Western States Cycling Conditions Update

This image snagged from the Internet tubes illustrates how I felt sometimes on my recent tour.  While never quite this bad in terms of raw numbers of vehicles, the traffic was rough at times, so I thought I do a little research to add numbers to my experience.

We like to think of the wide, vast, unpopulated stretches of the American West as lonely country, ideally suited for ambitious cyclo-tourists.  That might have been true back in the 50's, maybe even through much of the 80's, depending on your route, but much of the West is way past its prime in terms of truly high quality paved surface cycle touring.  The issue in the West, in contrast to much of the Midwest and East with which I'm familiar (I can't speak to the South), is that we have very few paved routes that cover any distance.  That wide, unpopulated country led to only a few roads and highways to connect distant population centers.  As those population centers have bulged and burgeoned, major new connectors have, for the most part, not been constructed.  What we have are more and more cars, trucks, and RV's clogging the existing infrastructure.  The cities themselves see upgrades--the beltway around Vegas is one big example--but we're never going to see dozens of different ways to cross Arizona or Colorado.  The countryside in Illinois may not provide the scenic bliss of the Rockies, but the maze of virtually empty back country roads is cycling gold for those interested in riding on hard surfaces.  I write about this with genuine sadness.  For the foreseeable future, long distance road touring is going to get suckier and suckier.

Let's put some numbers to this as they relate to my recent experience touring from Bishop, California, to Prescott, Arizona.  It turns out that Arizona is one of the fastest growing states in the union, and anyone who has witnessed the metastasis of Phoenix and Tucson can testify to what this looks like.  Between my first ride to Prescott in 2004 to 2018, the resident population of Arizona went from 5.76 million to 7.17 million.  Tourist traffic, however, has REALLY blown, from about 30 million in 2004 to almost 44 million in 2017, and I'm sure the numbers are even higher now.  There was a dip for a couple of years after the great recession of 2008, but they're back, in great numbers, rocking the the rotting blacktop with thousands of massive RV's towing off-road vehicles.

To get a sense for the historical trends, Las Vegas is especially instructive.  In 1960 the entire area contained just 127,016 souls.  Today? 2.2 MILLION.  That kind of growth and population creates a grotesque sucking and out-gassing of traffic so that even the once lonely back-of-nowhere East Mojave Preserve is starting to see "commuting" traffic for folks headed to the crap of the craps tables, businesses, families and friends, whatever.  The saving grace of the East Mojave Preserve is that commercial trucking is not allowed.  But be warned, it's now a shortcut to debauchery and regret in Sin City.

What can be done?  Nothing, really.  We can agitate for good shoulders, and while this makes riding safer and relatively more enjoyable, when every road becomes a highway, every ride becomes highway riding--noisy and sub-optimal to say the least.  Research the hell out of any route.  Just because it's a "designated bike route" does not mean the cycling is actually enjoyable or recommended.  A big stretch of Hwy 89 in northern California, which is part of Adventure Cycling's Sierra Cascades bike route, is shoulderless, high traffic, gnarly riding--lots of logging trucks and weekend freaks gunning for the gambling dens of Reno.  I know of at least one cyclist killed on this stretch of road.  The glories of the Oregon coast entail thousands and thousands of cars passing you every day.

I think the future lies in bike packing and dirt road touring--or hybrid routes combining paved and unpaved surfaces.  We have to learn to ride where drivers don't typically go.  I'll probably do more road touring in the future as it's hard to give up the smooth speed of paved surfaces, but it's going to get tougher and tougher out there. 

Ride safely, one and all.