Bay Area Bike Rides

It's a comprehensive guide, with 51 routes of varying skill levels, but lacks a few things: - Enough information on public transit connections. - The pages could have been better laid out so the mile charts and maps could be a spread that could easily be photocopied and carried in a pocket, but they are often spread in a way that does not make this possible. - I'm not sure if this would be possible, but rating climbs as cat4 to cat1 would be tremendously helpful. That said, I'm happy I bought this book. It's a pretty good intro to biking in the Bay Area.

I bought this book about a year ago when I first moved to the Bay Area, and did all of the East Bay road rides, and a few others. With the exception of one error that I found the hard way (in the Calaveras Road ride, Evans Road doesn't really turn into North Park Victoria Drive -- you have to make a right turn!), this book is accurate, interesting, and the routes are well-chosen and as nice as any I've found in the Bay Area. Most of the rides are fairly challenging for a casual rider, but certainly not impossible. I've used it as a basis for my own explorations, stitching various routes together.I can't speak for the mountain bike rides, as I haven't tried any of them.All in all, this is a great sampling of rides and a interesting read with your Sunday afternoon beer, after an invigorating ride through the beautiful Bay Area hills and canyons.

"Bay Area Bike Rides" by Ray Hosler is a collection of dozens of Bay Area bike rides. The rides range from 4 miles to 104 miles and include rides in the North, South, and East Bay, as well as the Peninsula.Hosler's book is broken into three sections: Mountain Rides, Road Rides, and Casual Rides. Each of the rides includes a text narrative taking you through the highlights of the trip (including historical commentary), detailed directions with mile-indexed checkpoints, a map of the course, and a topographical graph of the ride (showing areas you will go uphill and downhill, as well as the difficulty of the climb or decent). This book is very easy to read and seems to have been very well researched. I recommend it 100% for anyone living and cycling in the Bay Area.

This is a very practical book written by a pretty serious cyclist, it has the information you really want to have and pays attention to details often lacking in similar books by other authors. While there are some pretty good rides left out of the book, he covers a very good sampling of the best near the bay area including rides from all around the area. Suggestions on where to park, where services are available (and warnings about where they are not available), rough topological profiles, very complete route sheet distances and even a very decent amount of history relating to the areas of the routes is included. In cases where different books are suggesting routes involving the same road areas I have found Ray's rides usually to be the better suggestion. It is true that there are some long rides included in the book, but just a few, and they are great rides that are worth the effort.