Originally Posted by
Wogsterca
There are a few issues, and the hardest one is to stop thinking like a driver, but start thinking like a cyclist. Drivers tend to prefer high speed arterials, as they make the trip shortest time wise. Cyclists tend to prefer quiet streets with little traffic.
This really isn't too relevant to what I was talking about in route planning. My problem really isn't one of municipal streets. Quiet streets with little traffic are an easy thing in every municipal area I've been in (town, city, village, whatever you call it) if you just work to find them. Of course, crossing the major arterials prove to be a problem.
But to expand upon your analogy, the choice in design was to connect each municipality with a relatively straight arterial, which is designed to both be very fast, and to have a high capacity for traffic. Since these arterials connect many municipalities, there tends to be much traffic. Now with the tendency of some people to live in country areas, there are roads that are constructed to be routes off the arterials for these folks to get where they live. But these tend to be very cheaply done (dirt/gravel), and can tend to develop ruts, and wash out (hence the BMX/off-road reference I made). They also tend to be haphazardly laid out, so there's no guarantee you could use them to get to the same places as the highways would get you.
Now I'm fortunate to be in a county that is electing to asphalt chip and seal some of its more well-traveled dirt roads, so I'm lucky there (not as bad as real dirt). That's how I get some of the distance I do now, since if I were to stick to municipal streets, my available distance to travel would be down to about 11 miles without retracing my path a number of times.
For the ride I started talking about, I ended up on two of the more less traveled highways, where I really didn't have much concern for traffic. But I ended up on one of the more traveled ones, which was what concerned me.
So to clarify what I'm asking about in #3, I'm asking where people typically plan their rides out to get the longer rides that they talk about. Are they fortunate enough to be able to ride where most wouldn't generally think about safety issues, or are they hitting highways? And if so, how they determine which ones would be smart to hit? I didn't find this topic discussed in search, so I probably will go ahead and travel over to A&S and think on a good way to post this question.