The Road Best Traveled

Wright also said inexperienced riders should not use the map's "less preferred" routes. Those include stretches of such forbidding roadways as Baron Cameron Parkway in Reston, he said.

Wright and Strunk emphasized that the map is a beginning for Fairfax for identifying where bike lanes, signs and other facilities are needed.

"We really have very few," Wright said. "We need to make the 'less preferred' routes 'preferred.' Where there are missing links or dangerous links, we need to concentrate on those first."

The county has begun designing its first major bicycle improvement, a $400,000 project to create a route along Gallows Road from the Washington and Old Dominion Trail south to the Dunn Loring-Merrifield Metro station. The route will include a dedicated bike lane and signs, Strunk said. Eventually, the route will stretch to Springfield, following Annandale and Backlick roads most of the way.

Future projects include identifying roads wide enough to accommodate a striped bike lane, and Fairfax has plenty, including Westmoreland Street near McLean, Sleepy Hollow Road near Baileys Crossroads and Jones Branch Road in Tysons, Strunk said. Many residents will welcome striped bike lanes, which tend to slow traffic by narrowing the road, he said.

In some cases, reconstruction of medians or small-scale widenings will be necessary on roadways too narrow to accommodate a new lane. Those will be expensive but necessary to connect the bicycle network across the county. "You can't just stripe 400 feet of bike lane here and there," he said. "It's got to be long, logical sections."

And it has to be one step at a time, he said. "We're eventually going to get there."

For more information about Bike to Work Day in Fairfax County, visithttp://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/fcdot/bike/biketowork.htm. For information regarding other locations in the Washington region, visit the Washington Area Bicyclist Association athttp://www.waba.org.