Changing Lanes

One of the major differences between Chicago and Baltimore is that in Chicago, I had no worries about starting and finishing my cycling workouts from my front door. Well, at least the front door of my building as I haven't yet learned how to ride down 3 flights of stairs on aerobars. There were basically only two routes one could take when riding in the city: east to the lake and head north or east to the lake and head south. Even though Chicago lacked riding options and the terrain was mostly flat; riding was definitely convenient.

In Baltimore on the other hand, I have to drive to all the places where I would feel comfortable riding on the road. This presents a problem for weekday morning rides because I'm not a huge fan of losing sleep so that I can wake up early, install my bike rack, secure my bike, drive 20 minutes, ride for an hour or two, and do the whole process in reverse. However, the idea of doing all of my mid-week rides on a trainer is not appealing in the least, so today I decided to suck it up and drive to a "safe" spot.

Last week, while driving to a local park, I spent about 15 minutes driving down Pulaski Hwy. Surprisingly, the highway had wide shoulders and was marked as a bike route to some of the towns northeast of Baltimore. Although the road was extremely busy during the afternoon, I figured that it would be relatively quiet at 6:30am on a weekday. It turns out that this assumption proved only partially correct. The problem was that I had to ride far enough to get outside of the beltway (I-695) before the traffic died down and in the meantime, I had to make sure that I stayed as far to the right of the shoulder as possible. As a aside to any city planners who might happen upon this post, if you have a bike route that bypasses one or multiple interstate on-ramps, build a bridge or underpass or specify a detour so that cyclists don't have to play Frogger with cars, trucks, and semis driving along at 50 mph. Anyway, once I made my way outside of the beltway, the ride was great. Nice rolling hills that required use of most of my gears (a nice change from Chicago) and not too much traffic.


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All in all, it was a good experience and I will now suck it up and spend the extra 5-10 minutes to park outside of the beltway before hopping on my bike.