Oulu in Finland and Winnipeg in Canada are two winter cities with remarkably different stories. Oulu is just like Winnipeg – except for the bike paths stretching for miles in every direction and the thousands of people riding bicycles in the snow – says Winter Bike to Work Day founder Anders Swanson

It happened for me three years ago in Turku: the moment I realised that cycling in the snow was going to become normal. I was winding my way up Finland, en route to the world’s first ever Winter Cycling Congress, hosted by a city called Oulu some 400 miles north. It had been snowing non-stop for a week.

I thought I had already found somewhere quite special. Earlier that afternoon, I had watched what I believed to be an impressive number of people riding their bicycles on Turku’s main shopping street in the falling snow. I remember thinking, as I ran around with my camera taking as many pictures as possible before sunset: “Oulu must be like this.”

When I arrived in Oulu that year, everything suddenly became clear. I had found it: a real winter in a real winter city. It was the kind of city I knew – a snowy one with just the right amount of ugly buildings, box stores and strip malls. It had American-style suburbs full of single family homes, it had the hockey rinks, it even had the right kind of trees. It was just like Winnipeg, Canada – except for the properly connected bike paths which stretched for miles in every direction and the thousands of people riding bicycles in the snow.

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What Oulu makes up for in moderation due to its proximity to the ocean it loses in lack of sunlight thanks to being 120 miles south of the Arctic Circle. The mercury in Winnipeg is higher over the summer and dips lower in midwinter but experiences average daytime winter temperatures within four degrees of Oulu. At 160–175 days of snow coverage each year (pdf), Oulu’s number of days with snow on the ground is higher than Winnipeg’s average of 132. Yet the differences in bicycle usage between the two cities are stark.

Measuring bicycle trips is not easy. Kids under 18, for example, are almost always left out. However, the most cited reports put Oulu’s overall bicycle modal share at around 22% (32% in summer, 12% in winter). If Oulu were located in North America, its winter bicycle share alone would make it a shoo-in for the continent’s most bike friendly city. It would leave the summer ridership numbers of places like Portland, Davis or Minneapolis trailing. By contrast, even though cycling is currently the fastest growing form of transportation in Winnipeg, the 2011 national census pegs us at 2.1%. Two winter cities, with two remarkably different stories.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest In Oulu, Finland, cycling in the snow is seen as unremarkable. Photograph: Anders Swanson

Snow is an identity issue. Winter stakes out a special physiological and psychological space in those supposedly hardy people who think they are adapted to it. Some of the hype is fair – a really cold winter day can, after all, kill you fairly quickly. But some of us like to overemphasise our own bravery.



Most assumptions about winter cycling are based on the same myths no matter where you are from. Those -30C days do happen in Winnipeg, but they are pretty uncommon; yet we allow the deep freeze days to characterise an entire winter. We also conveniently forget that cycling keeps you warm – comfortably so. In an urban environment, the risk of being harmed by the weather while cycling is reduced to nil with a basic scarf and jacket. We assume that winter cycling is dangerous but somehow we forget that vehicle speeds are the real issue, and that they drop in the winter. It shouldn’t be surprising when a study shows that cycling in the winter months with steady conditions is relatively safe compared to cycling in June.

In a city, the risk of being harmed by the weather while cycling is reduced to nil with a basic scarf and jacket

When we wonder out loud “why anyone would ever want to spend more than a few minutes outside in a place like this”, we forget about its beauty. Winter is a glorious spectacle of glittering fractals complete with a soundscape and atmosphere entirely its own. Some of us have forgotten the bright side of winter: the simplicity, the efficiency, the pragmatism. In transportation terms, winter is all smooth, clean lines and quiet sounds. Bikes fit right in. Perhaps sitting in cars has dulled our senses.

I still find it amusing that pictures of children cycling in the winter elicit amazement in Canada – even skepticism. You’d think that a country famous for winter sports, and which scores D- on its own children’s physical activity report card, would be about ready to see them outside getting a little exercise. In Oulu, where 30% of children under 12 (pdf) ride a bicycle to school year round, you will find packed bike racks outside primary schools in January. In Joensuu, 50% of people of all ages continue riding once the leaves fall. A similar scenario will reveal itself to you in numerous cities in Sweden and Finland. Places like Linköping, Uppsala, Umeå, Örebro, Karlstad, Rovaniemi, Jyväskylä and Luleå demonstrate that cycling in the snow is not just possible but popular. It is enough to make any bike-friendly planner living in a city with cold winters completely rethink the idea of weather as a barrier.



Oulu’s longstanding planner Mauri Myllylä sees nothing unusual in the stubborn fight for an extensive network of year-round pathways, peppered with stress-relieving and time-saving bicycle underpasses at almost every roadway intersection. What good is relying on a painted bike lane in a white-covered world? The wisdom of protected bike lanes becomes obvious.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Winter cycling in Winnipeg, Canada. Photograph: Anders Swanson

The cold makes new things possible: frozen rivers transform themselves into one long continuous bike path, building temporary bridges everywhere. Winter changes the texture of the ground itself, making the surface of the Earth so hard that you can barely dent it with a shovel. Snow is also a wonderful method for tracking transportation habits. The sneckdown concept is becoming popular among planners, but imprints in the snow have been teaching us stories for millennia.

