A few weeks ago I purchased my first bicycle. I've mainly been using it at the break of dawn when it's only 85 degrees or so for aerobic fitness but I like the idea of using it for commuting and today I did my first car-substitute chore by returning some videos to my neighborhood video store. Rather than trying to make an elaborate descrition of my neighborhood I made a screen capture in my GPS software which should help illustrate:



So basically my house is in the neighborhood at the south end of this picture and the video store is actually where I drew the yellow star. Yes, my GPS software uses satelite pictures from before the store was built. So anyway, it's about 1.25 miles round-trip from my house to the video store, so that's either an annoying 19 minute walk or an enjoyable 6 minute ride.

This being the first time I have ever ridden there, the ride there was fine, I exited the neighborhood, pulled into the bike lane, rode that whole 640 feet up to the video store driveway then pulled in and dropped my videos in the return slot. Only when I turned around to head home did I realize I would be on the wrong side of the street! Not wanting to take a car head-on or anything, I chose to ride on the sidewalk instead and figured if I encountered anyone, I'd just dismount and walk my bike past them in the gravel. Being that it was already 100+ degrees in the mid-day sun and it's only a 640 foot, 30 second ride on the sidewalk, I didn't encounter anyone.

Still, it left me puzzled as to how to deal with this. Surely it doesn't make a lot of sense to have to ride another quarter mile east to the next intersection, wait to cross, then ride the nearly a third of a mile back on the north side of the street only to wait again at another intersection just to get back to my neighborhood. Worse still, a ton of the roads are being ripped up and widened all around my neighborhood and although this particular street is completed and has bike lanes, many streets only have a bike lane and/or sidewalk on one side of the street to begin with.

So what say the commuting experts - how do you deal with situations like this where it's either impossible to find a right-way lane or would result in riding 4x as far just to get where you're going by trying to find right side lanes?