John_V 

OP is using FTL to abbreviate Fort Lauderdale, which I think is also the airport designation letters.

flan48

I am NOT a Floridian, but I've been to that southeast part of Florida a zillion times, including this past February, and I agree with John. Yyou can't generalize about an entire state based on 1 geographical area. The whole "Gold Coast" stretch, from West Palm Beach down to Miami,has become so crowded, particularly in winter, that driving is a disaster and serious frustration, and IMHO a dangerous place to cycle.

I'd only bike on designated paths, if in that region.
Best regards

tkamd73 

Nope, airport designator for the Ft Lauderdale airport is FLL.
Tim

Maelochs

I'll keep that in mind if I ever need to land my bike there.

There is a lot of good riding around Florida, on and off-road, and in my limited experience, the real waste-exits are concentrated in the cities. I have been coal-rolled by the the "good ol' boys in a pickup," but I have been passed by tons of those same good ol' boys (gun racks, stars and bars, three foot lift kits) and never had a real problem except the couple idiots who coal-rolled .... and that was almost amusing. (If they had brains they'd have hit my on a hill ... but if they had brains ....)

As with any area, if you re planning a riding vacation, contact local cycling clubs and get the good routes.

Oneder

Lots of low IQ people in many areas, nothing to be done. When you do run over glass, stop and brush it off. Sometimes I use my foot on the tire to scrape it off while I ride but that is probably dangerous and harder for the rear tire. I also try and kick some junk or glass into the gutter every trip and if you do it every day a little here and there really adds up. Glass is annoying but the big problem here is chunks of metal, bolts, even railroad spikes. No idea wtf all this junk comes from, though I do sometimes stock and find a wrench or some electrical tape so I guess it's not all bad.

Jinkster

Florida definitely has it's fair share of Type A folk but you know what?...a great portion of those came here from other states "TO PARTY"

Ft. Lauderdale is part of the "Party Central" towns and a real disaster during Spring Break.

There are beautiful places to cycle in FL but they aren't in the highly over-populated national party destinations.

John_V 

Thanks for the clarification. Never flown into their airport but have driven down there many times.

Digger Goreman

Almost, exclusively, cars and trucks....
(yeah, I know, rhetorical question )

A thread keeps running through my mind when I see things on the road, "Bet this didn't come from a bike!"
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stephr1

I know this thread is abt FL, but this incident reminded me so much of my short time in AZ. I was in college (back in the '70s) at ASU and was out driving my motorcycle (that's the 2-wheel connection here on Hiway 10 (goes East-West). Traffic was a bit heavy and moving in a slow-and-go pattern so I was keeping a bit of distance from the car in front of me. I'm in the inside/fast lane and the median had guard rails, but was dirt and gravel.

So, I'm moving along with the traffic flow and, apparently, some yokel behind me in a pickup truck thought I was going too slow and leaving way too much space between myself and the car in front of me. All of a sudden this idiot accelerates and passes me on my LEFT (did I mention I was in the inside lane and the median was nothing but dirt and gravel?). He kicked up a bunch of crap along the way and barely got past me before he swerved back into my lane.

Good news is I anticipated his dumb move (had seen him playing with the idea for a bit), had given him plenty of room and was already slowing down just in case he did the stupid thing I thought he might do. I noticed once he got in front of me he was looking in his rear view mirror and I got the sense he was not a motorcycle lover. I was getting off in the next 2 exits and started moving over to get away from him.

There are idiots looking to cause problems everywhere.

Duragrouch

Video cams on bikes and every car is going to solve this. Many years back in rural MI, a passing car threw a bottle at me. I called the police with the car description and plates, I think I only had a partial on the plate, and they determined the car in a few minutes. Kids, they weren't charged but given a serious talking to at their parents house, it make a big impression (which the cops told me, they had the courtesy to call me back later that day to report on the status of things.)

J Palmer Cass

The social contract in Florida, and in much of the South, is that as long as the working class doesn't demand political and economic power the elites tolerate all sorts of low rent rowdy redneck behavior such as fireworks, noisy motorcycles, public drunkenness, tearing up the countryside in ATVs, reckless gun use and just about any other "hold my beer" behavior you can imagine.

