tandempower

Cycling almost always brings us in contact with motorists to some degree, even if it is just the whoosh of a car driving by on the road parallel to a bike trail. Sometimes, if you bike very late at night on country roads, you could be completely alone for miles. Probably some people on this forum have traveled and bike-toured in areas where there was no motor-traffic at all during their tour.

So what's the farthest you've ever ridden a bike without any motorized vehicle entering into your field of vision or hearing? What's the farthest you've biked totally 'car-free?'

Machka 

Hard to say, I've never paid much attention to the distance between passing motorists.

CliffordK

It depends on your definition.

Do rails/trails count? I've been quite a few miles along the Katy trail in the past, off-road, but with the occasional road crossing.

Our bike path net around here has sections of maybe 6 miles without road crossings, and doing a loop or two cold get over 10 miles. Does hearing them count?

I've hit night rides with little traffic, depending on where I was at.

I-Like-To-Bike

AutoFrei Tag/Happy Mosel, 144km along the Mosel River from Schweich to Cochem Germany. Last time I rode this was in 2002.

wolfchild

When I used to do long distance rides on rural roads and gravel roads there were times when I would be able to ride for a few minutes without seeing any vehicle but eventually would cross a path with some car. Impossible to avoid it completely. I've also ridden on rail trails and haven't seen any cars except when the trail crosses some road.

Stadjer

A couple of days probably. There's a small Island in tidal area just 50 km's away and cars aren't allowed on the boat. The locals are allowed to have a car but most of them don't because there a just a few roads you can use it on and there's just not much distance to cover. But it's very popular for recreation so you encounter about 10.000 people on a bike first and when you finally spot a driving car it's a nice surprise, like 'hey, what's that funny moving metal box doing here?'.

tandempower

So you've never even really given thought to the possibility of biking in the absence of motor-vehicles, apparently.

Idk, should it?

Wow, I detect no negativity in this post. Congratulations!

One of the waddeneilanden? I've visited Texel and Vlieland, I think, though it's been many years so maybe my memory is off. I remember the towns being very quaint on those islands, but I can't remember whether there were cars or not and how many.

350htrr

Probably 200 to 300 Meters max, normally... Unless You count trail riding, and there I have probably done 20 to 25Km without a car in sight...

Machka 

Incorrect.

All I said was that I've never looked at my computer when a car disappeared from view in order to monitor the distance I cycle between it and the next car.

Shimagnolo

US 36 Bikeway: New ?Highway for Cyclists? | 36 Commuting Solutions | Commuting Options and Advocacy for U.S. 36

This is becoming addictive; No stops signs; No traffic lights; No cagers.
Only downside is most of it is close enough to the highway that you still get the noise.
But it is fun to gloat when sometimes during rush hour, I'm traveling faster than the motor traffic.

Stadjer

Yes, Schiermonnikoog, it's the most eastern of the Dutch Wadden islands and the smallest (of the inhabeted). The other ones you can take the car on the ferry, but most visitors don't because if you do your missing the point of visiting those islands. I like cars, I enjoy driving, but cars just don't belong on any of the islands, I'm not gonna ride an Elephant through NYC either, one's transport has tot to fit the location. Actually it's almost the same as with cities, whether it's a ferry to an island or a main road into a city centre, if people bring their car there's just not enough space to let all the people in and those who get in can't get around.

I prefer to sail to the islands, but our boat is very small with very little draught (tidal area) and most bike rentals usually are next to the ferry harbour, not to the yacht harbours, so I end up walking the islands more than biking. Bigger boats usually take their own bikes or those people only care for the water and hardly get off their boat. But I did rent bikes on Schier and on most of the island you just don't see a bus or a car the whole day.

tandempower

I'm sorry I attempted discussion with you again. I should have known you'd say things that describe areas in terms of non-belonging elements (like elephants in NYC) and there not being enough space (liebensruimte). I got very tired of listening to everyone propagate these kinds of ideas while I was in Europe and I keep hoping that they will fade away but they never will. It doesn't even seem fascist to think in terms of elephants not belonging in NYC or there being insufficient space for things, does it? These ideas just seem like neutral logic, which just happen to justify exclusion by coincidence, right?

