Steamer

Where is the like button?

ThermionicScott 

I have no doubt that location plays a role here. In Iowa, we have lots of pretty good roads that are lightly-enough travelled to be safe for brevets. I agree that rider safety should be a priority over convenience in route planning, though.

skiffrun

I thought you were in Arizona.

I see that all your brevet riding has been in Iowa or MN, but I would have sworn that your initial posts (that I saw) were about riding in AZ.

Obviously, since you have over 13-thousand posts, I likely didn't see you initial posts. Or maybe you didn't start posting on this LD, etc. forum until just a few years ago.

unterhausen

I have some routes that use a couple of roads I don't like, but people from other areas just love when they ride my routes. I definitely ride on these roads, it's just that I'd rather ride on other roads. And I know that there are some routes where the traffic is quite variable given time/day of week. But you have to take these things into account when designing a route. There was one road that I rode on a Friday night that was fairly unpleasant because of football traffic. In fact, there wasn't much traffic, but apparently they were late for the game and high school football fans are the scum of the earth. At least from the way they treated me that night. I warn people away from a couple of my routes on Penn State football weekends, the billions we spend on highways aren't good enough, the fans have to spread out onto every little road to get around the traffic.

skiffrun

RUSA brevets are defined course routes. If you leave the route, you are to return to the route at the point where you went off course. If Greg is not typically following that rule, then you likely shouldn't be advertising it, or else Greg may have some talks with certain people, possibly starting with Spencer.


I could copy in "unter's" comment about RUSA punishing RBA's that put riders on dangerous roads, but I'll just go straight to this:

"Locally," I know that some local, but widely known, members read one of our RBA's the riot act a few years ago after routing on a too-busy road for 50-or-so miles. That routing has not been used again.

I've been told that the current RUSA brevet review and route approval committee requires that the submitting RBA identify if the route between controls is the shortest possible route or not, and defend the longer routing if the shortest route is not used. We can all imagine that that might nudge the RBA toward the shortest route, even if it isn't the safest or most interesting or whatever.

I imagine that the proliferation of GPS devices has enhanced the fear of riders taking shortcuts which can be determined on-the-fly mid-ride. Not to mention that RWGPS, BikeMyRide, TrimbleOutdoors, Strava, etc. makes it easy to plot short-cuts in advance.

If the leadership nationally or locally is afraid of short-cutters, I'm not. A short-cutter is only cheating themself.

I'll acknowledge that I've not gone afield to ride brevets, etc., but I have wondered if some RBA's have used roads that they were not really familiar with because of feeling the need to find new route / new roads. Posts on this forum and others over the past several years have put that thought in my mind -- it is a question for which I'll likely never have an answer.

ThermionicScott 

Hmm, I actually haven't been to Arizona -- maybe you were thinking of someone else? Most of my posts are pretty worthless.

That's a huge consideration. I have no doubt that your routes are great, with all the care put into them -- wish I made it to Pennsylvania more often.

Steamer

If what you say is true, then it might explain why I have found every brevet I have ridden to have more than a reasonable amount of dangerous road sections, save for one. All IMO, of course. And we all know different people have different interpretations of what is dangerous and what is not. I readily admit I am a scardey cat.


On the other hand, the perms that both Unter and myself have put together are of seriously better quality.


Are we really that good? Or do we live in cycling nirvana? Or are the concerns about using the shortest route between controles not as tight for perms as they are for brevets and we just so happen to take advantage of that?


My guess is that it's the last one.

ThermionicScott 

Yikes, I do not want to get Greg in trouble for an assumption on my part, and he certainly does not advocate going off-route. He's also very good about pre-riding his routes a week or so beforehand to make sure they are still in good shape.

