Good roads and bad roads

One thing about cycling on the road that pretty much everybody can understand is that some roads are better than others for bike riding.  I’ve ridden for enough years now that I’m pretty comfortable riding on a lot of different kinds of roads, but there are some roads that even I just don’t want to ride on. 

I’ve always said that there are three things that make a good bike riding road:  a smooth finish, a wide shoulder, and no traffic.  Of course, I know I typically can’t expect to get “no” traffic (except maybe very early in the morning on a holiday) so I’m willing to take very little traffic.  And another thing that I know I typically can’t expect is to get all three of those things on the same road, so my rule is that any two of the three make for a good bike riding road.  SR 46, for example, has a nice new surface and a nice wide shoulder.  So even though it has some pretty high-speed, sometimes relatively heavy traffic, I feel like it’s available for rides.  Howard Avenue is another road that we like, even though it has no shoulder whatsoever.  But it qualifies as a good road because it has an ok surface, and we can ride from one end to the other (about 2 miles) and very seldom see a car. 

And even though it’d be non-preferred, there are some selected instances when I’m even willing to ride on a road where I only get just one of the three.  For example, Stone Road for the longest time had one of the most horrible surfaces ever, and absolutely zero shoulder.  But we’d still ride on it (grudgingly) because we’d almost never see a car on it (and you pretty much had to use if it you wanted to use Howard Avenue.)  (The good news about that one is that last year just before Christmas Brenda and I were out there and when we turned onto Stone Road we found that it had a fresh, new, smooth-as-a-baby’s-butt surface!  It was one of our favorite Christmas presents.)  Of course the whole one-out-of-three thing is by no means universal.  For example 426 heading out to Geneva has a nice smooth surface, but it has nothing for a shoulder and at times it is very traffic-intense.  Early on a Saturday morning it’s not too traffic-loaded, so it gets a 2-out-of-3 then, but by the time Saturday afternoon rolls around traffic picks up and it reverts to a 1-out-of-3 road.  And in this case, (the one being comfort-related in stead of safety-related) it gets disqualified.

But for us, the roads that we ride on most are either wide shoulder and smooth surface, or smooth surface and very little traffic.  And we’re pretty comfortable on either of those types.  It’s sort of like Meatloaf said, “Two out of three aint bad...”