Originally Posted by tandempower

Glad to hear you've had so many positive cycle-touring experience on different continents. I'm hoping one day the bridge plans between Alaska and Siberia will be carried out with, hopefully, a bike lane along with whatever train tracks and/or other lanes are included. How cool would it be to plan a 1+ year cycle tour from one side of the Atlantic to the other via Asia?

In the meantime, I'm looking primarily at US developments in long-distance bike touring. There are a lot of jobs here that pay @$10/hour or even less, with many people working part time. There is a lot of debate about whether economic growth should be stimulated so that people can work more hours, which many seem to want because they have car payments, rent payments, and plenty of other bills and consumer desires to pay for. Essentially what I've come to realize is that the reason all these people are clamoring for so much money is because the cost of everything has driving costs factored into the salaries of everyone from managers to the lowest paid workers.

So I'm hoping that a growing network of affordable camping facilities along a network of bike highways and roads with camping facilities along them will begin emerging to take some of the pressure off the already stressed CO2/asphalt economy. Hiking trails like the Appalachian Trail have simple camping facilities like lean-tos and larger camping shelters, which I think would be a good model for camping along bicycle routes. The problem is that there are many people in the US who dismiss and/or resent the idea of having lots of affordable facilities to promote bicycle touring because they think it just won't be that lucrative. For some reason, such people never stop to consider that the more lucrative forms of touring amenities are too expensive to expand much beyond the demographic that already enjoys them.

Anyway, if you've seen/used any amenities that stick out in your mind as particularly impressive, please mention/describe them. A few years ago, I saw plans for multi-story camping platforms that would supposedly be built in popular EU cities for urban camping. I think the US could attract a lot of tourist business if it was possible to fly into a city and then tour around a region by bicycle. There are a lot of nice dedicated bike roads/highways emerging and most new road and repaving projects I see include bike lanes. There are also lots of travel-oriented motels, campgrounds, truck-stops with showers, etc. but they are mostly oriented toward automotive travel. If the same or similar facilities were geared toward cycling, e.g. with less pavement/parking and lower cost, I think the combination of increased domestic travel and global tourism would make it a feasible addition to existing travel industries.