And I didn't mean to cause an stir, either. Just wanted to note that if it's possible to make a good route where the shortest distance is between controls, then it helps remove an incentive to cheat (not that that happens much with randonneurs, we're typically intrinsically-motivated.) I'll not bring it up again.

unterhausen

I have gotten push back from Crista when I didn't use the shortest route, but she has never overruled me. I refuse to put people on roads that I consider unsafe, and if I was an RBA I wouldn't put up with that nonsense. I have ridden many RUSA and ACP sanctioned brevets where there are significant short cuts that also cut out lots of climbing. So it's not true that these organizations require unsafe but shorter routes be used. I know of some RBAs that are unwilling to do the right thing in this regard and as a result, I don't ride their brevets. You can always say you'll put up a secret control sometimes and get a pass.

I think this has really gotten better, not worse. In the earlier days of GPS, people were taking shortcuts inadvertently, and I don't think this happens as much any more. Maybe I'm wrong.

There is some of this. I really think an RBA should be riding all of his routes. I have found that pre-rides are pretty worthless for feedback on the suitability of the route. Some of the really experienced guys I know don't even notice that they had 20 near-death experiences on a pre-ride. And there is a lot of reluctance to changing things unless really necessary. My experience with the Eastern PA randonneurs is that the roads are pretty well known to the people that are involved in the route planning. I have some routes that I haven't finished because the idea of driving in a car or riding 300km puts me off, but I'm not going to just do a google street view and call it good.

Crista has given me permission to have alternate routes on my fixed route perms. I have one that has two places where you can choose an alternate route. Neither of these is much different, but one puts you on a busy road instead of a rail trail and the other takes you off of that same busy road.

Jan Heine in one of his writeups that was published in the RUSA magazine talked about a 600k route that had what seemed to me to be a significant alternate route. I didn't bother to check the map to see what he was talking about

antimonysarah

The recommendation I got from our RBA was to keep it under 10% over the shortest route and that likely wouldn't be an issue; it wasn't. It was less about avoiding dangerous roads/intersections (though there were a few of those, too) and more about navigational simplicity -- in densely populated areas there's sometimes ALWAYS a way to duck down a side street for a block and then another one for a block etc and cut off a tenth of a mile here and there, but makes an already-complex route into a labyrinth.

skiffrun

Thank-you!

If one has read enough blogs, er, probably make that, too many blogs and forums, etc., one will eventually see someone write something such as "oh, this road won't work." I always think "What!!! Didn't you test that road, test that route, BEFORE you submitted it?"

I have one 300 (which I developed at the urging of a friend so we'd have a handy, hilly 300k for PBP training). I had ridden almost every mile before I came up with route, essentially stringing some rando and non-rando routes together. There were one or two short sections that I had not ridden, but I knew were quite likely good. However, there were sections, maybe about 50 - 60 miles, of the route that I hadn't ridden for four to six years. I went for a car drive on a beautifully sunny and warm(ish) Saturday in January (and tried to intercept 4 riders doing my 138k pop by going just a couple miles off the 300 course -- the interception would be a story in itself) to check out the unfamiliar roads and to make sure nothing untoward had happened on those roads I hadn't ridden for several years.

I finally submitted several months later (after my friend again urged me do so). [One reason I had not been in a hurry was that, last year, all the local PBP aspirants were traveling to do quite a few 300, 400, and 600 km brevets, esp. the 400's, or so it seemed.] Submitted, approved, announced to the local herd & almost before I had finished the "open for business" email, fellow Raleigh rando and then-RUSA-prez Mike Dayton emailed asking if it would be alright to organize a ride for that coming Saturday -- result: 7 riders if I recall correctly (I'm not going to check the RUSA results page).

Well, I've gone astray. The purpose of this response was to encourage you and others to actually ride the roads, ride the route, BEFORE submitting. [I know you do that, but maybe someone else will read and realize that it is at least very useful, and possibly important, to test out a route before submitting it.]

skiffrun

I hope those reading (and writing) comments on this thread, which seems to have turned into a RUSA brevet and permanents routing discussion, realize that the committee that reviews brevet routes is not the same committee that reviews permanent routes. And that those two groups don't always have the same approach to similar issues.