Originally Posted by
GovernorSilver
Less riding on the sidewalk and more on the road will definitely cut your commute time, at the cost of more stress riding with the heavy traffic.
Fortunately, about half of the commute is on a pretty straight and pretty empty MUP. Where it gets a little sketchier is once the MUP ends and gets into the commercial/business park area - riding the streets around here is scary, especially because it takes several left-turns to actually get to the business park where I'm at. I just wish they'd expand a thru-trail so I could get to my business park by MUP (I think there are plans for this eventually but it's probably a long ways out). I actually took a longer 5mi roundabout route which avoided freeway on-ramp crossings and was primarily riding in the bike lane most of the time. But ironically, this turned out to be stressful with all the cars on the road (the main street I was riding down gets super busy especially around a certain intersection). Additionally, they had a tree-trimming crew w/ wood-chipper blocking part of the bike lane, so getting around that was pretty scary with cars whizzing by. I definitely have super-low confidence in my street riding but that didn't help one bit.