Several years ago we were on the first day of a week long bike tour out our door. The next town, Delta, is 40 miles away. The highway between here and there is not an interstate but is divided, two lanes each direction, the 12 ft wide paved shoulder is fine to ride on. When we were 10 miles from Delta all the traffic was funneled to the eastbound lanes because they had just paved the westbound lanes. They had not striped it yet. It was just sitting empty. We scooted over to the freshly paved portion and had a beautifully smooth, traffic free ride into Delta.
A few years ago the city here built a bypass through town, a "parkway." It's about 5 miles long. The couple of months before it was officially opened to traffic I found plenty of reasons to go ride my bike on it, right down the middle of the road. It has a lot of car traffic now, but it has pretty good bike lanes and I still use it to get places sometimes.
Then they repaved
Rim Rock Drive in the Colorado National Monument a couple of years ago. It's the jewel ride here.