Starting in February of this year I decided to ride my bike on every road in Boulder. Every neighborhood, every dead-end, and every circle. I didn't do very much detailed planning for this. I didn't try to optimize my routes to minimize distance. I figured that the worst case was that I rode my bike a bit extra, and that's fine by me. Even with perfect planning there are road configurations that require some duplication anyway, so I wasn't bothered by repeating segments more than once. Also, since this was always going to be a multi-day endeavour, I knew I would have to repeat some segments that brought me to neighborhoods starting from my home.
To be clear, I didn't ride every road completely, I had some rules:
- I didn't ride dangerous roads. There are a few very busy roads in Boulder that lack a safe place to ride; they don't even have a gutter bike lane. No one paid me to do this, and being super-ultra complete isn't worth the danger
- I didn't do alleys. I love a good alleyway, and when I'm dictator I will require them to be built everywhere, but I didn't ride them for this project
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I limited myself to roads actually in the city of Boulder. There are unincorporated islands within the city of Boulder, and I didn't ride in those unless I used them to get to other roads. For example, there are a number of unincorporated islands pictured below and I didn't do some of these roads
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There is some ambiguity about when a road is actually in Boulder and not. Some city boundaries run along roads as pictured below. City roads have blue and white signs, while county roads are given green and white signs. Some of these border roads have green signs, and some have blue. In general I would use the color of the street sign to guide me as to if it was a city or county road. As an aside, I ended up riding on the road below because I used it to get to a part of Boulder that is only accessible via county roads
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If a street had a "Private road, no city maintenance" sign, I didn't ride on it. Some private streets have green signs, which I would skip. I made two exceptions: NCAR and NIST. These are (semi-)governmental entities and therefore aren't private. Both are contained in city limits, so I felt it was appropriate to ride on them. I probably ended up riding on private roads here and there, but if they had a blue sign and no "Private street" sign, I figured it was fine for me to use it
- Similarly, I didn't do parking lots and other obviously private roads, like the roads in the IBM campus
- Some roads are under construction, and are either inaccessible or a complete mess. I avoided these as necessary or prudent
- I only needed to ride on a road in at least one direction, including divided roads
- I didn't focus on bike paths, but if one helped me get where I was going, I used it
I enjoyed this project. I visited parts of Boulder I had never seen before. I started to connect disparate parts of Boulder by era of development and design commonalities. For example, some residential neighborhoods have dead-end circles with parking in the middle. I found this design in a few places scattered across the city. All the older parts of Boulder have alleys, but mid-century developments stopped using them, likely because developers wanted to save money. However, some of the newest developments in Boulder have brought them back, because they are useful and a good idea, which I think is excellent.
Again, the project was fun, but I'm looking forward to getting back to more normal riding, where I'm not constantly changing direction and checking my GPS map for where I need to go next.
Here are some statistics:
- It took me 18 rides total
- 37 hours and 17 minutes of riding time
- 887 KM of distance
- 7,300 meters of climbing
Here's an animation of my progress1. The date and time is shown in the bottom right corner. To get the full effect, you'll want to view it on YouTube, full screen the video, and switch to 4K resolution. You can adjust the playback speed to make the video run faster, if you like. There are a few hiccups in the animation where progress backtracks and repeats. It's not in the original file I uploaded to YouTube and I have no idea what's going on.
Finally, I've updated my cycling history map page to include all of this new data.
- I used GPX Animator ↩︎