Suppose I was going to cycle from Seattle to Long Beach, WA. Or from Seattle to Portland. Or from Seattle to San Francisco. Or from Seattle to New York.
What, in general, is the way that people cycle long distances in the US? Is it frontage roads? Do all freeways have these?
Typically lower traffic hiways are used. Sometimes these parallel freeway but often they take a less direct route.
Some states have bicycling maps, with roads color coded for suitability.
The Adventure Cycling Association produces may maps
http://www.adventurecycling.org/routes/
Or you can try to find somebody who did a similar trip:
Brian
Very few freeways have frontage roads between cities, although parallel roads are not uncommon.
Use bicycling resources to find bike-able trails and stick to lower-traffic roads for the rest. Your choice of roads may also govern the type of bicycle you use.
Our own Quasimodem made a bike trip from Dallas, GA to Dallas, TX a couple of years ago. He probably can answer this question.
I do think that frontage roads do not exist along most miles of Interstate in the U.S., only for those portions which exist within urban areas.
ETA: or what Chief Pedant said.
Frontage roads are the exception rather than the rule in California at least. Generally if a limited-access freeway was an in-place replacement for an old non-limited access roadway there might be a long stretch of parallel frontage roads suitable for bike traffic. But a freeway like I-5 through the San Joaquin Valley was built on brand new right-of-way and there aren’t any frontage roads of any length to be found. However, there are plenty of two lane state highways that get you from north to south if you are brave enough to make the journey.
If you aren’t aware, you can ask Google Maps to map walking directions for you though they mark the route with disclaimers saying not all roads are guaranteed to be available to pedestrians. Mapping Seattle to Long Beach, CA sends you into Nevada, which is odd. Highway 1 from Monterey to San Luis Obispo is about as bike friendly as any extended single length of highway that you’ll find anywhere. Still, there’s a large degree of taking one’s life in one’s own hand, no doubt.
Whether there’s still a usable frontage road usually depends on how they built the Interstate in question. Some of them were just built on top of the old US routes they superseded, but other times they built them along side and left the old road as a frontage. It seems like in my experience if there’s even very light agriculture near by, they left the frontage road, whereas only the completely desolate pieces of road are frontage-less.
For example, in I-90 in Montana by where I am, the old US-10 is still mostly travelable-- there’s a few spots where bridges don’t exist any more and some of the mountain passes are so narrow they had to build the Interstate right on top of it, but for the most part you can ride all the way through the state on them. A lot of cross-country cyclists still ride on the Interstate, though-- the old highway is not in very good shape in some places, and it also adds a bit of distance because in many places the old highway follows meandering river valleys whereas the Interstate plows straight through them.
I’ve ridden the Pacific Coast Bike Trail from Canada to Mexico and it’s chosen to take slightly less traveled highways and smaller roads, but its primary design criteria is to make it scenic. It follows the Pacific Coast Highway (1) for a great deal of the way. PCH is rarely almost never a high capacity or high speed route, although it is harrowing as hell in the Pacific Northwest when lumber and wood pulp trucks pass you by less than a foot. Sometimes there are safer parallel roads and bikeways, especially in cities. But lots of the time you are on a fairly big highway. One of the sketchiest spots is just northwest of here, on the 101 where there are narrow bridges and big semitrucks.
When I lived in Montana in the 1980’s, you sometimes saw bicyclists using the shoulder of the interstate. A quick Google search tells me this is still legal. Although there was actually a frontage road in our area (old US highway 10), it was a windy two-lane road with almost no shoulder, and one could argue that Interstate 90, with its nice wide shoulders, was a safer way to go. Not that Mom would let me ride there, of course.
There are lots of old roads paralleling the interstates; I suppose the trick for that is to have a good map. They are more for local traffic.
The problem comes in places with constrictions - bridges, narrow valleys, mountains (passes). Odds are there’s only one way through, and it’s been converted to the high-speed route.
In wide-open rural areas (Wyoming, for example), I would think it’s safer to be well-marked but on a 4-lane highway than a 2-lane. There’s more traffic, but they can give you more room. Everyone is still going as fast as they think they can get away with. Going through the mountains, does it really matter? People will still be driving blind corners faster than they should, whether is a county road or the interstate.
Going across Canada is something of a cyclist tradition for decades, and you see lots of them on the shoulders of the trans-Canada every summer. However, the TC is sort of schizoid; our main highway is more often a country highway with crossroads, than a limited access highway. (The feds are cheap that way in Canada).
I drove a motorcycle for years and never had a problem with aggressive drivers; yet others have interesting horror stories. The same may be true of cycling - interstate or rural road, you may go across the country with no problems, or you may be the one like a few years ago, where a motorist right out of the blue plowed through a pack of trans-Canada highway cyclists on a clear sunny day, killing two.