No Carter

By now most local racers have heard, the Carter Lake Road Race is cancelled for 2006. To my best knowledge, Grand Valley will now be Senior State Roads. As a board member this was probably the hardest decision I've had to make yet. I could not vote to cancel until I went to the Lake on Saturday the 12th to see for myself what the traffic would be like on a sunny weekend morning in mid-summer. In my 16 years of riding I have never been up there on a summer weekend. I have no exact reason why that is but my best guess is just plain old common sense. Big trucks towing boats on narrow roads is just a bad thing to combine with cycling.

The Carter race course was a challenge for officials when it was held in April. On any given weekend day in April you could find a handful of boats on the lake. On Saturday I counted 80 on the northern half of the lake alone. I sat at the proposed finish like and counted 39 vehicles pass by in 20 minutes. About 40% of that were vehicles with boats. The bottom line is that having a race on summer Saturday would cause great traffic delays for people going to and from the lake. For the most part, delays lead to anger and frustration. Combine that with a VERY large number of racers who have tuned out traffic because they are tuned into racing and you get a recipe for disaster. It's a recipe that I cannot support, hence my vote to cancel the race.

Hope to see you on the bike in another few weeks.