Road Cycling - Cycling on Roads with >= 45 mph speed limit

Do you all cycle on roads with a speed limit of 45 mph or greater. I don't because, to me, I would just be asking to be hit.

I do and have never had a problem. Now that I think about it, if I didn't I wouldn't be able to get very far. Even the main streets in my neighborhood have speed limits of 45 mph.
I ride on the coast highway where parts have a limit of 55 and have had to do certain freeway sections with a limit of 65. Luckily there are plenty of wide bike lanes.

I ride on 100km/h, 2-lane highways. I ride 2 ft left from the white line (we drive on the right here). That's why, I have to wear bright colored jerseys and be as visible as I can be. ;) Shoulders? the shoulders here are the gravel type.. not roadbike ridable..

Here, the speed limit is not enforced so cars can go up to 130~150kmh w/o being chased by a patrol car.

Personally I do not/would not unless there was a nice wide shoulder.

sometimes i have to ride on roads with a 55 mph limit and no shoulder at times for 1+ miles.

I usually ride on no shoulder 2 lane roads and actually I like to ride on roads with a high speed limit especially when a large truck or bus comes by instant draft!

especially when a large truck or bus comes by instant draft!

yup... buses and trucks do take you faster... just be careful.. you'll never know when these giants stop.. They tend to brake hard..

My commute route is on a 45MPH 2 lane country road with little shoulder. Normally I am on the fog line. There are some blind cuves on the route as well. I have 2 multi-led blinkies on the back. Also reflectors tec on the commuter bike.

When I am on the road bike, I wear bright NEON colored jerseys. Never had a problem.

I don't know what the roads around the Nashville area are like, but here every little 2 lane here is 55mph unless other wise noted. I ride on 2 lane roads with no shoulder and 55mph limits, people often drive faster, with few problems. The only times I get a little spooked is in the evening when the high school kids are coming home! :eek: They drive fast and don't pay close attention. I also ride on the shoulder of local 4 lane devided highways here. They are rated to 70mph with a nice wide shoulder, just about like I 40, but not an interstate. Ironicly, most of these roads are marked as bike routes! ;)

Having biked on basically every road in my area (including 95/rt 128) I've concluded I get more scared by entering and exiting traffic then passing stuff. *******s arise every once and a while but they typically do nothing except piss you off, the soccer mom making a fast right turn on the cell phone on the other hand...nightmares

Do you all cycle on roads with a speed limit of 45 mph or greater. I don't because, to me, I would just be asking to be hit.

Most beginners are worried about being hit from behind, but the statistics I've seen show this is only a small percentage of accidents. Single-bike injuries, intersections, and cars turning in front of you are a lot more of a problem. You just need to get out more. Try some club rides or events on your beautiful TN backroads, and I bet you'll like it.

Just because a road has more than a 45MPH speed limit does not make it an instant death-route. You can just as easily be killed at 25MPH.

In some ways, I worry more about low-speed roads than high-speed ones. Parking lot and subdivision roads to me seem more dangerous because all sorts of things can happen from kids running out into the middle of the street to people backing out without looking. Seems drivers tend to treat these areas as if they're not on a real road.

This road has a 55MPH speed limit and as you can see has no shoulder. This cyclist is wearing very bright clothing. She's quite visible and for the most part traffic passing us was not a problem.

http://www.neebu.net/~khuon/albums/20040208-everett-monroe/pict0015.jpg

If you act like traffic then you are traffic and for the most part motorists will know what to expect from you. Follow the rules of the road and you shouldn't have a problem.

Here's a road with a wide shoulder. The speed limit on this road is 50MPH I think... it may be even 55MPH. Notice that there's plenty of room for both bicycles and automobiles.

http://www.neebu.net/~khuon/albums/kitsap_penn-20030824/PICT0001.jpg

My usual ride takes me alongside a 50mph stretch of about 10 miles. However, there are very few cars that go through it, and it’s a very popular spot to ride, so the cars know that bikes will be on the shoulder (or in the bike lane). However, every once in a while you get some hothead doing 75+ along it, which can be a bit nerve wracking. I’m usually more frightened by people pulling out of their driveways blindly (lovely experience with that today) than by cars going by.

Around Atlanta we have a well known equasion for calculating speed limits. Signs just give two parts of the equasion.

45 means 4+5x10=90, 55 is 5+5x10=100 etc...

