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Riders in cities have a specific problem that country riders never think about: the good riding exists, but there are 45 minutes of traffic lights, dual carriageways and industrial estates between you and it. Do that twice and the enthusiasm for a Tuesday evening ride starts to erode.
The useful insight is that this is a route-finding problem you solve once, not a compromise you make every ride.
Five strategies
Find one good corridor and use it forever
Most cities have two or three genuinely decent ways out, and finding them is a one-off cost. Spend two or three rides deliberately exploring exits rather than trying to have a good ride, and you will be repaid for years.
Follow the water
River and canal paths are flat, continuous and cross the city without junctions, and they usually end somewhere near open country. Slow, and frequently the fastest way out in practice once traffic lights are counted.
Take the train out, ride back
Twenty minutes on a train replaces an hour of suburbs. Ride home from the far end and every kilometre is a good one. Underused by almost everyone.
Leave early
The same road at 6:30am and 9:00am are different roads. For a city rider, the start time is a bigger lever on ride quality than the route choice is.
Accept a dull first 20 minutes
Treat the exit as the warm-up rather than as part of the ride. Reframing it stops it souring the whole outing — and you should be riding easily for the first twenty minutes anyway.
The train one deserves more attention than it gets. Cyclists treat trains as something for holidays, when in fact a regional service on a Saturday morning converts a city rider's four-hour ride from "one hour of suburbs, two hours of good riding, one hour of suburbs" into three and a half hours of good riding. Loop, out and back, or point to point covers the route shapes this opens up.
Finding the corridor
Go looking for exits deliberately, in a way that has nothing to do with training. Pick a direction, ride out for 30 minutes, note what worked, come home. Three of those rides gives you a permanent asset.
What you are looking for is not the shortest way out but the one with fewest junctions, fewest lanes and most continuity. A route that is 3 km longer but has six sets of lights instead of eighteen is faster, safer and dramatically more pleasant. Traffic-light count is a better metric for a city exit than distance.
Moveee's Route Engine favours quiet roads rather than fast ones, which is exactly the preference you want for this job — it will often find a corridor through back streets and lanes that no navigation app optimising for speed would ever suggest.
What to do on weeknights
For a city rider, the honest answer is that a 90-minute weekday evening ride often cannot escape at all — and an hour spent riding badly in traffic is worse training and worse fun than an hour indoors.
This is the strongest practical case for a trainer that has nothing to do with winter. Moveee Indoor runs in a browser tab and rides your own saved routes in 3D, so the Tuesday interval session happens on a road you like rather than on a ring road — and the weekend, when you have time to escape properly, gets the good riding. Reverse periodisation is effectively a plan built around that split.
The commute question
If you ride through the city daily anyway, the exit problem is already solved: you know every quiet street, every light phase and every shortcut, and that knowledge is exactly what a weekend escape route is made of. Commuting by bike as training covers the training value; the navigational value is the underrated part.
One reframe
The 20 minutes it takes to get out is not stolen from your ride. It is the warm-up you should be doing anyway, ridden at exactly the easy pace a warm-up asks for, in a place where you could not go hard even if you wanted to. Riders who make peace with that find the whole problem gets considerably smaller.
Sources 4
Where this article summarises a study, the study itself is linked — not a write-up of it.
- 1 McGowan CJ, Pyne DB, Thompson KG, Rattray B Warm-Up Strategies for Sport and Exercise: Mechanisms and Applications · Sports Medicine · 2015
- 2 Reported road casualties in Great Britain: pedal cycle factsheet, 2024 · UK Department for Transport · 2025
- 3 Mekuria MC, Furth PG, Nixon H Low-Stress Bicycling and Network Connectivity · Mineta Transportation Institute, San José State University · 2012
- 4 Regulation (EU) 2021/782 on rail passengers' rights and obligations (bicycle spaces on trains) · EUR-Lex, Official Journal of the European Union · 2021
Build a route that is actually worth riding
The Route Engine works from real surface and elevation data and favours quiet roads, so it finds the lanes a fastest-way-there app routes you straight past. Give it a distance and a direction and it does the rest.
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