Originally Posted by freetors

So this has been a topic I've been mulling over for a very long time. My background is in mountain biking and in the last year I've been doing a lot of gravel riding. I'm not a super competitive cyclist, I don't have a 300+ watt ftp, I don't do big pack rides. I'm not a roadie. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for all those guys who crush 5000 plus miles a year and pound out the watts, but I'm not one of them. My passion is more in exploration, getting away from cars and other people, and just getting out there.

Over the last few years I've been using strava a lot and seeing the kinds of routes that are popular with the local road scene. Last year I ended up getting a more personal look at quite a few of these roads when I did my first big organized century ride. Now I'm not afraid of road riding, but there were significant chunks of this ride where I just plain did not feel safe. For instance, there was fifteen mile stretch riding on a two lane 65mph highway with no shoulder. There was also a further 15-20 miles of highway riding, but at least we got some shoulder room buffer, I guess. And to be honest the route design just felt extremely lazy, there was no notable scenery, just a couple decent hills, and a lot of looong boring straight roads. The local road scene is just littered with lousy roads like this. It's even infiltrated the gravel scene. I tried out one of their popular weeknight gravel rides in my own time and it was honestly one of the most miserable gravel routes I've ever tried. It was super flat, almost all grid road, really fine gravel that got corrugation bumps easily, and also lackluster scenery. It really just seemed like a course for groadies to just pound out some watts without being distracted by anything even remotely interesting.

What I find most baffling about the popularity of all these particular roads is the large number of totally viable alternatives. Many of the alternatives aren't even far from the bad ones! I don't know if there's an objective to this thread. Maybe I'm just venting. But I would be interested to hear if other places have a similar thing going on.