How to mitigate the risk of riding on highways I'm planning a single-day ride between the cities of West Palm Beach and Orlando, Florida: roughly 180 miles. I'm trying to plan my route for safety. However, there are no routes to Orlando free of major highways.
I'm no stranger to cycling Florida's country roads. I've cycled between West Palm Beach and Naples, which is around 130 miles. During that trip, however, I managed to minimize the amount of time on major state highways by taking some two-lane county highways (which are less traveled). Still, the small amount of time I did have to spend on the major highways was very distressing, as large trucks frequent those roads, traveling at well over 65mph.
While planning my trip to Orlando, I managed to map most of the northbound part of the trip to follow the coast, where I can travel on the barrier islands that line the treasure and space coasts. The speed limits on those beach roads are usually lower than 40mph, and people are in less of a hurry on them; they're mostly used to get to residences and for leisurely drives along the beach. My problem comes when I must travel west. The only westbound roads into Orlando require me to ride along US192, or some other state highways with similar infrastructure (no bike lane, only a paved shoulder).
If I want to complete this trip, I believe there is no avoiding these roads. My question to the community is, if you're forced to ride a treacherous road as part of the route for a tour, what kind of precautions do you take to help ensure your safety? I know there is always a high risk present riding along a highway, but learning how to mitigate that risk may just save my life or the life of a future reader of this post.
My route:
Google is probably not the best tool for this, it's not tailored to the needs of cyclists. I would always use BRouter, here is the route it produces when I ask it to give me a safe route. The route is quite a bit longer, but I'd guess that there are pretty few major roads without bike lanes on it.
BRouter is a nice tool that builds on OpenStreetMap data, and allows you to select (or even define your own) different goals (safety, fast, walking, non-hilly, etc.) for which the route is optimized. It even allows you to generate some alternative routes. I've found the results of the &quot;safe&quot; optimization quite solid, there have been pretty few places where I decided that the chosen route is not safe enough for my purposes.