Sooo, if you rides in a 35 mph zone you will be gently passed at 80 mph by most cars ;)

I ride my bike everywhere, from 15mph to 65mph. Plus theres no shower so I have to ride on the road. I have come very very close to getting hit by cars passing way to close. You get use to getting passed so much that it really doesn't bother me any more. Plus people around here driving in 15mph school zones still go like 30 to 50 mph.

Even been on the freeways a couple of times..As long as there are wide shoulders. I do ride on roads that move fast without much shoulder, as long as the traffic is usually light.

There are only 4 paved roads out of my town, and all of them have 55mph stretches for atleast 3 miles afterwards.

It all depends on the road. Some narrow roads scare me, depending on the type of traffic.

But it definetly feels more dangerous to ride on the 25mph stretch of highway through my town than out of town. I've been cut off and nearly hit many times in just a couple of years...

The route from my house to the beach is a four lane highway with a speed limit of 50mph. There is a huge gravel/aggregate factory down towards the beach, so lotsa dump trucks and cement mixers fly by me. There is a freeway type shoulder with sleep strips. I ride to the right of the sleep strips. Kinda nice, if you hear rumbling from the sleep strips, it gives you warning of your certain death!! Other than that, the road, to the north of my house is a 35mph, two lane road, packed with construction right now. Almost too dangerous to ride, but it is basically always at a standstill. Eitherway, its pretty nerve racking. But, around my campus, smooth roads that lead into desolate country roads that go for miles. Really can get cranked out on those roads.

Except for one road, none of the roads where I live have shoulders. Usually the white line is painted right on the edge of the bitumen. Sometimes there might be 3-4 inches of bitumen to the left of the white line, but that is it. There are times I don't ride at all, because I get a feeling that just tells me not to ride. There are concrete trucks, buses and 18 wheelers that use these roads, which thankfully are mostly 80kph zones. They used to be 100kph zones, some were 110kph.

CHEERS.

Mark

Do you all cycle on roads with a speed limit of 45 mph or greater...

Yes, almost exclusively. Otherwise I wouldn't get to ride at all.

Well, maybe where you guys are you can get away with it. Here in snowbird/blue hair FL. You try doing what Khuon showed in his first pic you will be a road pizza.

Well, maybe where you guys are you can get away with it. Here in snowbird/blue hair FL. You try doing what Khuon showed in his first pic you will be a road pizza.

Well, never having ridden in Florida, I'll have to take your word for it. I'll keep the warning in mind when I go to visit my in-laws. I've heard from several sources that say Florida is the worst place for cycling.

Around Atlanta we have a well known equasion for calculating speed limits. Signs just give two parts of the equasion.

45 means 4+5x10=90, 55 is 5+5x10=100 etc...

Sooo, if you rides in a 35 mph zone you will be gently passed at 80 mph by most cars ;)

In all seriousness what is with all of the aggressive drivers here??? I know there are a lot of people who speed, but it seems like every 3-5 minutes while on the expressway I see someone weaving in and out of lanes without blinkers and cutting off other drivers. Are there this many people in Atlanta that think their time is more valuable than others life? For the Georgia folks I drive from I-20 west of Atlanta to I-285 N and then I-85 N to Norcross. Maybe the amount of time I spend on the roads lets me see more than others??? I just don't see this type of behavior in other cities. Maybe I haven't been to the bad cities yet. Sorry to rant in this thread everyone, I just feel better getting it off my chest here than strangling a driver on the road. I was cut off 4 times yesterday within 30 minutes. :mad:

Florida is not all that bad as long as you choose where to ride wisely. I have a 25 mile loop that I ride daily where maybe 10 cars pass me. Major roads, tourist areas, as they say in New York FUHGITABOUTIT. ;)

I hate intersections, and there are fewer of these on the major roads. The trans-Canada through the west island of Montreal is a great ride, as you can get into a good pedalling rythm. The road to Ottawa on the N side of the Ottawa river, is a 2 lane with quite a few logging trucks. This can be scary if there is traffic in both directions, they didnt try to push me off the road, but they came really close.

A head mounted mirror is useful to keep aware of the situation.

Logging-truck drivers seem to gain some type of perverse pleasure by seeing how close they can pass bicyclists. Occasionally, they like to hit the Jake brake, too.

Almost everywhere I ride has plus 45-mph speed limits. If I don't ride those roads, I won't ride far.

