Bike itinerary building: how it works, step by step

An itinerary is a sequence of commitments, and most bad ones fail because the commitments were made in the wrong order. Bike itinerary building succeeds or fails on that order. Route first, purpose later, data never — reversing it costs nothing and removes most of the problems before they exist.

Rail trails make that order visible. The Great Allegheny Passage runs from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland, where it meets the C&O Canal Towpath for the ride on to Washington, D.C. The Katy Trail crosses Missouri from Clinton to the St. Louis area. On corridors like these the route is already fixed, so the decisions that matter are the daily distance, the crushed-limestone surface under your wheels, and the trail town where you sleep and eat.

What to take away

Purpose before route

Planners are made to do this formally. The Federal Highway Administration's Statewide Pedestrian and Bicycle Planning Handbook works through understanding who the plan is for, taking stock of what already exists, and setting goals, objectives and performance measures before anything gets designed. It reads like bureaucracy until you notice how many trips are planned without any of it.

For a trip, the equivalent is one sentence. Four days of easy riding with two long evenings in towns. Or: as many miles as possible, sleeping anywhere. Those two sentences produce completely different itineraries from the same corridor.

Get real data, not a rating

Trail information has traditionally been thin. The Federal Highway Administration's trail best-practices guide, Designing Sidewalks and Trails for Access, Part II, notes that trail info has usually consisted of length plus a subjective rating such as easy or difficult. On a crushed-limestone rail trail a section marked easy reads the same on a short day ride and on a loaded one, and it says nothing about the surface after rain. Such ratings reveal very little about actual conditions.

The guide's example: a wheelchair user cannot tell from "easy" whether the trail stays wide enough to pass, and may have to turn back.

The same guide describes the Universal Trail Assessment Process, an inventory method for recording accessibility and maintenance information developed with federal, state and local agencies. The data sits with whoever manages the corridor — Missouri State Parks for the Katy Trail State Park, the National Park Service for the C&O Canal Towpath. Where that agency has done the work, ask for the output rather than the map.

Build the itinerary in dependency order

Work top down. Every hour spent on stage six before stage three is wasted the moment the route shape changes.

The method applied: two days on the Great Allegheny Passage

Run the stages on a real corridor and the order stops being abstract. The Great Allegheny Passage is a crushed-limestone rail trail from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland, and it links to the C&O Canal Towpath for the continuation to Washington, D.C.

The purpose sentence comes first: two days of steady riding, with both evenings in a trail town instead of a campsite. That sentence settles the corridor — the Great Allegheny Passage, ridden point to point — and the corridor settles the return, because a point-to-point route needs a shuttle or an Amtrak train out of Cumberland rather than a loop.

Measured conditions come next, and they are the ones a trailhead sign never gives you: crushed limestone, gentle grades, and the places where the surface softens after rain. Daily distance is set by the slowest rider and by the grade, not by a pace borrowed from pavement; ride time is that distance at that pace, plus stops.

The bookings come after that, and on this corridor they mean a room in Confluence or Rockwood, Pennsylvania, or in Cumberland, plus a seat on the shuttle or the train. Everything still moveable stays at the end: the spare half-day, and the alternative for the hardest section.

Leave the slack in

A finished itinerary needs one empty half-day and one alternative for the hardest section. Without both, it is a schedule, not a plan; the first delay turns it into compromises.

For corridor choice, start from the purpose sentence and the measured conditions; a worked two-day structure on the Great Allegheny Passage is in a two-day rail trail itinerary.

Common questions