Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you all get to spend some quality time with friends and family today. I’m also keeping my fingers crossed that neither of us will get stuck in traffic.

Circumstances are leading me to get into a car for a couple hours to get out to the coast with a group of friends. It’s going to be a lot of fun, but I can’t help but think that we might ride our bikes if there was a safe, separated trail following the highway out to the beach.

We certainly could ride to the coast on our bikes if we really wanted to, but the only option is to ride on the shoulder of a highway. The noise and dirt from the passing cars would make the experience rather unpleasant. Riding side by side through the country, chatting about Thanksgiving dinner, is a much nicer proposition. If it were an option, we’d probably take it.

Not only would that keep us out of miserable holiday freeway traffic, it would reduce the number of the cars on the road by two or three, leaving more room for people who need or want to drive. I’m sure we wouldn’t be the only ones to opt-out of a car either.

If we had safer bikeways connecting cities it’d make holiday travel better; both for people on bikes and for people in cars.