How to plan a scenic ride that avoids motorways and traffic

The best rides rarely show up when you ask an app for the fastest way somewhere. The fastest way is usually a motorway, and a motorway is the one road most scooters and mopeds are not allowed to use anyway. A scenic ride is a different request entirely. You are not trying to save ten minutes, you are trying to spend an hour somewhere that is worth looking at, on roads that are quiet enough to enjoy.

I ride a small machine around Berlin and I build Urban Rider, the navigation app I cover later in this piece, so treat me as a biased but honest guide. This is a practical walk-through of planning a ride that stays off the motorway and away from the worst of the traffic, written for riders in the United States and the United Kingdom. It works whether you are on a 50cc moped, a 125cc commuter or a small motorcycle.

What makes a good two-wheel route

A car driver wants a smooth, fast, predictable road. On two wheels, especially a low-powered one, you want almost the opposite. A genuinely good scenic route tends to share a few features:

• It follows a natural feature. Coastlines, river valleys and forest edges produce the bends, gradients and views that make a ride memorable. Engineers had to follow the land, so the road does too.
• It is paved and well surfaced. A pretty lane covered in gravel, mud or loose chippings is a hazard on a scooter. You want a sealed surface you can read.
• It sits below the fast-road network. In the UK that means A and B roads away from the trunk routes. In the US it means state routes, parkways and designated scenic byways rather than the interstate.
• It carries little through traffic. Roads that do not connect two big places stay quiet. That is exactly what you are looking for.
• It suits your speed. Most urban scooters and mopeds live between 25 and 50 km/h (roughly 15 to 31 mph). A road designed for that pace feels right, where a high-speed dual carriageway never will.

Start with avoid-motorway and road-type settings

The single most useful habit is to set your route to avoid motorways before the app calculates anything, not after. The order matters. If you let a car-first app draw a fast line and then strip out the motorways, you often get an awkward patchwork. If you tell it from the start to ignore the fast network, it builds a calmer route from the ground up.

In the United Kingdom this is not just a preference, it is the law for a lot of riders. A moped limited to 28 mph (45 km/h) is banned from motorways, and anyone riding on a CBT certificate cannot use a motorway at all, on any machine. The fast roads are simply not an option, so a route that excludes them is the only honest route. I go deeper into this in whether you can ride a moped on the motorway, which is worth a read if you are unsure where your machine stands.

In the United States the rules vary by state, but the direction of travel is the same. Most states ban mopeds, and many small scooters, from interstates and other limited-access highways, and a vehicle that cannot safely hold the flow of traffic has no business on one regardless. As a rule of thumb, machines that top out around 30 mph are treated as mopeds and kept off the fast network, while larger scooters and motorcycles get more freedom. The practical upshot is the same on both sides of the Atlantic: plan around the quieter roads and you are usually riding legally and more pleasantly at once.

Most car navigation apps hide an avoid-motorway toggle somewhere in their route options. It works, but it has a blind spot: it does not know your vehicle class. It will still treat a fast trunk road or dual carriageway as a perfectly good road for you, because for a car it is. A two-wheel app that understands vehicle class avoids that trap by default, which is the whole reason the category exists. I compared the main options in the best scooter and moped navigation apps.

Finding the backroads: coast, river and forest

Once the motorways are out, the next step is choosing where to point the route. Three kinds of landscape reliably deliver:

Coast roads

A coastline gives you a view on one side and a reason for the road to bend on the other. They tend to be lower-speed by nature, with villages strung along them for coffee and fuel. The catch is summer tourist traffic, so timing matters (more on that below).

River and valley roads

Rivers carved the gentlest gradients through hilly country long before engineers arrived, so valley roads are often the most rideable way through otherwise demanding terrain. They flow, they have rhythm, and they rarely throw a surprise 1-in-4 climb at a small engine.

Forest and moorland roads

Roads through woodland and open moor are usually quiet because there is little at either end except more scenery. Watch the surface, as shaded sections stay damp and leaf-covered, but for calm and clean air they are hard to beat.

To find them, zoom in on the map and look for the thinner lines that wander rather than the thick ones that run straight between towns. The wandering ones are your route. A good two-wheel app will favour them automatically once the fast roads are excluded.

Three route ideas to borrow

You do not have to invent a route from nothing. Both markets have well-known roads that suit an unhurried ride on a smaller machine.

United Kingdom: the Atlantic Highway and the Antrim Coast Road

In the south west of England, the A39 follows the north coast of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, with the well-known Atlantic Highway stretch running from around Barnstaple down towards Cornwall. The northern end skirts Exmoor with sweeping moorland and sea views before the road tracks the Atlantic coast past Bideford and Bude. It is a primary A road rather than a motorway, so it is open to mopeds and scooters, and the national speed limit on these single carriageway roads is 60 mph, which leaves plenty of room to ride within your machine's comfortable pace. For a quieter, twistier version, drop onto the parallel B roads and lanes that branch off it.

