Some pictures from the past week

Early week we had two or three days when it snowed. It kept the snow plow contractors happy, as they had plenty of work to do. For cyclists that meant difficult conditions on the streets.

The street below is is narrow and has no through traffic.  In the dutch classification it is a local access road (street) serving the housing along the street. It doesn't need segregated bike facilities, but sometimes they'd be good to have. If you look closely, you might see an inch of snow over inch of half-packed snow, and ice under all of that. The half-packed snow is snow that cars have squeezed tight, but it hasn't turned into ice yet. It has a fantastic tendency to crack under a bicycle wheel, and as it is not homogenous it doesn't crack evenly, but more to one side than the other side. In effect, it throws the wheels left or right a little, and makes me wobble. Not very nice to ride in.

On the bikeways there was some loose snow, but in general the conditions were good. The snow was so fluffy that the wind blew it around even after the rain had stopped. Here's a 3,5 meter wide bikeway and almost half of it was full of drift snow.

The pavement in front of the City Hall has heating, and it seemed to be mostly snow free, so the politicians can be happy that the who knows how many millions they spent on the prettifying project seem to be good enough to let them walk in without bringing in the snow on their shoes.

The pedestrian street Rotuaari has also heating under the pavement, but at least there were people milling about. We're choosing a new president in a few weeks- actually, the first round is next week! The campaigning is going hot, and all the candidates had booths in the square. The candidates themselves weren't there, just some poor volunteers or members of the campaign machines. So you might just vote for me, as I was there.

This street has bollards to stop cars using it as a through route. The almost knee high snow behind the bollards stopped most of the people using the street as a short cut. They had to resort using the sidewalks to get pass the snow piles.

A view from the opposite direction, two blocks closer to the sea. Actually this is taken at the market square which is right next to the sea. The street has been calmed by forbidding motorized through traffic. Although I've got video of this street from the New Year's eve, after the fireworks when all the streets were full of people leaving the Market Square. The street was full of cars ignoring the traffic sign and using it as a rat run. Including a police car! :-)

I seem to have forgotten to write about the News Year's Eve. But here goes: there was some music and fireworks at the market square. So a lot of people were about, and those who couldn't be bothered to go downtown to see them closer went for a walk e.g. on the paths north side of the river. The view was good from there and the bangs weren't so loud. After the fireworks was over, I decided to ride downtown to see what was happening there. The MUPs were full of people leaving the Market Square, and the streets were clogged with traffic. Half an hour later, the pedestrians and cyclists were gone, but the streets were still clogged with last of the cars leaving the scene. Nice. :-)

On a normal day there's only a few parked cars, so the snow plow men decided it was a good place to pile some snow.

And who needs street side parking, when the street can be used to pile snow! I also saw a car parked on a street, blocked in by the snow piled by the snow plows. That's why we don't have much street side parking.

The last few days have been more like January should be. A nice -10°C weather and white snow every where. :-)