This winter, as a personal political statement after Russia invaded Ukraine, I decided to abandon using gasoline for my daily commute to work and replace it with muscle power + electricity — an e-bike, a train.
It’s now late July and I’ve e-biked ca 1400km in Tallinn doing daily commutes to work, taking kids to kindergarten and school and running errands. I’ve used two bikes — a standard solo city-bike and a cargo-bike. The mileage splits almost equally between the bikes.
I’ve bicycled in Tallinn for more than two decades for sport and an occasional tour with friends, but before this year, I had not really used the bike to travel from A to B with a purpose.
Here’s what I’ve learned so far..
It’s not sport
For the last 20 years, bicycling has been a sports activity for me — to go biking, you had to get dressed in special “bicycling clothes”, put on a heart rate monitor, shoes that click into pedals, etc.
Commuting is a different mindset — it’s not sport. You don’t “bike to work in the “blue heart rate zone”, you bike to work in a comfortable speed that doesn’t get you sweaty. Sports-dressing->undressing->work-dressing is unnecessary.
So I started biking “Dutch style” — with a bike that has full fenders and lights, in “civilian clothing” .. and it works just fine.
I wish more people in Tallinn would realise that bicycling does not have to be a sports activity.
You have to go the long way around
A number of bike paths and “light traffic roads” have been built in the last decade in Tallinn, but despite that, bicycling infrastructure is still weak for commuting.
The dedicated bike paths are mostly outside the city centre, seemingly built where there was empty space .. and often not really leading anywhere. So if you want to exercise and can choose an arbitrary route — fine. However, if you need to go from one specific place (like your home) to another particular location (kindergarten, school, work, supermarket), you’re often faced with a very patchy route of switching repeatedly between sharing the road with cars, sharing with pedestrians, going the long way around silly intersections, bouncing up and down countless pavement edges, riding through busy bus-stops, etc.
There are some hidden gems — a bike path built on an old railway line from Nõmme to Õismäe, a street dedicated for bicycling behind the Tallinn Zoo, an empty and pretty safe Mooni side-street running parallel with some of the major “stroads” connecting center to Mustamäe, etc.
So — it’s worth trying different routes and carefully “curating” your commuting route. This will sometimes mean going the long way around to be able to ride safely and comfortably.
The shortest bicycle route to work for me is 10.5km, but I ride 13km every morning just because of the much nicer “riding experience”.
I wish the Tallinn city government would strategically connect bike-paths to allow a bicyclist get from each area in the city to each other area via a segregated safe bike route, even if it means riding a bit longer.
Parking is a p.i.t.a
A good e-bike costs upwards of 2500EUR. For many commercial landlords, bicycle parking means providing a flimsy aluminium ring to lock the (removable) front wheel of your precious bike into.. in an area fully viewable to building visitors and passers-by on the street.
You need a good lock and you need to pick your battles — I bike a few hundred meters further from my closest supermarket to another chain’s store, since this brand has invested into a decent bike locking system by Bikeep.
I am lucky to work in a hipster area where the landlord has been forced by popular demand to dedicate a separate locked room indoors to bike storage. I would probably not choose to bike-commute to work if there was no secure option to store the bike for the day.
I’m still slightly anxious if I’ve parked my bike to a random location.
I really wish 1–2 car parking spaces in our large office parking lot would be dedicated to locked and CCTV-d bike sheds. One car parking spot could hold up to 10 bikes!
I also wish there was reasonable insurance for e-bikes that would allow these to be parked to commercial locations.
Drivers & pedestrians are mostly nice
There has been a dramatic improvement in how car drivers regard bicyclists in Tallinn over the last 2 decades. When I stared biking in Tallinn in 2000, I remember that a bicyclist was essentially vagabond — had to fend for themselves and to get out of the way of car drivers (even the bicyclist had the right of way).
By 2022, I’ve found that most drivers are reasonable and respectful in moving traffic and you’re given space, yielded to if the signs say so, and in general considered an actual member of traffic (assume this works when you’re not a jerk yourself and respect the rules, too).
Where things fall apart is parking and maneuvering. It’s still very common to stop your car “just for a moment”, completely blocking the bike-path.. or to block a zebra crossing while you’re waiting for a chance to make a turn, or to park half way across a pedestrian path.
For pedestrians, I felt a mental change happening in October 2021, when bright red bike-paths were hastily painted on a bunch of streets before local elections. The red paint melted away into the sea, but the expectation that there are bicyclists and areas on pedestrian paths dedicated to bicycles remained ingrained into pedestrians’ expectations.
I really wish for a cultural / mindset change that would make parking on and otherwise hogging and blocking pedestrian and bike areas a moral no-no for drivers.
The weather is a much smaller blocker than you think
I started biking in the deep winter with snow and ice on the ground. The idea of bicycling in minus degrees seemed insane at first, but turns out that pretty basic studded tyres, a random jumper, an otherwise inconspicuous “bicycle commuting” waterproof jacket + some paraphernalia like tube scarf, etc do the trick. It’s fine to commute in light rain. If you’re adventurous, it’s completely doable to ride with studded tyres in the winter.
Side-effects of biking to work
I’ve realised that biking to work has expanded from just a political statement to not burn Russian gas to three broader purposes — it provides me an hour of light exercise per day, it’s a meditative mental health break between working and not working, and it’s reduces my “footprint” in the city (burning less fuel, taking less space, making less noise).
