Great cities if you love to cycle

[Possegal]

At least according to MSN.com. I have a nephew that lives in Boise. I wonder if I could pull off bringing my bike to go visit him? :)

http://local.msn.com/slideshow/slideshow.aspx?cp-documentid=29735174&GT1=24000

[Aggie_Ama]

Not surprised to see my hometown on there! It is funny City of Austin loves to play up the multi use trails, they are overcrowded and abruptly stop with no signage. I don't know if this is common but they are confusing to a visitor or casual user.

My favorite thing about Austin though is we have so many mountain bike trails and the culture is warm and friendly. I came here as a roadie but found my home on the dirty side.

[CyborgQueen]

Kind of surprised to NOT see Las Vegas on there. When Las Vegas started to expand (Summerlin, Henderson, Seven Hills, North Las Vegas, etc etc), they added a lot of bike lanes. Although you do have to deal with cars - very few dedicated paths (multi-use) made for cycling. There's a LOT of routes all over the place. Sadly, riding just from my house can be a little bit tricky, especially when going on Group Rides.

The other thing that riders must deal with is the hills. There's only ONE very flat route that I know of, and even that has a few areas where it's 1%. If you want to be a cyclist here, you need to embrace the hills.


The one thing that I notice is that while a city may be cycling friendly, but is it cycling racing friendly? Such as triathletes.

[Aggie_Ama]

Austin is a triathlete crazy, we have a ton of races you can find almost one every week, there are also five training groups I can count and I am not even into the tri scene. My gym even does a brick spin class. We are super mountain bike racer friendly, we have two separate weekly races on weeknights at different times of years. Several of the shops sponsor teams for our state-wide series, I race for one of them. Road is the same scene, we have a weekly crit series but I don't know much past that.

[Velocivixen]

I live in the Portland Oregon Metro area, so of course I'm not surprised. I just did the Springwater Corridor twice this week, including taking my bike on the MAX. The article neglected the weekly matches of bike polo, the naked ride, which the police sanction, and a boatload of other bike related topics. Also Portland Design Works purchased a velodrome from a college student in Calif., who made one as his final project for school.