MUPs are like every other tool in the toolbox - great when used properly, dangerous when implemented incorrectly. I think they work well when they have a more direct route than the roads, or are adjacent to a road that is too dangerous for cycling, and if they are properly paved - no chipseal. OTOH, Portland has one MUP that is totally horrible, with poor pavement, tight turns around obstacles, roots tenting the path surface, signs everywhere dictating that cyclists "must stay on the path - respect the property rights of others", and a 10 mph speed limit for cyclists. Those last two items aren't necessarily bad, but the heavy-handed way that path users are bombarded with the message leaves something to be desired.

Minneapolis, baby!!! We got a big chunk of money this year from the fed to improve/promote bicycling because we're already such a big cycling city - I think we're in the top 5 in the nation, and we were the only cold-weather city in the top 10. On our Greenway trail, where it intersects with a busy road called Hiawatha Ave/Hwy 55 they just built a dedicated bicycle overpass bridge to get you over the highway and the LRT tracks. The bridge has a very modern, high-tech looking cable/suspension system where all the cables come off a single mast. It hasn't opened yet, but I saw it lit tonight for the first time, and it's beautiful.

Heh heh. Riding in Sydney on the roads is OK, I think. Sure there are some idiot drivers, but there are some idiot cyclists too.

The shared paths are a nightmare. I find riding through pedestrians much more stressful than riding through traffic.

I try and avoid roads with bike lanes painted on them. They are invariably of the 'poorly maintained, strewn with debris and in the door zone' kind. Luckily the RTA produce maps of bile lanes in Sydney, so it's easy to plan a route that avoids them.

I like Sydney. And I like commuting by bike. But I've never done serious urban bike commuting in any other city, so can't really comment on how it compares. But the good weather is a bonus.

I've bike commuted in the DC Area for many years. The network of paths allows me to come in from 16 miles away and hardly have any encounters with cars. There is beginning to be enough critical mass of cycle commuters here that drivers no longer react with surprise. That makes it safer for all of us.And its really cool to cruise past all the famous monuments that everyone comes from all over the world to see, and know that you're doing it on your way to work. Another plus for bike commuters in this area is that if bad weather strikes while you're at work, you can use the buses to take your bike home, or leave it at the office and use the Metro and buses to get you back to virtually anywhere you came in from.

My commute is 28 KM return, almost all of it on a bike path that runs along the Rideau Canal, a UN World Heritage Site. The rest is on residential streets and 4 blocks downtown. Some mornings are so beautiful I slow down just to admire the scenery. Ottawa has hundreds of KMs of bike paths and bike lanes and there are lots of commuters. Almost all downtown buildings have bike racks and they are usually jammed. Drivers are generaly courteous, the professional drivers (bus, truck etc.) are especially good at giving me a wide berth. The only real worry are Mr. & Mrs. minivan and Joe Yahoo in his big pickup. All in all an excellent place to ride a bike.

I'm liking Denton TX. College town, unique (for Texas) city layout and history, cool eateries & shops.

few bikes and not bike-friendly layout, but bikes are rare enough that cagers give me PLENTY of room. Fairly seldom get buzzed or whatever.

I grew up in suburbs of LA, and visited back there recently. They city layout is much more bike friendly but cagers don't give no r-e-s-p-e-c-t!

I have never heard anyone describe the layout of LA, or it's suburbs, as being bike friendly. It was definitely not my experience, but maybe i needed to see it in a different way.

San Francisco is fairly bike friendly, but i would say that it is not as bike friendly as we like to believe. There seems to always be a war going on between cyclists and motorists, mainly stemming from critical mass BS. There are quite a few bike lanes, and if you like to climb hills then the views can't be beat, just watch out for those taxis when you are flying down the hills at 30mph.
This city is should be perfect for biking since it is so compact and you can have everything you need within a small radius of your home. I would like them to implement bike priority signaling on market street and through neighborhoods that carry a lot of cyclists, such as the wiggle.

Well, when I moved to TX, it sure seemed that in comparison, CA was very bike friendly
I was in Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks. We had bike lanes and signs everywhere, and sidewalks! I could ride anywhere in the city, and between cities, in bike lanes and on nice wide shoulders. Pavement was generally in very nice shape.

Here in TX (lived in West, Houston, and Dallas thus far) there is generally just a road. No shoulder, no bike lane, no sidewalk, no bike signs. Not bike friendly.

but the city i live in is fun to get around by bike on side surface street. the main streets are death! 40-50mph 4-lane roads with no shoulder, no nothing but oversized cars full of oversized half-asleep people. You go out there, you die.

Boston is my hometown where I used to commute from the ritzy suburb of Newton into Kenmore Square. I actually liked riding around the city when it wasn't rush hour. I preferred staying off the bike trails like the one on the Charles and Memorial Drive unless I wanted a leisurely meander. Tough winters though especially with all the salt that is thrown on the road. That stuff ate bikes (and cars). Mostly flat in the city unless you count riding all over Beacon Hill/Capitol area.

