Instead of building bikelanes my county has opted for trails, which honestly is not a bad option. Or at the very least, better than nothing. The way they did it was just by turning a lot of the sidewalks into multi use paths, so it makes a lot of sense I didn’t notice that I could use them.
There’s quite a few of them, and it definitely makes me feel safer that I can just ride on the “sidewalk” on a lot of the busy streets.
I kind of wish they would advertise this shit more because I literally had no idea, it’s like it’s hiding in plain site on their website.
My first bike shop job from 2010-2011 was technically 26.5 miles each way on the straightest possible route. It took me a couple of months to find all of the trails and connections I could link together, but I ended up with around 15 miles of mostly low traffic roads and a total of 33 miles of riding each way. Isolated trails are well worth going out of your way to ride as much as possible. I had to find trails by riding my route with lucky happenstance encounters with another rider that either told me or happened to be entering or exiting an area that made me investigate.
The part that bugs me is that many trails start and end on the same geographical features but never get connected or completed. If parents could raise half decent children that could ride e-bikes without threatening peoples lives with idiotic antics, the trails would probably get built out much better. Around here e-bikes are banned from most trails. Maybe for the better. The little idiots won’t last long on the road.
If you are stuck riding concrete like most walking paths around me, you need a super compliant bike.
Yeah, I wish the trails got built out more as well. I feel like it’s a lack of promotion and large gaps between trails that make people not want to use them. Thankfully here they haven’t banned e-bikes from trails (yet).