Originally Posted by
B. Carfree
Perhaps the primary factor when I choose where to live is avoiding the use of a car. Thus, I live where I can ride out the door and enjoy myself.
When I see people unload their bikes from their cars in the places where I ride I don't know whether to be sad because they don't feel they can ride there or to feel glad because they are likely new to riding and haven't yet fully incorporated it into their lives by living where they can ride without driving. We do have the donut problem here: You can ride in town with relative safety and you can ride well outside of town with reasonable safety, but the edge of town is less than fun.
When I want to do some single track, I generally ride my touring bike and just put some off-road tires on when I leave the pavement. The mountain bikers are usually confused/amused/pleased to see what I have done.
I spent over a decade without owning a motor vehicle, so just about everywhere I went everyday was by bike. The places where I lived were chosen ostensibly with this in mind. I was fortunate with one location in that I had a choice of great riding in four or five different directions, and my daily commute was as interesting and as long as I wanted to make it.
But some severe changes of circumstance meant four years ago that we had to acquire a vehicle. Our residence then was over two miles into some backwoods, off the grid and over some fairly rough and slippery paddock tracks and gravel road. This wasn't good for road bikes... and motivation. So we ended up travelling more and more using our van.
We moved into a town. We ride in the good months pretty well everyday just from our front gate, but at weekends we will hop in the van and go where we want to explore the state where we live. Included in that have been some randonnee events. But we've had a lot of fun doing hub-and-spoke tours.
We're planning a move again fairly soon back to my home city, and I am hoping we can arrange the location of our residence so I can get back to cycle-commuting again and have some nice weekend ride options from the front door.