Boulder is where I live now. Too easy. Bike lanes and paths everywhere. No traffic to speak of. Only a few streets to avoid and lots of bicycling folks. Winters are cake here with only a few blizzard days to deal with. They plow the bike paths before the road sometimes. Pretty flat in town with some nice ridable climbs nearby you can do during lunch. Ironically, I have gotten buzzed more times riding in the bike lanes here than riding in no-bike-lanes Boston.

Austin is where I commute to every month. Where our offices are (northwest)there are some bike lanes but they end abruptly and toss you into some unfriendly and fast trafficked roads. At least they are trying and downtown Austin looks very bike friendly with marked lanes and wide streets. Hills are steep in some places in the hill country; I can see why Lance trains here. Winter? What winter? Too hot in the summer though and flash floods scare me.

My favorite city to bike in is still Boston. There are almost no four lane roads and things are snarled so much that cars are generally going no more than 30 mph before they encounter a light. Drivers are not bike-friendly but at least they are more aware of obstacles than the average Boulder driver with the 'Meat is Murder' sticker on her Outback yakking on her cell-phone. Austin drivers think they are in the Indy 500 with the speeds they achieve between lights.

When i went to LA i was coming from what i thought was a non-bike friendly city, but when i look back it may have been better than LA, and that could be due to the fact that it was a college town. I was in Pasadena, where you can bike anywhere you would want to go, but on the main streets people seemed to not think you had the right to be there. My job was in altadena, and to get there from pasadena there was a 4 mile climb which made getting there a PIA, but it sure was fun coming home in the evening.

college town good that what makes this place OK.

that pretty much sums up nyc. bike lanes are pretty worthless in manhattan.

Berkeley, CA. It's a commuters paradise IMO. Bike boulevards and good weather.

Plus it just sort of...peters out...

The Springwater trail on the other hand is very convenient. Except on the weekends when it is clogged with the usual pathletes/strollers/invisible leashes, etcetera. During inclement weather it's great. Empty, and you don't get splahed by cars. I use it to get back and worth between my dad's house (near Damascus) and my mom's house on Mount Tabor/ downtown.

SF as well.

I do the wiggle every day too and from work.

Well, after saying Sydney was Ok for commuting, last night on the way home I had two extremely close shaves with motorists not looking where they were going - one of them was a real heart-stopping moment when someone just pulled out onto a roundabout just in front of me at high speed.

Oh well! Don't let it put you off!

Houston?

I do all my riding inside the loop, mostly in West U/Downtown/Montrose/Heights.

Cager-wise, the ride's not bad. I just take my lane and ride predictably. Once you get out of the loop and into the burbs, that's when our commuting really sucks. Fortunately, our buses are beginning to have bike racks put on them. I can take a bike onto a bus and ride out to Missouri City (sw of Houston), but to get to my parent's place in Sugar Land would be a real challenge as I'd have to ride on streets where suburban drivers aren't used to seeing bikes. It's about 18 miles from my parents place in Sugar Land to downtown Houston. I just don't see myself making that ride too soon. I did the 60-70 mile route on the Tour de Houston a few years back, and I could see the driver mentality change when I was out in Alief and NW houston.

I don't mind the lack of bike lanes, most of them are poorly planned, under managed, narrow strips of shoulder anyway. I'd like to see more bike signs up, though. Especially ones that say Bicycles are Vehicles and Share the Road. I think those are better around Houston than the bike lanes. People around here don't even know that can ride out on the road. I still have people telling me that it's safer to ride against traffic - we used to be taught that in some of our bike safety classes.

I concur with that. I go about 11 miles each way and have MUP and the National Mall for all but about 1/2 mile or so. I can go the distance I do and have it only take about 10 minutes per way more than it would if I took the subway/bus and maybe 15 minutes more than if I took a car the whole way . . . traffic is that bad. Plus it costs about $6/day for the subway and another $4 to park at the subway or at least $11 to park in downtown DC if you drive all the way in. That's what I tell my wife anyway in trying to rationalize a bike purchase. Mornings are usually fantastic. Trying to dodge tourists in the tourist areas is a little dangerous in summer afternoons, had several close calls. On the other hand, in some places the hills are a little tough and there are temperature extremes and the MUP are not kept in the greatest shape.

On the other hand, nothing seems to beat some of the German cities I lived in for infrastructure with most wide roads having sidewalks clearly demarcated with a bike lane and a pedestrian lanes. Why cannot that be done in the U.S.?

I lived in DC for ten years and was car-free most of that time. It's far easier to get around by bicycle than by car, but you do have to be careful in places. It's full of drivers who range from clueless tourists who are so overwhelmed by street layout, traffic circles, large numbers of pedestrians, bicycles, and other vehicles that they won't even see you when you're right in front of them; to seasoned DC drivers who are downright hostile because they spend so much of their lives in the car commuting in and out of DC. Fortunately traffic is often so slow that bicycles have a big advantage. Just watch for cars making sudden moves like lane changes and turns... I've seen many car+car accidents happen in DC that way, and also have seen (and been part of) some near misses between cars and bicycles because of those sudden moves.

