Bowden Rd/University Ave to St. Johns County/Shands Bridge

Round trip length: 68 miles.


View Bowden Rd/University to St. Johns County/Shands Bridge in a larger map

It's difficult finding a pleasant and safe bicycle route from the "Southside" (really the east side of Jacksonville; due to being split by the St Johns river, Jax does not have a single southern side) southwards to St. Johns County:

• South of the Bowden Rd (itself not a safe road to ride on) passage underneath I-95, there is no way for a bicycle to cross I-95 and the railroad tracks until Baymeadows and getting to Baymeadows itself requires one to ride much east on Skinner Parkway, all the way out to Southside Ave. 
• There is a road called Salisbury Rd that runs parallel to I-95, but this comes to a dead stop at a church, just short of Baymeadows. 
• US1/Philips Highway, which could be a nice route to St. Augustine, offers no sidewalk or safe bicycle path of any kind. 
• Between Butler Blvd, 9A and US1 there are vast tracts of private land that are all fenced off and offer no roads of any kind. 

So I mapped out a route going south from University Ave, avoiding the main roads as much as possible. A strong drawback of Jacksonville city planning and modern city planning in general becomes obvious:

• All new housing developments are built as loops off of a main road. There is no through passage. This is probably a wonderful way to stop traffic through your neighborhood, but what about bicycles? Can't we have a narrow concrete or asphalt path that connects these communities for pedestrians and cyclists? Can't this be part of the planning? Why are we forced onto busy, dangerous roads?

In one place today, we could have stayed on small roads, but a community had put up a huge fence with barbed wire to stop through traffic, so we had to ride out to two main roads! You can see here how we tried to get through and then had to ride all the way around:

View Bowden Rd/University to St. Johns County/Shands Bridge in a larger map

Once we made it to St. Johns County and crossed Racetrack Rd,  Longleaf Pine Parkway was wonderful. This is a haven for cyclists. Thanks to the stagnation in the big-scale home building that was clearly planned here, there were long wide asphalt roads with very little traffic.We saw lots of cyclists here. It stayed nice all the way until we decided to ride a short bit on SR 16A East. Here the nature of the traffic changed abruptly from modern vehicles to speeding jacked up full size pickup trucks with muffler issues and other off road contaptions, as well as loud motorcycles. In addition, there was no shoulder.

We decided to turn around here.

All in all, it was a nice trip. I'm glad I finally found a reasonable route south.