Astrozombie

Side streets to get away from the cars
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0304...edzd7VyIKg!2e0

You guys have some nice wallpaper material out there! With silky smooth asphalt that would be good enough for a racetrack .

Roody

Wow, that sounds like one of those Mystery Spot tourist traps where water runs uphill. It's similar to what cyclists call "false flats"...a section of road that looks perfectly level, but is actually a grade. John McPhee said bikes are like those two-mile long coal trains--both can feel, and struggle with, even the slightest grade.

One street with such an invisible grade (E. Michigan Ave.) happens to be one of my favorite streets to ride on. It's five-lane arterial with metered parking on both sides, but the right lane is fairly wide. The speed limit is 30 to 35, so it's not at all scary. (No bike lanes) It has some cool things along it like good restaurants, coffee shops, and a great independent bookstore. Also "The Ave." links Lansing and East Lansing, and runs past a huge university campus. Riding west, you see the state Capitol building at the end of the Ave. along it's entire run.

wipekitty

That is...awesome. I bet it would be amazing on a clear night.

Something for the bucket list, I guess!

Machka 

This is a collection of photos of the roads and scenery on Hwy 11, the Icefield Parkway, and the Golden Triangle route.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/machka...7619203595712/

Most of the roads in that part of the world are good. The shoulders on the Icefield Parkway do get a little broken up and bumpy from the erosion and traffic, but the scenery is worth it, and the best times to go are late May/early June or late August/early September when there aren't so many tourists around.

These are all Hwy 11 ...

Roody

Shouldn't those sheep have their own lane?

Machka 

They do. It's all theirs.

Roody

Not really. A hell of a lot of them are slaughtered by cars.

Machka 

Actually, it's not bad in that part of the world. There's more of an awareness and there's not much traffic. What you see in the photo is a traffic jam.

mrodgers

Even looking at the signs on the left of the frame, it still looks like downhill to me.

Beautiful looking road. I always wonder when people mention climbs. Around me, when I take a picture of the road, the road runs out of the top of the frame. I've tried to take a nice shot of a road and have it head off into the distance, but I can never get a long enough section before it shoots out of the frame. I climb everything in my lowest Hybrid gear at about 4 mph. I so wish I had a road that looked like that to ride.

Take the right most lane that the bikes are in and add it to the shoulder, divide that in half for north/south or east/west lanes and you have my roads. Add the gravel shoulder shown in the shot and extend the road straight up through the top of the photo frame and that is what I have to ride on, LOL. Your one lane and shoulder are wider then our entire roads.

Then again, though I may be climbing in my lowest gear slower than a walking pace, I don't go more than half a mile at most, quarter mile average before I'm heading downhill again. What's it like to ride a long stretch of reasonable grade where you're not crawling at a snail's pace?

On the opposite end, the downhill, it's the same thing reversed. I get going way too fast for my liking if I pedal and it only lasts a few seconds. I'd love to have the other side of a long drawn out decent grade to get a reasonable pace going for more than 10 seconds.

EDIT: OMG! Then I get to the 3rd page and see more of your pictures. Your area to ride and the roads you have to ride on is breathtaking!

Machka 

While I love cycling in the Canadian Rockies ... the scenery is stunning ...

I also enjoy other roads.

There are many in central Alberta like the one in this photo: quiet, a bit of a shoulder, and still something of a challenge ...

Machka 

Are you talking to me or FBinNY?

Roody

Yeah, "only" 16,000 a year in Alberta alone.

https://www.alces.ca/references/downl...Amy_Carter.pdf

Machka 

Funny ... you look at a photo of scenery and wildlife, and all you can see is the negative. That's just sad.

And incidentally ... 1) that number is apparently the number of animals involved in collisions throughout Alberta, a big province, not just in the Canadian Rockies; and 2) that article says nothing about big horn sheep. 16,000 big horn sheep are not involved in collisions in Alberta. 3) You've posted a link to a hunting website.


Are you trying to hijack your own thread for no reason at all?

Let's bring it back onto topic ... What streets do you like to ride on?

Ekdog

You are presented with the facts and all you do is deny, deny, deny. That's just sad.

Machka 

More delightful, rural Albertan roads ...

Alberta has a lot of roads with wide shoulders. I was quite spoiled when I lived there ...



But there are also narrow, quiet country roads which are very pleasant ...

mrodgers

That would be you with the breathtaking road pictures. I guess I used the quoted FB text as a beginning to my post on how he said it looked like it was downhill and I thought the same.

And, for some reason I had thought you were in Australia. So, it's Canada, then?

Roody

A good road to ride on...the lanes are narrow, but cars easily overtake cyclists by swinging partially into the center left turn lane.



Another good road. The super wide lanes are easily shared by cars and bikes, with room to spare.



(Actually, they're both the same road, a short distance apart.)

enigmaT120

Machka 

We live in Australia ... but I spent the first 40-ish years of my life in Canada.

The thread is about our favourite streets (what streets do you like to ride on), so I thought I'd start with my No. 1 favourite, which is Hwy 11 in Alberta. Then I'll make my way around the world with more favourites.

cooker

Your pictures are amazing but they aren't "streets" (although Roody did mention both streets and highways in the OP). Got any more conventional "streets" you prefer to ride around Taz for commuting or utility purposes?

timmythology

this is a picture of what is now the Spring Water Corridor, in Lents. Growing up here, we used to ride our bmx bikes down this trail when it was the old rail bed.


Other than this trail where I enjoy riding is more dependant on which bike I am using. But this stretch will always bring me into a good mood. Even when it is cold and wet and late at night.

gear64

A few of my favorites:

gerv 

The scenery is very cool, but best of all is that the bikes outnumber the cars.

gerv 

Ok.. a utility image from earlier this year in Des Moines. Scenery is less lovely than above, but luckily the city replaced the steel plate with some new asphalt.

cooker

I don’t call these my favourite streets in the sense of I like them better than other streets, but rather in the sense that they are part of my preferred, easiest route to work. I took these pictures around 8:30 pm tonight biking home. It’s amazing how well cell-phone cameras work nowadays in dim light.

This is Shaw St. It seems wide with its grassy median, but the lanes are narrow. I used to see a lot of cyclists riding dangerously in the "door zone", as cars impatiently squeezed by, but since they painted the sharrows in, earlier this year, things seem better – more cyclists seem emboldened to take the lane, and the drivers seem more willing or resigned to waiting for a safe spot to pass.





Here’s Shaw a little farther up. This section used to be only one-way southbound, but it attracted a lot of “wrong-way cyclists”. I found that incredibly annoying as a “right-way” cyclist, because it made cars passing me squeeze over to the right and crowd me, in order to give space to the scofflaws. Now that the northbound riders have been legitimized by being given a generous lane (which I am now using too) things are better. Again, the southbound drivers have adapted to their narrower lane, and rarely try to pass southbound cyclists, although a few do cross the yellow line to do so.