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Comment by k3liutZu | Hacker News Reader

I might have like a cargo bike if I didn't like on top of a hill. And if I didn't have 6 months of cold dark weather with snow / ice covering the roads.

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I live on the top of a hill and have 6 months of dark cold weather with snow and I use a cargo bike for around 12kms every day. The roads are covered with salt to prevent the ice though. Works fine overall.

> snow / ice covering the roads.

Ice is not problem with studded tires. And isn't snow is usually plowed from the roads so cars or bikes could pass?

They might be for major roads in major cities eventually, but most of the streets are pretty terrible for anything smaller than a car whenever it’s snows periodically.

Have you ever tried cycling in actual Winter, with ice, snow and slush?

Just search "Netherlands bicycle snowing" on Google Images to see how normal it is. The top results show both children and the elderly cycling on ice and slush and snow.

Yes it is normal here, but it is also hilariously fraught with low-stakes peril. Dumpert always has vids of people busting their ass trying to make a turn or they hit an icy patch every year. I've had a couple of falls on ice here and I am not confident of my resilience long term doing that as I get older. So I avoid biking when it is frozen. But since that is only like a week or two out of the year, it is no big deal

Personally yes, every day to the train station on my way to work.

The bike paths are a bit less busy but basically nobody changes their behavior except to go slower around the icy corners.

This is in Netherlands

Bit less busy == many folks changing their behavior.

I mean yeah some switch to transit, but there are still lots of people on bikes. I guess I shouldn’t have said nobody changes their behavior, but rather that it’s common and totally fine to ride in those conditions, as evidenced by many people doing it in my daily commute.

Sorry, my comment was pedantic and unhelpful.

Better comment:

I'd think that many people still commuting, doesn't erase the fact that cargo bikes (the thread topic) don't do well in those conditions.

And a critical factor is, hills. I live in a countryside that alternates between flatlands and all-hills. The towns are all around rivers (the pioneers needed water) and built close to them, and it's very hilly around rivers.

So here our experience is different from, say, the flattest country on earth.

have you?

I've ridden my bike in pretty much any condition. When it's icy, I ride with lower pressure in the tires, snow and slush is usually doable, the only thing that really sucks is when it gets cold again after a warmer day and the roads or covered with frozen slush, that's where I get off and push my bike.

It really depends on how well the roads are maintained, this winter they were quite good at clearing the snow in my city, so it wasn't much of an issue.

I live in Tromsø and I'd say the amount of bikes, which is high, barely drops during winter. They just swap tires.

Yup, I do it every Scandinavian winter on a beater mountain bike that I have an extra set of wheels with studded tyres for the sketchiest days of ice-y conditions. When it's just snow/packed snow the usual deep grooved MTB tyres handle it quite well.

Yes. Not too much in slush though, it was usually far too cold for there to be any slush.

I took the bus when it got to -30, though. Or, as they reported it then, a wind chill of 2400 watts per square meter.

It only snows when it's warm (say, -10 C). Plows smear the snow into a thin layer. Then a high moves in so the temperature drops and you get asphalt covered in sheer ice that just gets polished by the sun and subsequent plowing.

In some places there's Winter, not just the pause between autumn and spring.

If you find cycling up hill difficult then an electric cargo bike should solve that problem for you.

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