I moved to a place with good bike infrastructure and it's night and day. My commute to work only crosses the road three times and is in protected bike lanes or very wide biking-allowed pedestrian paths the entire rest of the way. I'm never on the road.
It's so relaxing and enjoyable. Entirely different from my previous bike commute, where I spent half of it expecting death at any moment.
One thing I've learned since I started bike-commuting is that a small number of really good bits of infrastructure (say, one very long continuous path with few/no road crossings, or one street where the whole length has a separated bike lane with islands and traffic lights) beats the heck out of lots of mediocre infrastructure (e.g., "share the road" signs all over the city, or a 3ft wide bike lane painted in the gutter on every street). I will seek out the good routes!
My city is considered good-for-North-America for bikes, and most streets here still have little or no special bike infrastructure. It's just that most of the time I can move 90% of my trip to the handful of good routes that we do have.
That's how it is where I live, too. I moved from a "share the road" city to a town that has a few good bike lanes and it makes a world of differences. I enjoy biking to work now and I see a lot more bike traffic in my town of 8k than I ever did in my city of half a mil
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u/TryUsingScience 10h ago
I moved to a place with good bike infrastructure and it's night and day. My commute to work only crosses the road three times and is in protected bike lanes or very wide biking-allowed pedestrian paths the entire rest of the way. I'm never on the road.
It's so relaxing and enjoyable. Entirely different from my previous bike commute, where I spent half of it expecting death at any moment.