouldn’t be uncommon to hear how it took drivers five or six hours to drive as many miles, or that schoolchildren who were let out at 2pm were stuck on busses until 11pm.
By 5pm there was a good six or seven inches of snow on the ground, and although it was light, dry, powdery stuff, that’s the point at which biking in the snow goes from “fun” to “hard work” and “treacherous”. So I let all but 20 pounds of air out of my tires (for better traction) and made my way outside at the height of the storm.
Just getting from the office door to Canal Street was difficult, as no one had cleared the sidewalks. But once out in the street, I was fine. I followed a snowplow toward Causeway Street, moving well and enjoying the packed snow crunching beneath my tires.
Causeway and Nashua Streets were another story. They really hadn’t been plowed, which left half a foot of fluffy powder to wade through. However, they’re main arteries, and passing vehicles had packed some of the snow down in very slippery ruts. The combination is really hard for a bike to navigate through, but I managed to keep upright to Leverett Circle.
At Leverett Circle I hopped onto the Esplanade’s Paul Dudley White bike path, passing a father pulling his son around in a sled. The path was perfect: it had been plowed once at maybe 4pm, but now had maybe two inches of fresh powder that was an absolute pleasure to ride through. At 13 mph, I was making better time than the traffic on Storrow Drive, and the only discomfort I had was some cold snow falling and accumulating inside my balaklava. Even the couple small snowbanks left behind by the plows were easy to burst through at speed.
When I got to the footbridge to cross over Storrow to Dartmouth Street, I hit my only real roadblock. While the DCR had plowed the bike path, they understandably hadn’t cleared the footbridge, and I just couldn’t make it up a ramp clogged with seven inches of new snow, so I walked the bike to the top of the ramp, them rode across and down and over to Beacon Street, smirking at the six lanes of stopped traffic on Storrow.
Beacon Street was more of the same: three lanes of traffic, not moving an inch. Although the road was a bit slick, I managed to navigate between cars and trucks and busses the one block from Dartmouth to Exeter, passing maybe three dozen gridlocked vehicles along the way.
Both Exeter and Comm Ave were fairly well cleared, and easy to ride.
In the end, my two-mile commute, which usually takes 15 minutes, might have taken 20. I had fun, got some exercise, made it home very quickly and without stress, and got out to enjoy the fresh air and one of the most beautiful scenes of the year: the first snowfall.
Yet the people who think it’s preferable to sit trapped in a little metal box spewing carbon monoxide for seven hours on a five-mile commute call me “crazy” for biking home in a snowstorm.
Can I call for a sanity check, please?