Cyclists can benefit from Urban Sprawl

Whether you've never visited Atlanta or lived here for 30 years, you can't help but notice how spread out it is. There are no natural boundaries, so new sub-divisions keep springing up further and further out from the city's center.

The average commute by car exceeds 30 miles -- for years I traveled close to this distance daily -- which was further than a trip to our family's summer home from the house where I grew up.

The spread is bad for air quality and also the quality of the commute, but it also means lots of roads to explore on bike.

We rode southeast of town this morning along some familiar roads, but also several roads I've never been on. There's a 50-mile loop that takes us through 4 counties that we like. It only takes about 30 minutes to get out of the city and onto low-traffic roads with lots of shade. Coming back, there is a substantial amount of climbing along River Road and Bouldercrest, so we tried finding a different route back into town. This brought us down a whole set of roads I've never traveled down, lakes I've never seen, High Schools I've only heard of, and neighborhoods with different personalities.

What I find impressive is I've lived here 30 years, we ride almost every week, and we're going down new roads all the time. SO many roads, so little time.

Even though so many people have to drive so far to get to work, it is a delight to discover new places to go and new roads to ride.

Oh, we did have to make up that elevation eventually, so we only managed to substitute one set of hills for another. White Oak needs to go on our Dirty Dozen list of hills.