💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › crossing-the-baltic-sea-by-bi… captured on 2020-11-07 at 02:07:40.
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Crossing the Baltic sea by bicycle ---------------------------------- The Franken-Peugeot has rolled onto Swedish soil! Our recent, multi-wave move from Finland to Sweden involved a single wave with a rented car to move the bulk of our stuff, and the original plan called for my disassembled bike to be moved in this wave. This plan was quickly abanoned when it became clear we had been ludicrously optimistic about the size of the hire car and/or the amount of stuff we'd want to take with us. So, I left the bike locked up in my building's communal shed and planned to to come back for it later and transport it without the aid of a car. There are two companies running twice-daily ferries between Finland and Sweden. I call these things "ferries" because that's the convention everybody here uses when talking about these things in English, but I think it's kind of misleading because most people, when picturing "a ferry", imagine something that one of the boats I'm talking about might eat as a light breakfast. These things are a lot closer to what most people would picture when they hear "cruise ship". 200 metres long, nearly 3,000 passengers, multiple onboard shops, restaurants and entertainment venues, and, crucially, multiple car decks that you can drive right into and out of. Apparently the industry term for this is "RORO", for "Roll-on/roll-of". For a meagre 10 EUR extra you can add a bicycle to your ticket, so, not really knowing how this would work but encouraged that it was "a thing", I made plans in early January to head back for one day to return some stuff to my former workplace which I'd not had time to clean up before leaving, and to collect my bike. I generally think of the Nordic countries as being exceptionally bicycle friendly, and these ferries always make a brief half-way stop at the Åland Islands, which are famous as a summer cycling destination. So I expected this whole thing to be fairly straightforward. It came as quite a surprise, then, when it turns out that the way you take your bike on the ferry is simply to pretend you are a car: you get to the harbour an hour early and line up in the big multi-lane queues with all the other cars, and then you roll-on via a huge metal ramp. Now, this part was actually kind of fun. After checking in at the boom gate I got told to line up in the bus queue (yeah, buses and even semi-trailers loaded with cargo use these ferries), which happened to be empty. So I got allowed on relatively early in the bording process, while the car deck was still almost entirely empty. The boarding process is quite well orchestrated, I guess to keep the boat well-balanced, so the deck is full of men in fluorescent yellow jackets guiding cars into appropriate lanes, and I got to go through this exact same procedure. I tried to ride fast enough through the large, empty and enclosed space that I wasn't at risk of being caught up to by any cars which may have been released from the queues behind me, and this combined with being guided into lanes by officious-looking workers made the whole thing feel like some kind of weird, very short industrial race. I was surprised that the car deck included nothing in the way of dedicated bicycle racks that I was guided to, I was just told to leave my bike standing out of the way beside some random equipment standing around. I don't know whether during the summer they install racks and so I was seeing the situation at it worst, but it wasn't what I expected. So, I left my bike on its kickstand, fully expecting to come back in the morning (these passages take about 12 hours - they could be done faster, but they're slowed down, in part to facilitate the convenience of being able to get on at the end of one day and get off at the start of the next, but also to maximise the time spent in international waters where alcohol can be sold tax-free, which is what these ferries are actually infamous for) to find it lying on its side - which, to my astonishment I didn't. Getting off was largely the same procedure in reverse, but not as fun because all the parallel lanes of cars get released at the same time. There is no bike lane in the harbour's internal roads, so I was riding amongst real traffic in precisely the kind of way that I'm used to absolutely never having to do in the Nordics. But it wasn't terribly heavy or fast traffic and so I survived, rolling through the "nothing to declare" lane and out into the free world. The next leg of the journey was also a bit complicated. The ferries arrive in Stockholm, but I don't live in Stockholm. However, it's only a very short train ride away. Yet another surprise, though, was that Swedish train operators are not terribly bicycle friendly. Bikes aren't allowed on most trains. They are allowed on some, but only outside of the 0600 - 0900 rush period. Naturally, my ferry arrived at 0600, meaning I had a compulsory three hour thumb twiddle in the cold and dark waiting for me. But this wasn't all bad, since even outside of rush hours bicycles are never allowed to board a train at Stockholm Central station or at Arlanda Airport station (i.e. the two most obvious and convenient stations for somebody bringing a bicycle in out of the country). Which meant I had to first complete an unfamiliar ride from the harbour to the nearest non-central station on a suitable line, and it was nice to know that I was in absolutely no rush for this part. The majority of the ride to the station was possible using nice wide segregated bike lanes, which was exactly what I had come to expect. The final leg, though, involved the kind of bike lane which is more or less the only kind that exists in places like Australia and New Zealand, which is a 50cm narrow strip on the side of the road with no actual separation beyond a dotted white line painted on the road. This was kind of a surprise, and I don't recall *ever* seeing a single instance of this kind of lane in Finland, although I never wandered around Helsinki specifically looking for them. I chickened out of this part and walked my bike along the sidewalk, admittedly feeling like a bit of a coward watching very non-intrepid looking locals of all ages happily riding in the lane in question. I presume the drivers in Sweden have orders of magnitude more awareness and consideration for those lanes than is common back home, so maybe I shouldn't been so afraid. I found my station, locked up my bike and killed nearly two hours in a cafe waiting for 0900 so I'd be allowed on. At which point I unlocked my bike and rolled up to the station door only to have my heart sink when I spotted, from a distance, a "no bicycles" sign on the door. I was *certain* all the official information said bikes should have been allowed at this station. Up close enough to read the sign, things became a bit clearer - bikes were allowed but had to use an alternative station entrance on such-and-such street (no map offered!), not the nice, big, obvious first-class entrance that Google Maps knows about. But I eventually found my entrance, and got to use two separate elevators (one of which may technically have been a funicular, but I won't swear to it) to get down to the platforms. From this point on the rest of the journey was straightforward and boring. Ultimately, I'm incredibly thankful that it's *possible*, and also extremely affordable, to move a bike internationally without a car in this part of the world. But it wasn't as easy or as convenient as I had hoped it would be, particularly with regards to the trains. That's quite a shame, because in the summer time I'd *love* to take my bike to the Åland islands, or even to somewhere like Estonia or Latvia, for some light touring. Oh, well. The move is now complete, and winter is proving *so* mild this year that I don't think I even need to wait to start riding around my new home. Certainly no need for winter tyres.