Best bike rides in the San Francisco area... and apps to find more

July 14, 2013 2:09 PM

I'm in San Francisco for the summer again, and looking for can't-miss bike rides as well as apps that will help me find more of them. Snowflakes inside.

I'm in San Francisco for the summer and I'm looking for bike routes that I'll enjoy. Sometimes I want a tough route with a lot of hills and other times I just want to get from point A to point B with as little strain as possible.

I'm looking for really lovely routes that I should not miss and also:

An iPhone app that will let me specify
- how much elevation gain/loss I want
- find routes near a particular location (not always where I currently am)
- have some kind of rating system
- not require me to use GPS tracking but just give me directions so I don't drain my battery
- have some awesome discovery feature that lets me find cool rides I might otherwise miss

For example, I wanted to bike to Bolinas from San Francisco, and I couldn't find an app that would just let me search for Bolinas, find the highest rated route to get there, and then download a map that will get me there, all in one place. All of the apps seem to be cluttered with routes like "How I Get To Work on Tuesdays" that make it hard to tell what the good routes are.

I've tried Strava and MapMyRide, but maybe I'm Doing It Wrong.

Things I don't like/care about:
- Competing with others
- Performance analytics
- Following/chatting with/whatever with others

Share your best rides with me. Thank you so much!

posted by 3491again to Health & Fitness (5 answers total)

Response by poster: Also forgot to mention -- I'm happy to pay whatever for the app. If it had only curated amazing routes, I'd pay a lot!
posted by 3491again at 2:21 PM on July 14, 2013

Ok .. it's not an app, but the Oakland Yellow Jackets have mapped out basically every great ride in the Bay Area:

http://www.oaklandyellowjackets.org/
posted by duckus at 4:24 PM on July 14, 2013

It's not an app, but the book Short Bike Rides in and Around San Francisco is excellent. Be aware that the author never met a hill he didn't love, so it's worth reading the route description in detail. For example, we did the Planet of the Apes ride. Correction, we started the Planet of the Apes ride; we gave up partway along Skyline Drive (which we renamed Armstrong's Tears Drive). The fact that the book describes it as "hilly, but not steep" has me falling about with laughter.

The Bay Area Bike Rides deck includes a small elevation gain/loss diagram on each ride's card.
posted by Lexica at 4:48 PM on July 14, 2013

I loved biking the Tilden fire trails in Berkeley. Quite lovely.
posted by thejoshu at 5:14 PM on July 14, 2013

Ask other cyclists :). To get to Bolinas I would take the Marin bike route (the one that's signed) out to downtown Fairfax, then turn left on Bolinas-Fairfax Rd. Great ride around the dam and over Bolinas Ridge. To get back to SF just go down the 1.
posted by bradbane at 10:52 PM on July 14, 2013