Thursday Night Route Choices

One of the great things that has happened in the last couple of years at Bike Works is the social aspect. When i started volunteering at the bike repair work parties on Thursday nights i always enjoyed the ride home. Those night time rides are glorious: the streets are empty, wet or dry, cold or warm, it's just so nice to be out in the night. But it was a bit of a downer riding alone.

In the last 12 to 18 months we've developed a nice group of folks who ride north together almost every week. It's an enormous amount of fun -- a bicycle gang running through the dark city at 10pm. It's social and all bike geeky too. We chat and argue and enjoy riding together. We learn from each other: from conversation of course, from riding styles, from bikes, and we learn different parts of the city from each other.

One of the very cool things about these rides is the way people slowly peel off the group as we roll through the city from neighborhood to neighborhood. We might start out with 6 or 7 people, someone will peel off after a mile, and then a mile later someone else will peel off. By the time we get to Broadway there might be only a couple of us, sometimes more, sometimes fewer. I'd love to see a map plot animation of each person peeling off.

Every week as we gather out front of Bike Works preparing to ride home, there is the issue of which route we will take this week. It's about 6 miles from Columbia City to Broadway. There are 7 basic routes with plenty of variants on each. Each route has benefits and drawbacks, supporters and opposition. We've ridden all of them, and most have at one time or another been the default route.

I draw many of my rides on my topo maps, and sometimes take a GPS with me, so i made an image with all seven rides on it, measured the distance and total climb on each. I was a little surprised that 5 of the different routes are essentially the same distance, one is a bit longer, and one is significantly shorter. I thought there would be more variance.

In blue, the beautiful Lake Washington Boulevard route is the longest at 7.0 miles and has the most climbing with 537 feet.

In purple is the zig-zag route, or the 31st route (i call it Melanie's route, because she's the one who showed it to me). It's 6.5 miles with 462 feet of climbing.

In green, the Beacon Hill route is 6.3 miles, with 495 feet of climbing.

In red, a little flatter is the city's official marked Letitia route. It's 6.2 miles and 399 feet up.

In white i've occasionally ridden via Renton Ave. It's 6.2 miles and 447 feet up.

In yellow, directly up MLK is 6.1 miles with 384 up, often seen as a 'quick' route.

And in black, mixing with the heavy traffic directly on Rainier Blvd the whole way is only 4.3 miles with 374 feet of climbing.

I usually rate the hilliness of a ride by calculating feet per mile of climbing. All of these routes come in above my arbitrary Seattle average of 50.0 feet per mile; most are around 65 feet per mile. Strangely that makes Rainier the steepest, at 88.0 feet per mile -- but probably only because it is so such a shorter distance.