I have just played with the MapMyRide - Site and have found that with the 3 direct bike riding routes home from South Tweed there is a difference of about 5kms. The two routes that cars take are the same for a bike but the Tweed Shire Bike Path Route adds about 6kms to the trip!
- The Highway then the Freeway about 26.4kms of very flat and on a scale of 1-10 Danger: Level about a 5 Duration:1.25hrs Distance:26.5km
- The Highway then the Coast Road mostly flat but many sections with no verge and lots of 80km/hr road rage-ers. Danger: Level 8 Duration:~1hr Distance: 21kms
- The Tweed Coast Bike Paths as well as adding at least an extra 6kms to the trip it introduces a lot of sharp/blind corners, street crossings, and badly maintained and or built pavement surfaces which is shared with other bike riders (very few commuters mainly cruisers and bmx/skateboard riders on the way home from school, joggers, dog walkers, site-seeing pedestrians and exercisers as well as "elderly electric goers" ie lots of slower non-concentrating traffic to avoid moving in both directions. The speed through most of a trip along this path is reduced to about 15kms/hr, except for the two wide open sections along the dune front where 25-30km/hr is attainable but with caution as kids have come out of side tracks to and from the beach without looking on many occasions. Danger: level 7 Duration: 1.75hrs Distance:27.4kms
2 comments:
That sounds pretty typical for a bike path, given that they often seem to be built on "spare" ground, which rarely gives you the most direct route. If your purpose is to meander and smell the flowers that's fine, but if you just want to get somewhere it's a bit tiresome.
As for the other traffic, it doesn't sound very conducive to commuting and I'm not at all surprised that you rate the bike path nearly as dangerous as the highway.
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I have not had much to do with any other bike paths but I do find the Tweed Coast Bike Path a fairly useless council expense if it was place there for any other reason than for leisure pursuits.
The roads here are all "Main" if you want to go anywhere and have never been designed for anything other than "FAST Country Driving" even though the population has increased 20-30x since. Thems the breaks and if you want to commute by bike you just have to put up with it around here!
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