Along the Northeast Branch Trail, near College Park, riders are scarce during the winter, he says. “Just all the animals — foxes, rabbit and the deer. You don’t want to surprise the deer because, unlike hitting a deer with a car, it’s a little different with a bike.”
Many things are a little different with a bike, Branyan says, and in seven years of commuting on two wheels, he’s experienced most of them. Riding through the winter months — unless it is bitter cold, raining hard or snowing — is one of them, and he enjoys it.
The proliferation of new bike lanes and trails in the District and surrounding counties has encouraged commuting by bicycle and won the city a rating as one of the nation’s most bike-friendly places. Nationwide, the overall number of bike trips has increased by more than 60 percent in the past two decades, and more than half of cyclists reportedly are using bikes for transportation rather than recreation.
Cycling as an integral form of transportation is long established in many European cities where winter is less hospitable than in Washington, and research suggests that half of bike riders in those cities persevere through the coldest months.
“In countries that have a very strong bike culture, they don’t think of it as recreational or a pastime or seasonal — it’s something you do to get from A to B. It’s how you get around,” said Chris Eatough of
BikeArlington. “In Copenhagen, one of the top bike cities in the world, they have kind of crummy weather year around, and in winter it snows and it rains and it’s cold, but in Denmark that’s how most people get around. It’s part of your lifestyle.”
Riding right through winter is becoming a lifestyle choice for Washington cyclists, too. Although numbers are hard to come by, it has been evident to the eye of anyone downtown during the first cold days this winter.
The Capital Bikeshare program, which rents bikes for short hops to members in the District and Arlington County, registered more than half as many riders in February as it did in July. Those figures are skewed a bit because this year the program expanded, adding more bikes and docking stations.
“There is a bit of a dip in the winter months, but not that much,” said Eatough, who also works with Bikeshare. “Tourist use generally goes down in the winter, but the morning and afternoon ridership numbers are quite strong for people who use it for commuting.”
Most Bikeshare riders don’t go far enough on the clunky red bikes to get frostbitten. The average Bikeshare ride is 1.4 miles. The average ride on a personal bike is 8 miles.
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