TransAmerica Bicycle Trail
first bicycle touring route to cross the U.S.
The TransAmerica Bicycle Trail is the first bicycle touring route to cross the US It was developed and mapped by Adventure Cycling Association, and travels between Astoria, Oregon, and Yorktown, Virginia, along mostly rural, two-lane highways.
History
The TransAmerica Bicycle Trail began as the route for Bikecentennial, a mass bicycle tour across the country to celebrate the US Bicentennial in 1976. The route was developed and mapped in the years preceding the event by volunteers and staff members of the organization Bikecentennial, which changed its name to Adventure Cycling Association in 1993. Over 4,100 cyclists rode at least part of the route during Bikecentennial, with 2,000 riding the entirety of the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail. Most of the riders were in their 20s and had no experience with long-distance cycling. They traveled in groups of 10 to 12 with leaders trained by Bikecentennial.
Since 2014, the annual Trans Am Bike Race is held on the route.
Route
The route can generally be ridden between May and September and requires about two and a half months, depending on the rider’s average daily mileage. The current route length is 4,228 miles (6,804 km). The TransAmerica Bicycle Trail was originally mapped with the intention of riding eastbound, but many riders choose to ride westbound.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “TransAmerica Bicycle Trail” as first bicycle touring route to cross the U.S. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as first bicycle touring route to cross the U.S. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q25005298. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1976, 1993 and 2014.
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This entry incorporates text from “TransAmerica Bicycle Trail” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.