I'm planning my first long (term is relative) bike trip. I've been browsing the net trying to figure out the best way to calculate a route that is low on traffic. Trails.com seems like a good place, but I am frugal (cheap) and have better things to spend money on (bike etc) besides an online membership. The trip I'm planning is from Kutztown Pa (Berks county) to Mt Gretna Pa (Lebanon county) approx 60 miles one way. The trail could be either totally road, completely rail trails or a combo (I have a few bikes that I could ride). If anyone on here has any suggestions please post them. I posted this in the long distance section as well, but thought local guys might have some good ideas. Thanks for any input guys!

Try bikely. You can draw your route on a map, and it will tell you the number of miles and show you what kind of hills you'll be going over, even give you an elevation profile. You can switch between map and satellite views that give you a pretty good idea of the scenery and the amount of traffic.

Google Street View is an invaluable tool for checking for the presence of shoulders. Bikely is good, but very slow and buggy; I just draw routes by hand in Google Maps these days, and only use Bikely if I need elevation information.

I suggest using Bikely to get ideas for roads cyclists have used in the Kutztown and Mt. Gretna areas, and then using Google Maps to look for other low-traffic roads. Aside from your departure and destination, the most traffic you will find should be around Reading, 5th biggest city in PA. The city's airport and the outlet malls are near your course, so plan accordingly. There's some trail north of Reading and near Blue Lake, but nothing substantial.

I'll do some research on this topic, since I'm 45 minutes from Reading and I've wanted to do a tour in Berks County.

Thanks for the additional info. I planned a route on bikely, mapmyride and google maps and ended up w/ a half decent route. There are not many "nice" ways to go north of Reading so I ended up going through an industrial park area to cross 61. My wife and I drove the route this past Sunday. Also, once I got out to Mt Gretna area, the roads ended up being very narrow and extremely hilly (my Subaru was not pleased by the hills). So my options in that area are mountain goat hills or rolling hills w/ some traffic. I'm not a big fan of monster hills....