My new bike commute is probably the best commute of my life.
Section 1: Rolling on a chill residential street with a nice little warm-up climb. Nice houses with glimpses of the lake below. Section 2: A MUP running along a beautiful, sculpted creek running in a little glen between the nicest neighborhoods of Minneapolis. Trees, lovely curves, picturesque foot bridges, lots of places to stop and enjoy after work beers, and various sections of bootleg single track. It’s a fucking delight, and hardly anyone was using it this morning at 8:15. Only dark mark is some jabroni named a bunch of Strava sections after porn stars. Section 3: A lovely bike-only section around a lake. It’s delightful.
I do think this commute will be challenging this winter. I think I need a fat bike now.[/quote]
Damn Doug that kinda reminds me of commuting in Iowa City. If I took the long way home, I could cruise trails/paths along the Iowa River for like 75% of my ride home. It’s nice in Austin that there are lots of bike lanes to actually get you to useful places, but the those chill Midwestern MUPs are ideal if they can actually take you to where you want to go.
And that does sounds like potentially an ideal fatbike route, insofar as those exist. You might ask around and see if anybody can tell you whether or not the plow/clear those trails but from your description I doubt it.
i was riding on 2" tires and if the snow was more than 4" or 5" deep it just didn’t work – I had to spend a lot of time wrangling the bike until I got to the plowed trails. Anything less than that was no problemo.
on ungroomed trails that’s the about the limit for fat bikes too
snow performance is greatly overrated
true upper midwest style for deep snow over pavement is as narrow a cx tire as you can get
at least try it before you commit to going wide
It’s been a while since I’ve been ultra-shoaled, but today some dude nearly hit me while I was stopped, rode in front of me, and was all “I didn’t expect you to stop there, sorry man my bad!” I just muttered “yeah”. I was at a stoplight crossing a 4 lane really busy road.
my favorite part about commuting are the folks that aren’t moving at the same pace you want, so you pass them, per efficiency and all that, and they take that as a challenge and try to bolt past at every light
no exaggeration, i re-passed one dude 5 times on damen ave today. its a great way to start the day.
I hate it when I’m out on a casual ride and someone in front of me is going just a little too slow. Do I just relax? Do I pass them? I’ll just relax. No, now they’ve lost 0.1 mph so I’m going to pass them. Well maybe not, they just sped up.
Then I get tired of it and pass them and then my casual ride turns into something less casual so I can get far enough ahead of them so they aren’t annoying.
