I keep running into the notion of people driving somewhere explicitly so they can go on a bike ride. So a question, as in the poll: Do you typically drive to go on a bike ride, or do you start your bike ride from where you live? Please exclude commuting situations, because that's kind of born more out of a need than a want, and because I'm looking more for a preference answer on what you would do if you thought "Hey it's a good time to go on a bike ride.".

Most of the time I ride my bike from where I live.
The longest trip I can make is 50+ miles on very nice bike paths. Thats take some time though. Moreover, the user density (and their ability/willingness to act stupidly) goes down when moving away from the city.
So sometimes (5%) I prefer to drive to the middle or end of the path and bike from there.

Cheers

It depends.


For example:

1) When I lived in central Alberta, this (see photo below) was about 250 km away. Sure, I could have cycled out there to ride on those roads, with that scenery ... I've cycled further distances than that ... but I preferred to drive there and then ride.


https://www.flickr.com/photos/1430288...7605871338498/


2) I have both a mtn bike and a road bicycle, but prefer riding my road bicycle. When I'm faced with about 3-4 km of this (see photo below), and worse, especially when it rains, in order to get from where I currently live in Australia to a paved road, I feel reluctant to ride my road bicycle to the paved road. So I pop my bicycle into the back of my 4WD and drive out.


https://www.flickr.com/photos/1430288...7619719051119/


3) Manitoba is as flat as a tabletop. When I lived there, if I wanted to train on a hill, I had to travel 150 km to the nearest hill. Again, I could have ridden, but when I wanted to ride the hill, I preferred to concentrate on the hill climbing rather than riding distance. So I rented a car (I was car-ownership-free in Manitoba) and drove out there to spend the day on the hill.


4) Many of the events I've participated in don't start from my doorstep, or anywhere near it. One such event took place in France (the Paris-Brest-Paris) ... a bit difficult to ride there from Canada. Another one took place in Australia (Great Southern Randonnee) before I moved here. Several have taken place in various parts of the US and Canada. When I lived in central Alberta, my cycling clubs (I was a member of 4 of them) were each based 160+ km away, and held most of their events in their local areas. Lots of driving, flying, taking trains, etc. etc.


5) In addition to events, I enjoy cycletouring. Some of my tours have been in my immediate area, but there's a whole world out there to explore and I don't like limiting myself to my specific, current area. Most of my tours have involved flying to another country with my bicycle to tour.


6) But sometimes, in some of the places I've lived, for some of the rides I've done, I have ridden right out of my driveway.


So ... if I thought "Hey it's a good time to go on a bike ride.", what I opted to do after that thought would ... depend.

I will ride up to 20 miles to the start of a ride but above that and the car gets used for transport. But that is only on the organised rides that I want to do. Most of my rides start from home- But if I was Machka and with that as my driveway- I would be riding the MTB.

I have ridden my mtn bike if my ride is going to be a short one on the tracks around here. I'm not really a mtn biker ... I haven't got much experience dealing with anything other than pavement ... so I find riding my mtn bike to be quite an effort.

My Road bike I usually ride from home to the path or wherever do like a workout. I wish it wasn't broken I'd like to ride it today! My TT bike I always drive to the path (really early in the AM) or somewhere that I can hammer it and not worry about getting run over or stopping for traffic lights every 500 feet. I would definitely get killed if I tried to ride it on the road here...

What kind of rides are you talking about?

Daily riding, I ride from the house.
Saturday morning rides at the bike shop- I ride from the house, but it's only a mile or so. If it was 10 miles, I'd drive like most of the other people do. I'm already slow, and don't want to start out tired when they're not.
Big charity rides- I've ridden from the house a couple of times (10 miles or so), but usually wind up driving.

Usually, it's a combination of time and distance. A metric century is a pretty good workout for me, so I don't necessarily feel the need to go farther. I was considering riding to a ride yesterday, but got to looking and the ride started at 7:30, so I would have needed to ride over in the dark.

One minor problem is if they give you a T-shirt and water bottle and all, and you're on your bike, you've got to tote that stuff around instead of throwing it in the car.