Winter also teaches frugality; it forces you to plan ahead and exposes human frailty like no other season. Road designers who ignore the ongoing operating costs of snowclearing do so at their peril – perhaps this will eventually push all cities to consider life-cycle costing in their design choices. In Scandinavia, true cost reckonings lead to bike paths that literally clean the snow off themselves.



A resident of Oulu knows that the bicycle will probably still be the most reliable form of transport in winter

Once you commit to it, it doesn’t take much to conquer winter. Oulu plans ahead. Its first proper bicycle plan, developed in the 1970s, was put into action in 1982 and since then, the bicycle network has grown by an average of 10 miles every year. Whatever Oulu builds, it maintains. In the autumn, when freezing temperatures approach, machines that spit gritty materials of carefully chosen diameters head out early to lay the groundwork for a sandpaper-like surface in time for the morning rush. It doesn’t take more than a centimetre of the white stuff to fall before equipment is unleashed to plough, remove, pack and texturise every single pathway that needs it.

In short, Oulu aims to have its cycling network ready and open for the people who want to use it. This not-so-revolutionary idea of caring about the needs of the basic users of the transportation system results in a populace that can rely on their city year round. Even in extreme weather, Oulu residents know that the bicycle will probably still be the most reliable form of transport since the pathways will usually be treated first.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Winter cycling in Oulu, Finland. Photograph: Anders Swanson

The bikes you see embody the same kind of practical, time-honoured design used in all great cycling cities around the globe. Despite years of practice and the most choice in the world, the majority of Oulu residents haven’t embraced studded tires. Downtown bike parking lots are instead full of run-of-the-mill old city bikes, the kind that sport regular rubber, kickstands and mudguards to keep slush off your clothes. Even in winter, helmets are decidedly optional. Most people simply use whatever bike they used all summer, dress how they want and they expect their city’s maintenance regime to keep pace.

All of this is a recipe for moments that would be extraordinary elsewhere. I have been passed by six-year-olds in snowsuits cycling home from kindergarten, with dad trailing far behind. My friend Pekka Tahkola is fond of telling how he witnessed a gentleman in his 90s cycle to a local shop in -27C weather to enquire about a new bike for his girlfriend who was “only” in her 80s. Apparently, in Oulu, the people outlast the bikes.

Just five years ago, in Winnipeg, winter cycling was almost a taboo subject. Back then I would sometimes need to explain, even to otherwise bicycle-oriented people, why this Winter Bike to Work Day idea we were toying with would not harm our chances of being taken seriously. This was despite all the people around me who I saw riding – in some cases having to ride – in winter.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A man cycles through the snow in Times Square in New York last month. Photograph: Gary Hershorn/Corbis

Things are much different now. Watching Winter Bike to Work Day go from 500 people the first year to 10,000 last year has been a lesson in how everything is possible. Winter cycling is undeniably growing.

Like waking up to an overnight snowfall, change can come very quickly. Forums like the Winter Cycling Conference and Winter Bike to Work Day have helped immensely. Once people find out that something is already popular somewhere, they want to learn what it takes to make it happen at home. Like William Gibson once remarked, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. When places like Joensuu and Oulu – where riding in the snow is so taken for granted that almost no one cares – get to talk to places like Montreal or Calgary who are seeing cycle tracks ploughed, connected and filling with people for the first time, confidence rises and opposition melts fast.

You see it happening already in some of the world’s most important cities. The five year trend for winter cycling in New York has shown a steady upward climb (pdf), nearly doubling in five years with recent ridership “attributed to solid bicycle network expansion during 2012 and high ridership in cold days immediately after Hurricane Sandy”. They are still working on the storm response, but they’ll get it right soon enough. Moscow’s recent winter bicycle parade attracted 2,000 participants.

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Catherine McKenna, Canada’s new Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, took a ride to work last Friday and is poised to ride on Winter Bike to Work Day too. Calgary’s famous new network of downtown cycle tracks are retaining what would have once been surprising numbers of summer riders thanks to top notch reliability in the winter from day one. More importantly, developing a network of winter maintenance priority routes for cycling is now one of the “quick wins” in Winnipeg’s new $334m walking and cycling strategy.



Those cities that will make the shift most quickly will be the ones that figure out that the ideal design vehicle for their cycling network is an elderly couple wearing regular clothing, riding regular bikes having a quiet kindly conversation, regardless of the weather, anywhere in the city. The fact that they are able to ride side by side while doing so will be no more surprising than the passenger seat in a car. They will likely be wearing woolly hats, not helmets, and they will be riding upright, enjoying the view, basking in the beauty of winter.

Anders Swanson is an artist and sustainable transportation designer based in Winnipeg, Canada. He is the secretary of the Winter Cycling Federation, lead designer of BikeWalkRoll and, with his brother Torrin, runs international Winter Bike to Work and School Day.