Ross520

That's an exaggeration. Never flatted from belt wires or glass... And that's on "delicate" GP5Ks. Every once-in-a-while I'll get a thorn in my tire, but it's rare.

I had a rash of bad luck a few weeks ago, but leading-up to that I hadn't had any flats in ages.
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Oneder

It's interesting how flats work. For a while I was having them every couple weeks now I haven't had one in over a year.

Cougrrcj

Over the years, I've had flats from both SBR wires and glass - but not in AZ. Only rode less than 500 miles there, and that was on new flat-protection-type tires. 60k+ miles elsewhere, and flatted plenty on both tire wires and glass slivers before 'armored' tires or flat-protective liners were a thing.

How about the rest of y'all? Am I exaggerating?

Ross520

So, by your own admission, you have NOT had any wire or glass flats in Arizona (as well as only riding 500 miles here).

Then why are you saying Arizona is worse than Florida for road debris?

Cougrrcj

Because I can SEE the glass glittering all along the roadside. I can SEE the wires glinting in the sun. As I result, I rode IN the traffic lane to avoid the glittering stickers on the shoulders. No rain to wash it away (annual rainfall in Phoenix is maybe 2"/year), so it stays there on the side/shoulder of the road. The tires I was using in AZ DID have a flat-deflecting barrier, AND I only rode ~500 miles and ON the road traffic lane, not the glittering shoulder outside the white fog line!

No I haven't ridden tens of thousands of miles in AZ like I have here in OH and surrounding states. BUT the numbers of flats from wires and glass that I've gotten here is waaaaay north of 75 punctures in 55+ years/100k+ miles of cycling... So let's say a a flat every 1,000 miles, on average. Much of that was on tires without a flat-defeating 'belt' or liner.

My weirdest/strangest flat was from roadkill. I wasn't watching where I was going, and ran over an older roadkill - a tooth or other bone fragment punctured the sidewall of my tire as I thumped over it.

Nachoman

It sounds like you fit my stereotypical view of a Floridian.

Ross520

​​​​​​I'm still confused as to why you're making the assertion that Arizona has worse roads for cycling than Florida. 500 miles is a drop in the proverbial bucket of Arizona roads. That's ~ 5-10 rides, and now you're an expert on our traffic infrastructure?

I have NEVER flatted from glass, on a tire notorious for its susceptibility to cuts from, amongst other things.... GLASS.

But by all means, continue your attempt to convince a native Arizonan that you, in your limited experience in AZ, are qualified enough to be making comparisons to another state that you likely haven't spent much time in either.

I'm done responding...

Goodnight.

-Ross


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50PlusCycling

Beer bottles are the least things you have to worry about when riding around South Florida. Having worked more than 10 years in law enforcement there (which aged me 20 years), I've seen a few things. The most useful cycling accessory I had was a Kahr K9 semi-automatic pistol.

Baldy1953

@Nachoman I am sure some stereotypical opinions are incorrect. I see where you are located and your opinion reflects that. I guess Ca. is the perfect place to live. After all you have a mass exodus with the idiotic Governor and the rest of your politicians. You have the kooky Hollywood liberals. You have the Ca. EPA that creates outlandish laws . I could go on and on, but I am going to consider the source and realize views are of an individual that lives in Ca. Enough said on my part.

Sorry folks for the off topic response.

Digger Goreman

... Annnddd the FOX channel church chimes in again....

Maelochs

As a person with a lot of years in Florida .... immigration is Not the problem. All the problems I have ever had on Florida roads were with white people, and not even rednecks .... (except coal-rollers ... ) except one gentleman who might have been Latino (or maybe was just very tanned) in a large older convertible who pulled into oncoming traffic to pass me coming up to a 4-way stop sign, then cut in front of me and across two traffic lanes to take a Y-intersection on the far right .... I had pulled into the left half of the left lane to give him room to pass in case he wanted to take the right-hand option, but he insisted on passing on the left. I heard him coming so I slowed so as not to hit him when he cut back across two lanes to make his turn.

