Cycling in Waterloo Region

[Canard]

My year on two wheels:

   

• Total distance: 4420.9 km
  
• Longest Ride: 59.1 km
  
• Number of New Bikes: +1
  
• Favourite New Trails: Brantford to Hamilton Rail Trail, Friendship Trail, Welland Canal Parkway Trail
  

How did everyone else do?

[danbrotherston]

Good idea for a year end summary.  Sadly, my year was not so good for biking.  

   

Hit by a car in the last week of April, I missed biking most of the summer, I only ended up (recording) biking 2,788.6 KMs.

Best biking was in Quebec, where although I didn't bike as far as we had (still was recovering at that point), the infrastructure is beautiful, and renting real road bikes was a treat.

Also biked in Ottawa and Austin TX, which all together made me realize how far behind we are here.

My previous points of comparison were really just London, ON, 5 years ago Toronto, ON, which does make us look good.

[jamincan]

This is a mix of running and cycling. Until May, I was focused solely on running. I was off for a week in July due to injury, a week in August while I was on a hiking trip, and then the two month-long gaps in the fall were due to work trips where I was in the field up north away from my bike.

Despite all that, I had 5,214 km on the bike for the year, over the course of 169 hours, and 107 separate rides. Longest ride of the year: 234 km and likely the highlight for me, first cycling to Milton and doing several of the hills up the escarpment, then back west to Cambridge, south to St. George, and then up to Bamberg before limping back home. Nothing on what clasher does, but definitely type 2 fun!

[clasher]

According to my ridewithgps, I did 96 rides for 7,069km and 48,326 meters climbed. Biggest ride of the year was a 1200km ride with a 90 hour time limit, the granite anvil , I finished in 88+ hours. I also did some touring in the rockies so that was cool to climb a real mountain pass, 580 metres of climbing in 12 kilometers near Radium Hot springs was my first big one... Sinclair Canyon is gorgeous. I also rode over Highwood pass in Alberta, the highest paved road in Canada at 2206m. It's a long climb from the trans-canada and only steep in spots. It's pretty remote too despite being fairly close to Calgary, there was a hotel and one open gas station in the 180km I rode that day, temps were over 30 too and the air is dry up there... Almost no traffic and the scenery is unreal, highly recommend, just plan for the lack of services.

[MidTowner]

I don't have an odometer on my bike, but I biked to work maybe forty times when GRT service was reduced in the summer and a handful of times in the shoulder seasons, so five hundred odd kilometres. I did the odd trip when my wife was out of town with the vehicle- maybe another fifty...

I'm clearly a "person sometimes on a bicycle" and not a "cyclist," as discussed in this thread many pages ago. That picture of Highwood Pass is awesome; that sounds like a lot of fun.

[goggolor]

I went from having never ridden a bike 5 years ago, to cancelling my corporate bus pass and cycling to work almost every day from February - December that was above freezing (I'm not at winter cyclist level yet). In 2017 I did 124 bike to work days, which would have been more if my bike hadn't been stolen out of my shed... twice.

I was encouraged to start biking to work by a cyclist co-worker... and two of my co-workers told me they started biking to work because they saw me do it. The network effect in action!

[Canard]

That's awesome, good on ya!

I've never understood why bike theft is so damn prolific.  When we lived at the Kaufman Lofts, someone broke into the bike room and stole half the bikes.  The week we moved out of there and into our house, someone broke into our shed and walked off with my Trek Y5, my favourite bike that I had bought with money from my first job.  I was crushed!

There are so many other things people could steal.  Why bikes?!?!  

Two of my coworkers have given very positive reviews of dealings with Moose, a Canadian company.  So, I'm looking at adding a Fat Bike 2 to my fleet...!

[chutten]

Bike theft being rampant is often attributed to the abysmal record of recovery and punishment combined with high margins on the sport equipment (and a dash of how the goods are themselves designed to be portable).

As for my stats... these pretty pretty plots and stories to go along are making me think I should look into one of those cycling applications they have on phones these days. Without it, all I can say is I rode more often than I bussed (50 weeks at 2.5 days puts me around goggolor's 124), and at a round trip distance of 11km gives me on the order of one to two thousand klicks.

[jamincan]

The plot we were using is from Strava, which is a sort of cycling/running social network, but also a useful resource to keep a record of your activities if the social aspect isn't your cup of tea. They have a huge number of users, and they are now providing the data of where and when people ride to municipalities to aid in transportation planning.

[Canard]

I started out with what I always had as a kid, a fairly cheap cycle computer:



You can pick these up for $25-$75 or so and they'll tell you your speed, trip distance, and a lifetime odometer at a minimum.

I started using Strava (app) at the suggestion of others here and it's a lot of fun - it uses GPS on your phone to plot a map of each of your rides.

You can also do fun things like this with Strava Multiple Ride Mapper:

   

This is a custom map of the Region where I bike the most - the "hotter" the lines are, the more frequent I ride there.

[jamincan]

This is the service they offer to municipalities: https://metro.strava.com/

[tomh009]

Bike theft being rampant is often attributed to the abysmal record of recovery and punishment combined with high margins on the sport equipment (and a dash of how the goods are themselves designed to be portable). 

What boggles my mind is the theft of (usually front) wheels. Yes, they come off easily, and have no serial numbers, but is there really that much of a market for stolen wheels? Fairly regularly I see dodgy-looking characters riding bikes downtown with an extra wheel in one hand, and I figure it's rather unlikely that they are just carrying spare wheels around. 

[Canard]

Yeah, I wanted to make a comment like that but I deleted it... my blood boils when I see them carrying around a front fork, frame, or wheel, knowing damn well it’s stolen.

[chutten]

Is there an easy way to report such a sighting? Just so that when, later, someone reports bikes/parts with that description missing, the authorities will have something to go on?

[goggolor]

My stolen bike saga has a somewhat happy ending... a few months after my second (brand new) bike was stolen I got a call from the Cambridge police. My bike was found when they busted that giant warehouse of stolen bikes this summer. Unfortunately the thieves had already chopped it up quite a bit, but my credit card insurance paid for King St Cycles to bring it back to the original condition.

Now my bikes live indoors... even having my new bike chained to the snowblower with a Kryptonite lock wasn't enough to keep someone from stealing it.