Sound very pleasant. Hopefully the thought of all the elephants and other elements mentally excluded from belonging didn't infiltrate your pleasant experience too much.

I-Like-To-Bike

Wow, I detect all kinds of negativity in this post. Congratulations!

tandempower

Yeah, I don't like having to respond to it but I made a commitment a long time ago not to keep my mouth shut when people say things that are offensive. Unfortunately, many people don't even consider what they say offensive and become themselves offended when they are told so. I used to know a lot of white people, for example, who got offended if you criticized the use of the n-word for African Americans. They would get irritated and offended if you would 'police them' to use PC language. Nowadays, it's pretty widely understood why racial words are offensive, but more subtle things like talking in metaphors about African animals not belonging in modern cities are harder to police because people can defend themselves by saying they're just talking about animals, not people. You can never know whether they are subtly suggesting racist comparisons, such as when people talk about 'African monkeys,' with implicit reference to people or whether they're actually talking about lemurs, etc. What really gets me is that I talked to a lot of Europeans about 'space limitations' before I ever learned that the concept of 'liebensraum' is a documented aspect of nazi propaganda. It just made sense to me whenever Dutch people told me that there was simply not enough space in the Netherlands for people to migrate there. It never occurred to me that people might like the fact that the country was small purely because it created an impetus to resist migration. Anyway, I don't like getting into these political discussions, because it gets threads bumped to P&R, but then I expect people to avoid dropping subtle expressions that imply fascism in these ways. If we're going to keep discussions politically neutral, then that should also exclude references to elephants in NYC and space-shortage necessitating exclusion.

Machka 

This is an elephant. It is located in ... the Netherlands ... right beside one of the bicycle paths.




Now ... I have no idea why it was there. Nor do I have any idea what tandempower is frothing on about this time. Nevertheless ... there is indeed an elephant in the Netherlands.

Stadjer

That's marxist-fascist symbolism for destroying trees, fight religion and reminds us that we don't have space for people of darker skin colour in our vaste country. The country is full of them:

I-Like-To-Bike

I just knew the The Grand LCF Inquisitor could get to the Real Truth about the environmental, cultural, and social blasphemers of NL!

badger1

No, you don't understand.

The elephant here -- this particular elephant in this particular place -- is not just an elephant. It is a reification of the dominant, hegemonic paradigm that always and everywhere reconstitutes the 'other' as being that which it is not. That hegemon, working through the individual 'subject', utilizes that subject's delusion of agency to suppress and exclude the other. Yet the subject is entirely unaware, until made aware, of its own subordination to the paradigm. As it were, the subject in the very act of supposing the elephant to be an elephant, as it were of "seeing" the elephant qua 'elephant', is engaging in its own subordination to that paradigm. To publicly assert the "elephantine" nature of the elephant is thus logically to instantiate the erasure of that very elephantness and in so doing erase and consequently exclude the sub-continents of both Africa and India and their populations from the Eurocentric gaze.

This reification, of course, is also the motivational factor behind Stadjer's seemingly innocent comment about not riding an elephant through NYC. Stadjer is simply ventriloquizing the dominant paradigm's oppressive symbology and thereby acting, as it were, as a kind of conduit through which that paradigm seeks to shape the immigration policies of the Netherlands by excluding the 'other'.

Thus you must see that the apparently-harmless elephant pictured in your post is in fact laden with a significance that you will disavow now that I have brought it to your consciousness.

