Fascinating

How do Europeans keep ice off bike lanes? Salt?

Tractors and snowplows. Salt kills the bicycles and salty slush is much worse to drive in. Hard packed snow is actually the best to ride on.

Interestingly Oulu bike roads clearing contract states the company doing the snowplowing can do inspections only on bicycles, not cars :)

Maybe hard packed snow is a strategy for only flat cities

Seattle infamously tried the hard packed snow strategy about a decade ago, and it turned it into a dangerous (hilly) ice rink

There's a difference between riding on hard pack with a bike, and driving a car over it. I have no idea why you think an experiment with hard-pack snow on automotive roads is in anyway indicative of what works on cycle lanes.

Hard pack on a hill doesn't seem to make sense for bicycles either

In Reykjavik they used sand at first because pedestrians prefer that but that is pretty dangerous for cycling so they use salt on designated cycling paths and sand everywhere else.

It depends.

Salt only works until ten below zero. After that it only makes things worse.

When it works the result can be magical if combined with sweeping. Trashes the drivetrain real bad though.

There's a nice big picture how Oulu does it, halfway down the article.

It depends.. salt works down to -18C on cycle paths as long as you maintain it snow free and do not have big puddles of water. Brushing the snow away down to the asphalt is my preferred surface condition for cycling.

This video is a great explainer https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU

The fact that this is newsworthy kind of reinforces the point that cycling in extreme weather is not a particularly easy or convenient thing to do.

It’s easy enough that children can do it. Cycling on hard-packed snow is not particularly hard, less so than sand, I’d say comparable to gravel. Ice is a problem.

Convenience is relative. Sure, cycling in winter requires a good pair of mittens, and a warm hat, but all in all, it seems that a lot of people prefer it in Oulu over driving.

And the thing here is that it’s not the weather that’s stopping people from cycling. It’s shitty maintenance of the cycling network. Slush and ice, being forced into the same space as cars.

And that’s the newsworthy part - how does Oulu manage to maintain a cycling network in winter where most other cities fail. The answers include things such as priorities, dedication, investment. Oulu dedicates resources to the problem. Most towns don’t because “no one cycles in winter” - which then becomes a self-reinforcing prophecy.

It's fine as long as bike paths are physically separated from cars and are maintained to the same standard as roads. My college had a network of pedestrian/bike paths that they plowed in the winter, and I and many others had no problem biking year-round.