Here's where the clip started

The clip in the previous post started from top of an overpass. The road below is a bit dug in, but the bridge still gives a nice boost going downhill!

I started wondering how the drivers below will like piles of snow and chunks of ice raining down on them when the snow plows clean the overpass, as there almost certainly will be some going trough the railing... then I noticed the "chicken wire" behind the railing in the upper picture. Ok, one inch pieces of ice are not so dangerous.

There's still some room to plow more snow to the side before you need to get a wheel loader (or a tractor with a front loader) to remove it.

Funny! A Winter Mushroom!

This is a few days old picture, taken before the last bout of snow. A car, covered in snow. Snow melts, runs down the bonnet and sometimes you get this:

An ice scupture? An ice mushroom? It will scare the careless mobilist who parks his car here and crashes into it. Although more likely, the snow plow got it first.

Wet snow will turn into ice when cars drive over it, causing un-ruts (whatever is the opposite of  a rut :-) of ice which are hard to remove by a regular snow plow (you need a scraper for that). These unruts, covered by snow were the reason for several crashes while the snow was still coming (I guess there were some pileups too). At least that's what the drivers claimed. And I think I read about a car flipping over a few days later when the weather got colder and the salted main roads started to freeze. Salt does not prevent freezing, it just makes it happen in colder temperature. So one might get that partially frozen, black ice road surface at -20C that we had a few days ago.

Luckily, there is no salt on bikeways so we're spared from artificial slipperyness, although that 15 or 20 centimeters of snow did make riding a bit difficult. :-P

The old underpass post pt.3

Here's the last pictures I've found. Taken from yet another direction.
First pic: sunny spring day.

Not so sunny! :D

The old unperpass post pt.2

This is what the old bikeway along the road looked like in April (which year, I'm a bit unsure :-P) before the construction. A rather scenic path when the weather is right. I've taken some flying snow flake shots here.

Oops, somebody cut the trees and dumped a lot of material for the new sound- I mean, noise barriers.

Ripped off the old asphalt, new gravel added and done some shaping on the dirt.

Here it is, ready to use. I was amazed they had a lush green grass growing already, at least in some places.

A view from the opposite direction.

The old underpass post pt.1

Whew, this post has been long in doing. I've accidentally deleted some of the pictures meant for this post, and then the memory stick has problems so a lot of the remaining pictures give error messages like "unrecognised type 0x020" or some such nonsense. Some that open have only half the picture, the rest is some weird color or digital noise, but who cares.


I've some pictures from late May when the work starter, then others early July showing the "in progress" state and some shot when the work was finished.

So, in May, here is the former hill being excavated and sewers done etc.

By July, it looks like the sculpting is done. This is looking back to where the pics above were taken.

The forms for the underpass structure...

And a few weeks later, gone are the fences and there is a new asphalt surface.

The stones... have been angled. Better than before (which was a three inch drop) but still one has to slow down when going uphill here. Not as bad when coming downhill. So... they want us to slow down before the uphill and come fast down? Doesn't make sense, so I guess it's some kind of snow plow regulation at work.

And there it is, the new underpass. With a new rollerskating gangster loitering about, already.

And the new bus stop, moved 40 meters from the previous location. On the other side of the road it's almost at the same spot it used to be.

Cyclist Crashes with Elk!

I've been enjoying the weather lately! Many, many days and nights of sunshine, and the 'magical' +25°C has been broken almost each day for the last two weeks. It's not so long it was below freezing and snowed some (in June! :-) so I guess the below average temperatures must me balanced with the current heat.

Earlier it was so cold that I couldn't get my fingers to type, and now it's too hot to do anything exhausting (like typing) so this will be short too. I've taken occasional photos at the new underpass they're trying to build, but I'm not ready to post them yet. Neither are my "snow in June" pics available yet unless I can figure out how to transfer them to my computer. Too smart electronics or not smart enough user?

A funny headline in the news caught my eye today: a cyclist was riding downhill, failed to see the elk crossing the road and crashed. Cyclist vs elk crashes are very rare. Maybe this was the first one? The cyclist suffered a few broken bones and the elk got a scare. And the comments section was very entertaining.  

Got some snow flakes

It's been a colder week and we got even some snow flakes from the sky. I think it flaked on three days. But as the temperature is above freezing (maybe a few degrees minus Celsius at night on a night or two), the few flakes disappeared immediately.

And there's a new interesting construction going on near one of my regular routes. They're building a new underpass. It's about 350 meters east of another underpass and maybe 200 meters west of a traffic light controlled intersection. It's the brown splot crossing the yellow road in the middle of the map.

It seems like a good place to build an underpass, as it is on a top of a hill. This underpass gives new routes that will not have as much uphill. Or at least not as steep uphill.

Makes me wonder if there will be more changes to the bikeway network in the future. Are they going to try and move the bike traffic away from the traffic light controlled intersection (yellow, pink and white streets intersecting north west from the last A in Alppila)?

With the underpass it would seem that most of the traffic from south would be to/from the south-west part of the map, coming from the railway underpass just a little SW from the first A of Alppila, and Alppila it self.

From the north it would seem that most users will be from Koskela and Niittyaro. Most of the trough traffic coming from Isko will continue south trough the traffic lights and the pink street.

One possible improvement could be to continue the bikeway north from the new underpass trough the letter Y in Niittyaro to the ski/jogging path (green lines on the map) and connect to the underpass going under the big green road. That would create a direct route towards the university and the supermarkets to the north.

In other news, apparently there was some winter cycling campaign going on. The participants commuted by bike a few days a week trough the winter, rode about 35000 km instead of using car/bus, and nine out of ten are going to try it again next winter.

And there's planning going on for the city centre. With the Big Dig finished, some streets will be closed for cars. Now the designers are asking cyclists to upload their gps tracks from the rides in the centre, so they could better design the routes around and trough the downtown area. And they want to know where you park your bike.