Bike Rides in the Pittsburgh Area
About the rides listed here
This directory contains descriptions of various bicycling
routes in the Pittsburgh area, for the benefit of people looking for
interesting places to travel.
Select one of the links below for the kinds of rides you want to take:
More bicycling information
For useful general information on bicycling, you might want to check out
John
Kolojejchick's bicycling info page,
which has various files of interest to cyclists, written locally and on
the Usenet.
John Greiner's bike directory
has some info as well.
See also the newsgroup cmu.rec.cyclists,
where you can trade
information and arrange rides with local CMU bike-fans. There's a
Frequently Asked Question list
(FAQ) posted there regularly as well.
The following rides may be useful for people in the Pittsburgh area who want
to ride right from their front doorstep, without using a car. They
go through a wide variety of areas and conditions.
Anyone is welcome to
contribute more material, or expand on or correct existing material.
Contributions can be emailed to me, and I'll include them in this directory,
with your name on them.
Send questions or comments on the descriptions to their authors.
I've tried to include a summary of mileage, hills, and traffic with
each ride. These are obviously subjective, and different writers may
have different opinions about what "bad" hills or traffic are. Mileage
may also be inexact; for many of my rides I just estimated, since I
didn't have an odometer. In many cases, alternate routes are given
which may be shorter or longer than the "main" route.
Door-to-Door Ride listing:
- In the City
- Beechwood Boulevard route (featuring East End city parks)
- A training loop around Squirrel Hill
- Pittsburgh Marathon course
- To the North
- Beechwood Farms and Squaw Run
- Hartwood Acres (via Middle Rd.)
- North Park
- The Red Belt
- To the West, East, and South
- The Mon Valley
- The Ohio River valley
- Raccoon Creek State Park (Beaver Co.)
- Rochester
- South Park
- Turtle and Brush Creeks
For rides outside the city, you may also want to consult information
about bridges.
A comprehensive off-line collection of rides can be found in the Western
Pennsylvania Wheelmen Map Pak, according to Rick Kazman. As of summer 1994,
Map Pak costs $15 and includes detailed maps and descriptions for 160
different rides in Western PA. The club meets regularly in Pittsburgh.
You can also write to the club at:
- Western Pennsylvania Wheelmen
- P. O. Box 6952
- Pittsburgh, PA 15212
John Ockerbloom (spok@cs.cmu.edu)