We’ve had a complicated relationship with biking in the winter. Unlike some of our favourite channels on the topic, we’re not long-time winter cyclists ourselves. We only started getting into year-round cycling a few years ago. At first it was exciting, we were breaking a mental block that we didn’t realize we had. So you don’t need to stop biking when the weather gets cold and snow starts to fall? Why didn’t anyone tell us this before? Why is our culture so weird about this?

But biking in the winter never really became something we did that often. We did it here and there, it was a fun novelty, but it never felt that natural and we still shifted to walking and transit for most of our winter transportation needs. Part of this was spending a winter in Ottawa, which doesn’t entirely embrace being a winter city. Some bike routes get plowed pretty well, but a lot of the ones near us didn’t and that made a modest bike network get even smaller.

But even when we had clear routes we still had a big problem: bike cleaning, maintenance, and storage was a pain. A blanket of snow that’s nice and pristine at the beginning of winter gradually turns into a mess of salt, slush, dirt, gravel, and grime. This will get all over your bike. It can rust, degrade, and interfere with the components like the chain and brakes, and if you store your bike inside an apartment it’s a big mess to deal with the gunk that melts or falls off your bike. None of these problems were insurmountable, but they added effort and made us question each trip whether it was worth taking out the bike. Much of the time, it wasn’t. The standard solution to all of this is to get a dedicated winter bike, especially an old beater bike that’s easier to maintain or leave outside and not worry about it getting corroded or stolen. We should have done that: trying to ride our summer bikes through winter has probably been our biggest winter cycling mistake that basically guaranteed it wouldn’t be the most natural transportation option in the winter.

But since moving back to Montreal a third option has appeared: BIXI. Until this year, Montreal’s bike share program has only been available from mid-April to mid-November. The city gets a lot of snow and those are the seven months of the year that are mostly guaranteed to be snow free. The big concern is that the stations — most of which are on the street — would interfere with the city’s pretty intense snow plowing and removal process. This was the first year BIXI has been available through winter as a limited pilot project, mostly based around off-street stations in parks and plazas to stay out of the snow plows’ way, although there were a few stations left on the street to test how they would hold up or interfere. We were pretty excited for this pilot, especially since we’d started relying on BIXI for most of our short-to-medium distance cycling in the summer too. So how did it go? It was a little rough at first, with someone on Reddit declaring it a write-off, saying “I don’t think this winter BIXI experiment is working”, pointing to broken docks and bikes covered in snow. Let’s cover the good and the bad of BIXI’s first winter season.

As November 15 came and went and we entered into the first winter BIXI season ever, we noticed something interesting: it didn’t immediately start snowing. Obviously, the five month winter window is the time when it can plausibly snow, but it doesn’t mean there’s snow on the ground for the whole five months. Even if you have zero tolerance for cycling when any snow is in sight, extending the season through winter gives you an extra month or maybe two of cycling. This winter it took a few weeks for the first snowfall to actually happen, and even though it was a pretty big one, it melted after a week or two and left a few more weeks without any snow. This stuff is unpredictable, and operationally you just can’t turn a whole BIXI system on and off around it, but if bikes are available the whole time you can make your own decisions based on the actual conditions and your comfort level instead of just turning off all winter.

We didn’t feel the need to avoid biking just because there’s snow on the ground though, and that’s because Montreal does a pretty good job of bike lane clearing, although it depends on the route and borough. Even when there’s residue or active snowfall, we felt more confident on BIXIs than our regular bikes because they’re winterized — apparently the only bike share service in North America to do so — with studded tires and grippy pedals. Step-through bikes are also really nice in the winter because it’s so easy to hop off if you encounter any dangerous surfaces or obstacles. Falling off your bike isn’t nearly as big of a problem as people often assume, but like with walking or driving in the winter we did have one or two close calls. And finally the BIXIs are equipped with lights, which is extra important with the shorter days in the winter. The basic value proposition of winter bike share isn’t that it does anything you can’t do on your own, but that it makes everything much more accessible and convenient. You can buy and install studded tires or grippy pedals for your own bike but that’s another step that a lot of people won’t take, especially if they’re new to winter cycling and haven’t gotten hooked yet. As we mentioned, the biggest barrier for us was general cleaning, maintenance, and storage of our bikes, which was always possible to handle but inconvenient enough that we’d always think twice about taking out the bike. “Do we really want to deal with bringing all that mess back into our apartment? Let’s just walk, or take transit.” Having bike share available in the winter basically fixed that for us.

But there were a few problems and inconveniences with the winter BIXI pilot, most of which were related to stations. Many stations just had technical malfunctions where they wouldn’t accept a bike or wouldn’t give you a bike for no obvious reason. Most of the time you could just take a different bike or use a different dock at the same station and it was fine, but a handful of times a station was mostly or fully not working and it was pretty inconvenient. Sometimes it was also hard to dock a bike due to snow build-up around stations, especially when snow or ice changed the height of the bike going into the dock so that it wouldn’t catch the locking mechanism. And the last problem with stations was the lack of them. The density of stations was actually enough that we didn’t have much trouble finding one near most of our destinations, at least within the service zone. The problem was that if a station wasn’t usable (because of a malfunction, ice and snow, or just being full or empty) the trek to the next closest station could be long. In the summer if a station is full or empty it’s no big deal, there’s another one around the block. In the winter it’s a much bigger worry and something we had to be more careful to plan around. Obviously, problems like this are understandable in a pilot project and BIXI is working on them for next year.

We do have one bigger complaint or suggestion though that might be less obvious. Right now the normal way to unlock a bike is to scan a QR code with an app on your phone. This just isn’t a great method for winter. Nobody wants to fiddle with their phone and maybe take their gloves off to work an app when it’s 10 or 20 degrees below freezing. You might also have to deal with snow or ice covering the QR code. BIXI also has keys that you can stick directly into a dock to unlock a bike, but they stopped sending these out by default to members a few years ago. You can still get one but you have to specifically know about it and request an “exceptional shipment”. We did this last year and we’re really happy we did — it’s better in the summer and much better in the winter. We probably would have used winter BIXI less if we had to rely on our phones. We think it would help other people use the system through the winter too if BIXI brought back the keys as the default way to unlock a bike, or at least publicized them more, because they really are better.

Now that we have most bike-related winter problems sorted out and we live in a place with pretty good bike lane clearing, we’ve been able to get a much better sense of how many days are actually impossible to bike because of the weather. It’s hard to say that any day is actually impossible, but we encountered four or maybe five days this winter where there was enough snowfall that the plows couldn’t keep up and biking was actually a bad idea. It wasn’t even dangerous necessarily, just difficult to bike through and not worth the effort. There was also an ice storm in late January that left the roads pretty slippery that might have felt dangerous to bike on but we were away in Miami so we didn’t actually experience it. Overall, despite a few hiccups, winter BIXI was a game changer for our winter mobility. This is the first year that biking in the winter really clicked for us and felt natural — not exactly like in the summer, but reasonably close.

If you’re considering getting into winter cycling, we’d recommend using a different bike. If you have bike share in your city and it’s available year round, try it out. If not, consider getting a secondary bike for winter riding that you can permanently winterize, ideally an older one with simpler components that requires less maintenance and that you can comfortably leave outside. Of course, if you have something like a garage then some of these storage problems go away.