I'm just entering my second season of cycling, and have recently purchased my first road bike. Last year my husband and I would basically just ride on a bike path or maybe a 10-miler close to our house once a week, and on the weekends would fit in progressively longer rides.

I'd like to become a stronger rider this season and I'm pretty sure the answer to that is to just ride more. My question: when do you do it? Living in a high-traffic suburb, it never really seems like a good idea to go out after work. We've found some nice low-traffic roads but we have to spend a little bit of time on busy no-shoulder roads to ride any of our routes in the area, and once my job starts up I won't get home until 5:30 -- seems a little late to drive out to the country. I'll have to leave for work at about 7:30 so going out before work doesn't seem like much of an option either. To be honest, this is the one thing I miss about running, and prefer about it over biking -- it's easy to fit in a run, and traffic is not really an issue.

So what do you all do?