Berlin Cyclists - With the colder days approaching, I'm interested to know what month you give up cycling?

Depends what kind of cycling you mean. My commute to work I keep going all year, the M10 goes down Frankfurter Allee so I'm mostly on protected lanes. But my weekend rides out to Grunewald or down the Mauerweg stop around late November, not because of temperature but because there's nothing worse than grinding up a hill with numb hands and no feeling in the brake levers. Bar mitts changed that for me though, cheap ones from a bike shop on Karl-Marx-Straße, and now I'll ride through most of January as long as there's no snow on the ground.

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My cutoff is usually the first morning the Tempelhofer Feld path has that slick sheen on it, that's when I know it's over. What actually pushed me to keep going longer was getting a cheap balaclava and ski goggles, sounds ridiculous but the windchill on exposed skin was the real problem, not the air temperature. Now I'll ride through most of December and only properly stop in January and February. The one thing nobody warns you about is the bike sitting in the Keller for two months, the chain rusts just from the damp air down there, so pull it out and oil it once in a while even if you're not riding.

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Cold isn't really the deciding factor for me, it's the darkness. Once it's pitch black by 4:30 I stop doing my normal commute and switch to the U-Bahn, usually mid November. What keeps me riding through winter instead is a cheap second setup: studded tyres and a dynamo hub so I never think about charging lights. That combo got me through most of last January, ice included.

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Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.

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if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point

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honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.

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