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Little over a week late swapping this thread up.
But some of us are still around so let’s get a new one going 🙂Was expecting this weekend’s snow to be the official start of winter covered paradise but it looks like it will probably all be melting in short order again. My tires are definitely overkill for this and sounds like a racket.
Right now I figure studded tires are a “must” given the frozen mornings and meltwater. Don’t need some nasty surprise so I’ll take the buzzing-bees (studded tires) quite happily thank you.
Am I the only one annoyed with the other ninja riders? (ie all dark, no lights at all) I generally now just yell at them “hey buddy your lights are off!” and keep going. Don’t need a conversation. If everyone did that maybe they’d “get it”. Please help… it could save someone from having a really bad accident.
Yep! I still laugh when I see a person riding a high end fat bike that probably cost $3,000+ AND NO LIGHTS! Couldn’t spare $20 – $30 for lights after paying $600 for those studded tires I guess.
You must get up really early. I haven’t seen any ice yet. My double ice spikers turn heads they’re so loud. I wish they were as quiet as humming bees.
Tonight riding home around 5pm I didn’t see anyone without lights, but 80-90% of who I did see had annoying blinking white lights. One dude was blazing along on his roadie at 35kmh with a literal strobe light. Street signs were reflecting a disco rave. What is wrong with people? You’re going to blind everyone on the pathway just so you can have a car swerve towards you on the road because you’re also blinding them and causing the fixation effect with the blinking? Where did common sense go.
You forgot to charge your front whites and they’re low on battery, that I can understand putting it on a blinky mode home. Anything else and there’s zero reason not to have it solid, pointed down and on a medium setting when on the pathway.
I don’t know. Maybe it’s personal preference on the road. But not on a pathway. Lots of pedestrians in my view reacting to his idiocy. 100% pointed straight ahead.So had two near misses on my evening commute home thanks to ninja riders. sigh… first time it was a matter of 1-2 seconds miss, the 2nd time was literally barely missed the tool as I was riding straight on the road and he popped out from site path right in front of me… and of course he was on his phone too.
So… why do I sometimes (not always) have brighter lights?? so I can have a chance at seeing this @$$hats in time to evade them!!
When riding the actual roads… my bar-lights are just “on” (usually low-mode, but pointing ahead to catch anything reflective)… but I often have a smaller blinky on top of my fork AND on top of my helmet. Sometimes that’s all that “saves” me. But then again it didn’t seem to help the idiot CT driver this morning who passed within less than 18″ of my left elbow as we descended a hill in Hawkwood before then closing the gap further before pulling into his next stop. At his next stop I smacked his mirror… made me feel better at least. who knows if he had a clue why?
CT drivers can be pretty bad. I’ve been forced on to the curb by buses making stops on the bike lane on Bowness Rd (as in they half pass me then pull over, forcing me to hop the curb or get run over).
And I almost got hit by a bus while driving my car down that road. There was a light dusting of snow, and a bus no seeing the paint on the road decided that the bike lane (which is 3 feet wide) was in fact a bus lane, and proceeded to pass me on the right. I called that one in, the bus missed me by inches before I realized what it was doing. I stopped, got out, and went to the door to explain what the road markings were before being roundly ignored.
So yeah, some of those bus drivers are completely clueless… Some of them are great though.
What we need is a way to rate the drivers (a la uber), and then have colored lights on every car that displays their rating for all to see, so we can spot the dangerous drivers coming! Maybe we could even add a down vote button on the bus mirror, so your next encounter would be recorded for the rest of us…
Grab the numbers on the buses (both the route and the bus number on the back), time of incident, and file it with calgary transit. I’ve had to put in tickets on a few buses for poor driving, including passing on the right, and I’ve always gotten an email back about actions being taken followed by a period of not having trouble in that area for a while.
Lights enough to see what’s in front of you is good of course.
The paved detour at the south end of the Crowchild ped bridge is back in effect. Same configuration as last winter. Didn’t see a projected re-open date.
Anyone know if the NW Stoney Trail underpass by Bowness park is open yet to allow one to cross the river there? I didn’t want to risk a dead-end “out and back” attempt last night (lack of time) so didn’t go look and instead took the 85th St NW gauntlet run across the bridge.
It still shows up as a closure on the Calgary.ca website under “Pathway Closures,” and disappointed to see that there isn’t really much mention on that website about the timing of the closure OR expected completion of the Stoney Trail widening project……
Homer says “D’Oh!” I forgot that it is a Provincial Road.
https://www.alberta.ca/west-calgary-ring-road.aspx
The scary thing is that the scope of work is kind of large. They are adding another bridge – REALLY?? It might be worth the ride over there to see how they’re doing that, even if you have to backtrack!
Thanks for the awesome link Gyro. I watched the video… comments:
1. I don’t think they coulda used more land if they tried on the new West expansion area
2. Hope they take care of the pathways around the new interchanges at Nosehill, Bowmont, 16th Ave, some new climbs up to OldBanff, and of course the new bridge area on Old Banff which is a HIGHLY used cycling corridor for us roadies.
3. To answer your question… they’ve been putting in a LOT of piles the last few months near Stoney and 16th Ave, and more recently on the embankments of the Bow, plus doing huge widening activities. Can see this from both driving the bridge and also cycling in that area.So gotta complain about the MUP between Edworthy and downtown today…. I realize that the recent snow was a “surprise” but a worse surprise was the crap job that was done attempting to clear it. There were huge chunks (ie basketball size), there were windrows in the middle of one lane, huge sections of glaze ice/hardpack, lots of stutter bumps, moguls, some air time, tracks from the machine doing 360°’s (no joke), and generally they made life hard for a few days. So ride your studded tires, at low pressure. It was the most sketchy for this season, and close to the worst from last year. At least we have a few warm days ahead but Thursday morning is not gonna be fun.
Didn’t Ride Yesterday because I figured that if they hadn’t cleared it by Tuesday night, it wouldn’t get done until sometime Wednesday, especially Bowmont Park.
As for this morning, YUCK! Icy patches, death cookies, rough & icy tire tracks – I had at least 3 squirrely moments, but never went down. Hopefully it warms up quick and the sun stays out all day and burns a lot of that crap off the MUP’s. I’m gonna try and leave a little earlier so that I can see all that crap before the sun goes down.
Hey Gyro… today WAS actually better than Wednesdays commute!! both going into downtown this morning and coming home this eve. Plus they emptied a full truck load of gravel I’m sure spread out between downtown and Edworthy.
By FAR the worst path areas are from around Prince’s Island (south side) until past Peace bridge. Highest number of crap areas, squirrelly, rutted and nasty. and that’s with two studded tires. AFTER I dropped their pressure from ~60psi down to about 35-40psig.
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