You're welcome.

tandempower

Thanks. I don't think most people here will understand how Dutch culture is strongly oriented toward normalizing certain kinds of animals, such as sheep and frogs, and exoticizing others, like elephants. Even though children are taught about all types of animals as they are everywhere, I think there's more of a culture of ridiculing things for being out-of-place, which then translates into dismissing the idea that foreigners could ever 'belong' in the Netherlands. Then there is the common complaint that there's just not enough space for them. Stadjer was talking about cars and not people, but I think the logic is so common in Dutch that it just comes out regarding all sorts of things, cars included. Plus, it probably leads many Dutch to say that cars 'belong' in the US because it's a big country but not in the Netherlands because it's 'just a small country.' There are all sorts of little stereotypical differentiations like this in Dutch culture as I've understood it. I feel like by saying all this, I am stereotyping Stadjer in terms of generalizations about Dutch culture, and that wasn't my intention as I was just trying to respond to his comment with a blank slate after we had bickered in another thread, but I just felt offended by the logic about not belonging and limited space as a justification for exclusion. I'm sure that if I hadn't talked to many Dutch people and gotten sick of hearing people say that there wasn't enough space in the country for foreigners that I wouldn't be sensitive to what Stadjer said, but the fact of the matter is I am, so I just had to say something and then maybe we can just move on, though probably as you said there will come a whole bunch of posts disavowing, getting defensive, and/or attacking and ridiculing me in retaliation. C'est la vie. Too bad we can't just say, "ok, noted," and try to use more culturally neutral expressions in future posts.

Machka 

Thanks!!


(Love it!!)

cooker

The only time I have a car-free ride (ie. no sharing the road with cars) is a bit like I-Like-To-Bike's example, where I ride on a road closed to cars for a day. That would be the Ride For Heart, an annual charity event on local freeways. It does get some flack from a small group of motorists who think car traffic should not be interrupted on a Sunday morning, but I think most get that charity events can occasionally take precedence over public convenience.

Machka 

My longest stretches would be either on trails or at night. However even so, you can still hear or see vehicles in those situations before too long. At night, you can hear and see them from some distance away and if they're not driving, they're in driveways.

And trails often run close to highways, and/or intersect them.

The Great Victorian Rail Trail (shown in this thread) is 134 km long, but it does run near highways from time to time, and cross them a few times.

https://www.bikeforums.net/living-car...paths-etc.html

cooker

Also like wolfchild (and Machka) I have ridden on rail trails where you only see cars at road crossings, and the farthest I have ridden is to both ends of the Caledon trail, so 68 km round trip. He's given me a tip on another rail trail that I might do this fall but I'll be testing out a suitcase trailer so it probably won't be as long a ride.

badger1

In the past I did several mtb rides of around 60 to 70 kms that were genuinely off-road and so involved no exposure at all to motor vehicle traffic.

These days the closest I come to that is using our very good (could be better) MUP system -- the Thames Valley Parkway. It has three branches, each running parallel to a river branch, that intersect where the river forks. Doing all three as an out 'n back, and adding a few little creative connectors that many of us round here know about, one can put together a ride of about 60kms or so that involves very little contact with motorized traffic.

I'd like to do more of this kind of thing, and I've been following cooker and Wolfchild's exchange with interest; I'm close enough to those rail trails to make trying 'em out feasible. I won't do it, though, unless I can get to them by bike or by rail. I have this self-imposed rule -- possibly silly but it's my rule! -- against 'driving to ride'.

cooker

The Brantford-Hamilton trail wolfchild mentioned is probably fairly accessible by VIA rail at both ends, as it parallels the more southerly route for the Toronto-London train (which has two alternate routes), but I'd have to check where the station is near Hamilton (or maybe Burlington), and if you would have to climb some huge hill like the Hamilton escarpment or not. Also, not all VIA trains have bike racks so you might have to package up your bike as luggage. I've ordered a trailer kit for my Bike Friday suitcase, so I'll be taking it all in the suitcase on the train, if and when I do that ride, so I can ignore the bike rack issue.

For the Caledon trail I could take a GO train from Toronto to Georgetown and ride on backroads to get to the trailhead, if I do it again, but that would be a long trip for you. However, the same trailhead might be reasonably reachable from the northern London-Toronto VIA route and I will check that.