Fortunately there are plenty of streets in DC that many drivers just don't take because they are too narrow or just too unknown. There are also many, many miles of MUPs. You can ride from Silver Spring to Bethesda, Georgetown, the Mall, Old Town, and many other places in Virginia and Maryland without riding on roads at all (or just a little). I actually really enjoyed bicycling around the DC metro area except for one problem that I never could shake: The terrible air quality. In the Summer time there are too many code orange and red air quality days to count. Even when it's not a code orange I would experience burning lungs and a cough after a three + hour ride. I couldn't go anywhere without an asthma inhaler... unless I left the area and went somewhere else. Which I ultimately did!

Sean

I've been to Oulu too and the bike paths were truly amazing even back in the late 1990s - you could literally get anywhere in the city by them. Hey, did you go to the famous burger joint that put Mickey D's out of business? Is it still there? That was run by a relative of mine...

Okay... Bellingham has only 75,000 people, but in my experience large cities are usually more bicycle friendly than smaller ones...which is why Bellingham has impressed me since I moved here a year or so ago. You see bicycles everywhere! There are bike lanes on most of the major streets, and a fantastic network of MUPs. The MUP I take to work is incredibly scenic as it curves several miles around Bellingham Bay. There is plenty of good road biking, and Galbraith Mountain is one of the best mountain bike destinations in the country. We also have a community bike shop (with bicycle garden) pedi-cabs in the nicer months, and plenty of bicycle-oriented events from casual alleycats to the annual Ski to Sea relay that has both a road and mountain biking leg.

Bellingham is in the process of revitalizing some parts of downtown, and city planners seem to be taking the needs of bicyclists and pedestrians seriously. This is a very bicycle and pedestrian friendly city, and most businesses always have a few bikes parked outside and/or inside. I have a Smart-Trips card that gets me good discounts at many local businesses. You just have to regularly log your "Smart Trips" on a website... basically anything that isn't riding by yourself in a car.

I've never lived anywhere that was as nice to commute in as the Fort Collins, Loveland, Longmont, to Boulder areas of Colorado. There is a large and older road bike community here, we don't have the traffic conjestion that Denver has, and there are lots of country roads with wide shoulders (snow-plow lanes) on the prairie and that head up into the nearby Rocky Mountain foothills. People have been used to seeing bikes on the road for years and years, and I have a lot less hassle from drivers than any other place that I have ever lived (Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; State College, Pennsylvania; Seattle, Washington).

I also hear the similar things about a lot of other Front Range cities and towns surrounding Denver, including Colorado Springs, and the small towns to the to the west of Denver around Golden. The traffic down there is a little more agressive than it is up here, but it is still great compared to other places that I have ridden.

Washington, DC. From Virginia, I ride almost straight through DC & and out the Maryland side in morning; repeat process in evening. I enjoy the views, the energy, and the fact that I can get through the city as fast as or faster than a motor vehicle during rush hours.

Beats paths any day.

Norman, Oklahoma. I have run into tons of riders since moving here, seen people riding everything from fixies to trikes. There are miles and miles of bike routes (no actual lanes, which is fine with me) that lead all over the city. The town is also FLAT so it is very easy to commute and there are bikes everywhere, all the time. Not some place that would normally be on the radar, but I love it!

I've lived in town a number of years at different locations and had different jobs in my growing career, not to mention college... So I have commuted from places such as North Park down to the Navy base... through older residential neighborhoods on older streets into the industrial area of the waterfront. I have commuted from Lemon Grove down to Point Loma, from Lemon Grove to El Cajon; from Downtown area near Balboa Park to Kearny Villa; Lemon Grove to Sorrento Valley... and most recently from Clairemont to Sorrento Valley. There were flavors to each commute, different alternatives, and with each area I went through different positive and negative aspects... certain parts of town were quite conducive to cycling.

North Park and the older neighborhoods, in spite of the lack of bike lanes, were very easy to negotiate... roads were narrow and low speed. You took the lane and it wasn't an issue. Other areas such as near UTC on Genesee or near Del Mar with high speed arterials, can be somewhat "hairy." Still other places such as near Market street and Imperial had their own "hood" related issues. (can you say high speed car chases... and thrown beer bottles).

Generally I have to agree that the hills can make you or break you. Certain areas are relatively flat, such as inside El Cajon, or along Pacific Beach, or right in North Park/City Heights. Other areas are nothing but hills... such as Genesee that you mentioned... (my route these days). That road just goes up and down mesas and cuts right across valleys.

As I mentioned, the older areas of town with the slower speeds seemed to be the best cycle commuting; in the newer developed areas, with wide fast roads and bike lanes... motorists seem less tolerant of a cyclist "out of place," while they the drivers, whip about at 50MPH on cell phones... Thus a cyclist has to be tolerant of fast, noisy, traffic and willing to negotiate when needed.

On the plus side is the weather... nearly year round moderate... really good for cycling.