Depends on the locale and the purpose of the ride. I don't participate in too many organized rides. The roads around my house are not particularly cyclist friendly. My wife likes to ride with me for short distances but she is at best a novice cyclist and only has enough stamina for ~12 miles or less. So taking the bikes to the start of a place to ride is, unfortunately the normal MO.

Currently I am in a decent area for cycling so leaving from the front door is my normal method.

Next weekend I am going to the ABCE Tour in Minneapolis, that will require a 6 hour drive. But once in the area I will ride to the start of the event(s) from the hotel.

Aaron

Exactly waht I was thinking.

Road ride solo= leave from my house
Road ride group= My house or local friends house
Cyclocross practice= leave from my house
cyclocross race=drive to race
Weekly club ride=3 mile ride to the shop and do the ride ride home
MTB=drive to trails
MTB race=drive to race
Charity ride Sometimse drive to sometimes ride to depends on if the ride starts within 20 miles of home
Week long tour=leave from home

I leave from my house a lot, but the people I like to ride with don't live near me. We tend to drive to eachother or meet in the middle. It varies the scenery and keeps things interesting. I've lived in the same place for my entire bike riding life (18+ years), so the imediate surroundings are getting a little boring... especially alone.

One of the reasons I road bike is that I can leave from my house. Otherwise, I would not ride as much if I had to load my bike into a car and drive to ride. My daily lunch ride is one example.
That being said some of my favorite rides are a bit far for me to ride to. As a result every couple weeks I load up the bike for a long weekend ride with friends.

What are these "recreational rides" you speak of?

So far this year I have driven to ride in a charity event one time and I cycled home from a visit to my mom (wife drove the car home). Everything else is out my back door.

There's good and bad to that. Good in that I don't need to drive. The downside is falling into a rut and always riding the same routes.

I ride somewhere probably 250-300 days a year. The bike gets "driven" to a ride maybe half of a dozen times.

I presently almost always ride from the house, but then, the local group with which I ride starts their rides about three miles from me, and other groups that I may someday join start from almost as close. Most of my rides are solo, and brief, and it simply makes sense to ride from the house. OTOH, when I get serious about hill climbing, I may have to occasionally drive to some hills, because it takes hours to reach hills from home by bike, and those are just rolling hills. Serious hills would take a couple of days to reach by bike.

In principle, of course, it is not very "green" to drive to the start of a ride. In practice, some wonderful riding in the area is very difficult to reach without driving the bike to the ride, due to distance, or urban/suburban sprawl making it difficult to get there. Large areas of Houston and surrounding area are VERY unfriendly to bicycle travel. I am fortunate to live in Bellaire, which has streets friendly to cyclists, and access to a network of cycling-friendly streets and trails/paths in Houston and surrounding communities, but getting "out of town" is best done to the south or west; east and north are problematic

I'm lucky to live where I can do almost unlimited mountain and road riding right from my front door--just over a mile from the Toiyabe and Tahoe national forests, with access to Reno just down the road, and I'm in the foothills of the Eastern Sierra. Nearly all my everyday riding is from the house. But there are so many nice rides within an hour or two that we often drive to a starting point just to save time.

Me too.

My wife and I do a fair number of social rides or bicycling vacations.

if I am going on a solo ride I ride from the house. if I am meeting a group I might drive to start point depending on how from home it is.

What I like about living in the middle of Los Angeles is that just about every meet spot for a ride is hardly ever more than 10 miles away from me. The only time I end up driving to the meet spot is if the ride will end at some late hour and there will be lots of drunks on the road and no one else on the streets.

Maybe if I had a bike rack I would drive somewhere for a ride.

2-3 times a week out of my house
Once/week an evening ride from the LBS (6 miles away and I'll drive)
Once/week an organized ride (30 miles to 150 miles). We'll drive a good distance for a "tandem friendly" ride and further for a tandem rally.

Since I wanna be a long distance bicyclist like Machka when I grow up, I bike to all my recreational rides. Once I get there, only THEN does my workout begins.
I need to build up for my first 200k permenant (120 miles) next week. I've joined my local randonneur group and the veterans of the group say that the route I signed up for is one of the more challenging.
I've bicycled to the last two charity rides since they were close to the house.
I've driven to the last two metric centuries with the same group since the rides are always in other cities.
Ernest