He looked to be 40s-50s so probably not a snowbird, either.

Also, I believe more tourists go to Greater Orlando (all the theme parks) than go to Miami. From Orlando they probably do day trips to the beaches on either side (the Gulf and the Atlantic are about 60-90 miles from O-town .... about three days' drive because the drivers are too stupid to merge.)

But blaming immigrants .... definitely a low-class move, there. People don't have to speak your language to be human, you know? And people who speak English can drive badly ... I know because every single person who has Ever yelled crap at me from a passing car, yelled in English.

Back when I arrived in Florida, riding on a dinosaur as we did back in the day, the issue was that poor and uneducated people from all over the Southeast saw Florida as the land of opportunity because it was a Right to Work state and because of crappy zoning and mostly negligible environmental protect and building code laws, was a hot spot for unskilled labor and construction jobs .... Anybody who could wake up to an alarm cock could find a job, often outdoors, in inhuman heat, and often involving hard labor, but a steady paycheck.

I worked with one guy who took great pride and pleasure in throwing beer bottles and cans out of his window while driving .... that "F the man!" of the truly tiny-brained. I worked with people who took pride in doing environmentally destructive things (pouring gasoline on the grass, for instance) to piss off the "tree-huggers." The fact that that gasoline would be headed into the drinking water .... was not an issue.

The whole idea of being responsible for waste was a joke, and pollution? Pollution was a left-wing hoax. it went from the level of personal action to job sites to planning boards, which gleefully authorized filling in wetlands and planning communities on the buried swamps, or planning whole communities in flood plains because the land was cheaper there .... for some reason, no one wanted to build. And everything from sewage to washing machine effluent went into the nearest river or pond, because only those stupid environmentalists cared about that stuff.

Florida was a mecca for people who wanted to deny anything learned after 1950, and anyone who wanted to do business the way it used to be done ... before people caught on that crapping in your own kitchen was stupid. And surprisingly, a lot of those people knew as much about birth control as they did about environmental protection.

Blaming immigrants might work if one includes people who emigrated from other states. Otherwise, that is just racist. Blaming tourists might work in certain settings ... but most tourists aren't cruising local roads through neighborhoods, or rural roads, because they tend to stay in hotels and at theme parks and beaches, and take main routes to get there.

As for Florida natives ... I have known a lot. A lot of them were really good people (and cyclists, so that's no surprise.) Some of them were unbelievably racist (one guy told me that in his Panhandle home town, when a black man (not the term he used) saw a white person approaching down the sidewalk, the black man stepped off the sidewalk "the way it's supposed to be.'") Many of them seemed to truly believe that whatever little they recalled of what they had learned in high school, was all there was to know, and everything discovered, devised, understood or invented since then was left-wing BS. from those East Coast elites---you know, those dirty book-readers.

Basically, i have lived with, worked with, partied with, and/or dated just about every sort of person of every race, creed and color, from all over the world ... and there are winners and losers of Every sort. No class, race, nation, faith, or place has a monopoly.

People who blame all their problems on "furriners" tend to be people who have never acknowledged, let alone ever tried to fix, their own personal problems.

i have also lived in parts of Florida with almost no tourism ... and people there were almost as likely to behave badly .... just so many fewer people that encounters were fewer, and general stress levels were lower. but I still found people who seemed to genuinely believe that only cars belonged on roads, and by the way some drove---only their cars.

Anyway .... if I lived in Orlando, and probably if I lived in Fort Lauderdale ... I would need to drive to a good place to ride. Sad, but that is city life (and urban sprawl life.)

wafranklin

I really like your idea of stopping and kicking some of the debris to the side.
Thanks!

257 roberts

this post made my day lol.....I spent 20 years in Law Enforcement in Florida and your absolutely right, also a phone to call it in

Maelochs

one would think something chambered in 257 Roberts slung across the back (legal if it is unloaded) would be the best accessory for cyclists who wished to remain unmolested by the immature, rude, and annoying ... but i didn't want to get the thread closed by suggesting it. Now I think enough folks have jumped in ...





(p.s.: Shout out to quality LEOs everywhere. Sad that we need you, glad that we have you.)