This time of year, I'm mostly riding bicycles from Divvy Bikes, Chicago's bike-sharing program.
Divvy Bikes are the perfect bikes for winter, mainly because someone else is in charge of maintaining them. Keep your personal bikes nice and clean, and let the bike-share mechanics deal with the salt! It's also nice to be able to bike somewhere in the winter sunlight and then take another route home if the weather turns nasty. Once the streets are plowed, it's easier to find your way on a Divvy than mountain-goat (this is a verb now) over the peaks and crevasses of ice and snow, and the Divvy bikes have full fenders to keep your clothes dry and grit-free.
Unfortunately, the Divvy bike docking stations aren't shoveled with any consistency. Above, I've posted a video from February 2014, when there was so much ice within the dock that the bike I was returning was suspended in midair, swaying gently above the ground if tapped. (I tweeted at Divvy, and they assured me this was OK.) This winter, I dealt with unshoveled and inoperable docking stations at my destinations. Still, it beats stuffing myself into rain pants and buying a new chain in the spring.
You can learn more about Chicago's bike-share program on the Divvy Bikes website, or find a bike-share program in your city from Wikipedia's list of bicycle-sharing systems. If you head out on bike-share in the winter, take a plastic shopping bag with you to tie over the seat, as the snow and ice adhere to the seats if the bikes aren't used frequently enough.