In all seriousness what is with all of the aggressive drivers here??? I know there are a lot of people who speed, but it seems like every 3-5 minutes while on the expressway I see someone weaving in and out of lanes without blinkers and cutting off other drivers. Are there this many people in Atlanta that think their time is more valuable than others life? For the Georgia folks I drive from I-20 west of Atlanta to I-285 N and then I-85 N to Norcross. Maybe the amount of time I spend on the roads lets me see more than others??? I just don't see this type of behavior in other cities. Maybe I haven't been to the bad cities yet. Sorry to rant in this thread everyone, I just feel better getting it off my chest here than strangling a driver on the road. I was cut off 4 times yesterday within 30 minutes. :mad:

Zman, Atlanta is bad driver capitol of the south. I've been to almost every major city from Virginia down to Jacksonville Florida and trust me. ATL is top dawg for stupid drivers.

It is something about the water coming out of the Hooch. ;) Houseboats on Lake Lanier are polluting our water with some strange stuff.

Logging-truck drivers seem to gain some type of perverse pleasure by seeing how close they can pass bicyclists. Occasionally, they like to hit the Jake brake, too.


Yeah, there is one really smooth flat road out of my town. The traffic usually is fairly light, but its a narrow road, and most of the traffic consists of logging trucks and semis and the like. The cars on the road almost always give me plenty more room than needed, but those truckers scare the **** out of me sometimes.

Sam, You want to see some really stupid drivers go to Jersey. Every day is like a 10000 car NASCAR race.

I ride on whatever road I can legally travel on to get to where I want to go and I don't worry about the speed of the cars. I have ridden on highways with 70mph speed limits (which means of course most cars are doing 75 to 80), and this doesn't the least bother me, not even when semi-trucks blast past me. By the way, I've been riding on these sort of highways for over 35 years.

I moved last month to Indiana, their max speed is 65 on highways, so maybe that's good since I'm older now!

In my experience, it's less about speed limits and lane width (pretty much always too narrow) than it is about how much traffic.

Well, maybe where you guys are you can get away with it. Here in snowbird/blue hair FL. You try doing what Khuon showed in his first pic you will be a road pizza.

I live in Florida. I have also lived in other parts of the country. Florida does not have the rural road net that say the states of the old northwest have meaning: Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin. They were set up on a grid system and the idea was to have a road running north south and east west every mile or so. Now many of those roads are paved yielding many paved roads with virtually zero traffic. It is great for cycling.

Here in Florida, most of the paved roads, get a certain amount of traffic and usually on a bike loop, you end up on a busy road for part of the way. But it really is not that bad.

You can get away wtih doing what Khuon showed in his first pic without becoming road pizza. If this wasn't so, our entire cycling club would have been road pizza last year. I think our illustrious poster has used some hyperbole. Now, the caution would be that there are some roads similar to what Khuon showed that have a very high volume of high speed traffic and one might want to avoid those. It isn't that those roads are so dangerous as the fact that it just is not that fun to ride with cars zipping by your left elbow all the time.

As I said, I live in central Florida and I put in a fair number of miles (12,000 last year).

I ride my bike everywhere, from 15mph to 65mph. Plus theres no shower so I have to ride on the road.
Without a shower I would make you stay out on the road too! My wife makes me shower as soon as I get in.


:)

Pat, I live over in Brevard. Thankfully most of the roads that are similar to Khuon's picture do not have a 55mph speed limit. The roads with the 55 limit, at least over here have a shoulder and/or bike lane. On my loop, 25 miles, I am on a 50mph road for a total of about 3 miles. If this road was like Khuon's I would not ride it. Instead this road has an 8-10 foot shoulder. The rest of my loop is side roads with little traffic, no shoulder, and a 35mph limit. These I feel more than safe on. I don't know about where you are but over here on the coast we have a lot of tourists and snowbirds. Speaking for myself I would never ride on a two lane road with a 55mph limit and no shoulder.
If your club is riding on 2 lane 55mph roads that have no shoulder, in a built up area like where I live, it sounds like an accident waiting to happen.
Maybe someone else will remember the incident but just last year, I believe in the St Pete area, a driver took out a club riding group. If I recall correctly 8-12 went to the hospital. And the road they were on was NOT a 55mph road.
I agree with your one statement though, cycling in FL is great. You just have to choose your route wisely.

Shoulders? We don't need no stinking shoulders! :)

Most roads here don't have shoulders. Well, at least not paved sholders. The interstates do and we can even ride on them out here. Speed limit is 75MPH. The "secondary" roads are 70MPH with no to little shoulders in most cases. Of course there are exceptions here and there.

My commute into town is on 45MPH roadway with no usable shoulder. I guess you just get used to it.