A cyclist trying to travel from the southern part of Monroe County to the north via bike trails should have no problem on the first half of his or her journey. But that cyclist won't get much further north than the Erie Canal or Court Street in downtown Rochester without taking to the streets.

Trail connections are just one of the big bikeability challenges facing the Rochester area. Some of the others involve making sure rebuilt or restriped streets are designed to accommodate cyclists, or increasing available bicycle parking.

But a core group of cycling advocates is consistently pushing for those kinds of improvements - and government leaders are listening. A bevy of public projects have connected existing trails, or focused on providing cyclists with space on the roads. And it's happening as much for transportation reasons as it is for recreational ones.

"I would say, all in all, Rochester is a pretty good cycling city, but we have a little ways to go both in terms of our infrastructure and in changing people's mentality," says Andrew Dollard, a member of the Rochester Cycling Alliance, an advocacy group that formed late last year.

Efforts to make the region more bike-friendly are getting the Rochester area some positive attention. Bicycling magazine recently named Rochester as one of its Top 50 bike-friendly cities in the United States (though it squeaked in at No. 50). The League of American Bicyclists gave Rochester and Monroe County an honorable mention in its Bike Friendly Communities program. And former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, an avid cyclist, has talked up Rochester as a city with good cycling potential.

The Rochester Cycling Alliance is on a campaign to make the area more bicycle friendly. To further that goal, it has organized Rochester Bike Week, running May 21-28. Bike Week will feature a few rides, tours, and races, as well as a presentation on the city's pending Bicycle Master Plan. (See sidebar for a list of events; for more information visit rochestercyclingalliance.org.)

"The overall idea is really to just kind of make a big impression on people and to kind of get people out, and get people talking about what we can do to keep making Rochester more bikeable," Dollard says.

The Rochester area has a lot of advantages when it comes to cycling. Dollard points out the relatively flat terrain. The Erie Canal and Genesee Riverway trails also provide a solid backbone for the development of a trail system. "Those are really your kind of expressways," says Rich Perrin, executive director of the Genesee Transportation Council, a regional transportation planning agency. [To locate those trails, and for a copy of the of Genesee Transportation Council's Greater Rochester Area Bicycling Map, click here.]

Thank the ongoing fuel crisis for Rochester's bikeable roads, says Richard DeSarra, a longtime cyclist and bike advocate who is active with the Rochester Bicycling Club and Rochester Cycling Alliance. When gas prices go up, more people bike. In the Rochester area, there's been a particular increase in people commuting by bike, DeSarra says. The federal Census Bureau's 2008 American Community Survey says there are 2800 bicycle commuters in the Rochester area. Percentage-wise, that puts Rochester at 18th out of the 51 largest metro areas in the country.

When more people bike, two things happen: policy makers begin to design public projects to accommodate bikes, and drivers begin to take notice and become more aware of cyclists. But making a community bike-friendly means more than building a couple of trails and slapping down some bike lanes. With bike lanes, the placement needs to be appropriate; put them too close to a line of parked cars and it's only a matter of time before a cyclist gets hit by an errant car door.

"The urban areas, the city of Rochester and any village, like Pittsford, they just don't have the physical space to make a road wider," DeSarra says. "So they have to learn how to be smart and make the roads safer by sometimes narrowing the lane down a little bit so they can pick up a 3' shoulder on each side."

City of Rochester officials have started work on a Bicycle Master Plan, which will help make the city more bike friendly. The city expects to complete the plan in early 2011. The process is just starting, but one of the goals is to come up with some demonstration projects, which would be designed in 2011 and built in 2012. Bike lanes or sharrows - a marking that indicates to motorists that they must share a travel lane with cyclists - are just a few possibilities. Another option would be to map or develop bicycle boulevards; these are routes through less-traveled streets that would be comfortable for cyclists of varying skills and experience.

Penfield completed a similar plan in late 2008. Advocates hope other local communities will follow the example set by Penfield and Rochester.

A good trail system can be tricky to build, but local officials have, for some time now, tried to connect trails together or to destinations, be they parks, neighborhoods, or streets.

Rochester and Brighton, for example, are working on a trail to connect Highland Park to the Erie Canal. Another trail will connect the Erie Canal trail with the existing portion of the Route 390 Trail, which currently runs between West Ridge Road and the Lake Ontario Parkway.

City staff is working on a few trail projects. The El Camino Trail would connect neighborhoods between Ridge Road and Scrantom Street to the Genesee Riverway Trail. Another would connect Kodak Park to the Erie Canal trail in Greece.

"That makes for an extremely important link to the west," says JoAnn Beck, the city's senior landscape architect.

But trails have a limited use because they can't go everywhere, DeSarra says. Which means roads will have to remain a focus for bike planning, too. DeSarra's happy to see some of the changes happening with the reconstruction of East Avenue in the city. The road will be reduced to two lanes with on-street parking, which should amount to more room for cyclists, he says.

"I see a good future here for Rochester in the next 10 years," DeSarra says. "A lot of things are happening. We're going to have much better facilities for cycling. I'm sure we'll see a large increase in cyclists."