In Northern Ireland, the Antrim Coast Road (A2) hugs the shoreline between Larne and the Giant's Causeway with long, gentle bends and frequent villages. It is a classic touring road precisely because it never pretends to be fast. If you want a city-edge starting point instead, my guide to riding a scooter in London covers escaping the capital towards the surrounding countryside.

United States: the Blue Ridge Parkway

The Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina is almost purpose-built for this kind of ride. It runs 469 miles through the Appalachians with a speed limit capped at 45 mph (35 mph through developed areas), no stop signs or traffic lights for long stretches, and no commercial traffic allowed at all. That combination of low speed, gentle curves and banned trucks makes it one of the calmest scenic roads in the country. You do not have to ride the whole thing, a 40 or 50 mile section makes a fine afternoon.

For a coastal alternative, sections of California's Highway 1 away from the busier stretches deliver the same idea on the Pacific. Pick a quieter segment, ride it midweek, and you have a scenic ride without ever touching a freeway.

Timing your ride to dodge traffic

The right road at the wrong time is just a slower commute. A little planning around the clock makes a large difference:

• Ride mid-morning on a weekday if you can. Roughly 10am to noon, after the rush has cleared and before lunchtime errands build up, is often the quietest window.
• On weekends, go early. Popular coast and parkway roads fill with day-trippers from late morning. Being on the road by 8 or 9am buys you an hour or two of near-empty tarmac.
• Avoid the obvious peaks. The 8am and 5pm commutes near any town, and Friday afternoons heading out of cities, are worth steering around entirely.
• Use live traffic, but trust the road type more. Live data helps you dodge an incident, but the surest way to avoid jams is to be on roads that never carry much traffic in the first place.

Plan your fuel or charge stops

Quiet roads are quiet because there is little along them, which is wonderful until you are low on fuel or battery. Small machines have small tanks, and a scenic detour can be longer than it looks on the map.

If you ride petrol, note where the fuel stations are before you set off, especially on coast and forest roads where the gaps between them can be wide. If you ride electric, the planning is more involved, because charging is slower than filling a tank and rural chargers are sparse. I wrote a full guide to electric scooter range and charging that is worth reading before a longer trip, and the trade-offs between the two are covered in electric versus petrol scooters. Urban Rider can show charging stations along the route, with output and network, so you can build a stop into the ride rather than improvising one.

Ride it safely

Scenic roads carry their own hazards, and they are different from city ones. Rural bends hide oncoming traffic, surfaces change without warning, and the speed limits are higher even where the road is not built for speed. A few habits matter more out here:

• Wear a proper helmet, always. In the UK a standards-compliant helmet is a legal requirement for every rider and pillion, with no exceptions. In the US the law varies, with some states requiring a DOT helmet for everyone and others only for younger riders, but the gravel on a country bend does not check your age. Wear one regardless.
• Read the surface ahead. Wet leaves, gravel washed across the road, farm mud and damp shaded patches are all common on quiet roads and all reduce grip.
• Ride your own pace. A 60 mph national limit on a UK single carriageway, or a 45 mph cap on a US parkway, is a maximum, not a target. Ride at the speed the bend and your machine are happy with.
• Keep your eyes on the road, not the screen. Mount your phone properly and glance, never read. My piece on phone navigation on two wheels goes into mounting and glanceability, and urban scooter safety tips covers the rider-craft side.

How Urban Rider makes this easy

This is the part where I talk about the app I make, so weigh it accordingly. Urban Rider was built for exactly this kind of planning, because it starts from your vehicle rather than treating it as a car with two wheels missing.

Choose a scooter or moped profile and it avoids motorways, major trunk roads and many tunnels by default. That single decision does most of the scenic work for you, because excluding the fast network naturally pushes the route onto the calmer, prettier roads you actually want. Choose the motorcycle profile and the faster roads come back, with the controls to fine-tune from there. Whether a 50cc or a 125cc suits your kind of riding is something I dug into in 50cc versus 125cc scooters.

Beyond the defaults, you can block roads above a chosen speed limit, avoid rough surfaces like gravel and cobblestone, and have arrival times calculated at real two-wheel speeds rather than a car's pace on the same road. Electric riders see charging stations along the way. On the move, Minimal Mode strips the screen to the next turn, the distance and your speed, so you can glance and get back to the view.

The honest caveats: Urban Rider is younger and smaller than the household-name apps, and it is iOS first, with an Android version in open beta. But for planning a ride that stays off the motorway and away from traffic, starting from a tool built for two wheels saves you fighting the app for every turn.

Frequently asked questions