Spring is finally coming. In Chicago, that may not mean that the emergence of flower buds poking through the dirt and sweet, steady rain showers. It may mean rain one day, snow the next and then sunny 75-degree temperatures the next. But there is one constant in the spring season in Chicago – the emergence of bikers.

“The difference in biking in the spring in Chicago is that if you’ve been biking in the winter, you’re kind of alone a lot of the time and then all of a sudden you’re joined by hundreds of other people,” Steve Vance, a Chicago bicycle blogger and former employee of the Chicago Department of Transportation’s bicycle parking program, said. “This is quite exhilarating, and it’s like making new friends, even if you never actually meet.”

Chicago has a large biking community – both competitive and noncompetitive – and the start of spring can be a rallying point for the community. Year-round cycling groups like Critical Mass start growing around this time of year as more and more bikers come out of hibernation. Springtime biking isn’t all sunshine and flowers, however.

Another unique aspect of biking in Chicago in the spring is the emergence of potholes that pockmark bike lanes across the city. The winter was especially harsh, meaning there are more potholes than usual. Already this year, about 2,000 claims of pothole damage to vehicles have been reported, a record high. Pothole damage is often attributed to cars, but bicyclists can have an equally difficult – if not more difficult – time navigating them.

Taylor Witzki, a graduate student in physical therapy at DePaul, recently started biking to class again after taking a hiatus during the winter, and she has had to adapt to the seasonal hazard. “It’s hard because most of the streets don’t have bike lanes,” she said. “It’s like, do I go into this pothole or do I risk going around it and a car hitting me?” Potholes may prompt bikers to be more cautious, but they don’t stop them from riding at all.

Many bikers find that biking is worth it. Witzki said she finds it more therapeutic than any other form of exercise, and it’s also convenient and efficient. Sujith Kumar, a former political science professor who taught the Discover Chicago course about biking and politics as recently as this fall, also finds biking worth the effort and pothole dangers. While he lived in Chicago, Kumar biked every day, whether it was to work or to run errands. Kumar has biked in several different cities across the country, including Washington D.C. where he currently lives, but he says Chicago is one of the best cycling cities he’s seen.

Kumar isn’t the only one to view Chicago this way either. The League of American Bicyclists, a nonprofit organization that promotes biking nationwide, labeled Chicago as a silver-award city in its assessment of the most bike-friendly cities, which is quite high for a U.S. city as big as Chicago.

According to Kumar, Chicago’s biking attributes include its flatness, good biking infrastructure, easy-to- navigate grid system, a supportive city government and a solid biking community. For veteran bikers like Kumar and Vance, Chicago is one of the best motorways and playgrounds for cyclists.

But even new bikers will find Chicago a welcoming and friendly first-bike city, especially in the spring. The City of Chicago provides bike maps free of charge that label all of the bike paths and lanes by type. There are also countless used-bike stores, which Kumar and Vance both recommend for a first bike. While the benefits of biking include health, fitness, financial savings and efficiency, there’s also another more abstract benefit.

There’s the feeling you get when riding a bike that you can’t experience in other common forms of urban transportation. “You’re being exposed to the elements, (which) I think is a very powerful experience that is not lost on anyone,” Kumar said. “You don’t have to have a developed appreciation of cycling to realize that you’re going 20, 30 miles.”

There’s something special about doing it on a bike in nice weather.” And with the exposure to the elements comes a feeling of going back to a more natural form of going about. Kumar refers to it as freedom. “There’s a sense of freedom you get that you don’t have from a car,” he said. “You can literally go anywhere – even though it’s illegal in a lot of places-you can go down the wrong way on a one- way street. You can go on sidewalks, you can go in alleys. You can see there are all sorts of objects designed to influence the direction of cars to keep them going this way and not that way, keep them off the sidewalk. None of that will prevent a bike from going places.”