jppe

Most of my riding is in NC where we have as many miles of paved roads as anywhere in the US. In fact most of our dirt and gravel roads are in the mountains so you have to drive to really do a gravel ride. Most of the lower speed rural roads which are conducive to riding a road bike are fairly narrow. Hardly any of those roads have shoulders. In fact, about the only roads in NC with shoulders are major roads with higher speeds and heavier traffic. A lot of those don’t allow bicycles.

The NC cities are trying to incorporate more bike lanes on the urban streets but presently bike lanes are only on shorter segments where it’s challenging to put a route together and not avoid riding in a traffic lane.

For most of my years I rode my bike as far to the right as I could. That seemed to work pretty well. However there was always that one vehicle or two that wouldn’t move away over passing me way too closely. The last couple of years I have moved over and ride several feet to the left of the white line. So far so good. Now vehicles move further to the left to pass. It has eliminated cars passing me when there is oncoming traffic. Now most vehicles move completely over into the other lane to pass. If I feel like a vehicle is passing too closely I can move over to the right a couple feet.

When I rode across NC on a tandem with my wife a couple years ago we rode off the white line. I explained why I was doing that. It seemed very effective for the roads we were riding. The occasions when we didn’t she got a taste of vehicles passing too closely.

On my ride across the US I tried to ride shoulders if there was one....... and rumble strip weren’t taking up most of the shoulder!!

What works for you?