If I was to find an unexpected silver lining in all this, it is the drop in overall car traffic which has made roadways dramatically more comfortable and attractive biking options (well, the secondary / residential roads around me.) A good number of roads here have painted "sharrows" or painted bike lane indicators -- but I also have easy access to a MUT network so I'd grown very accustomed to using the MUTs over the last 2 years of biking... Until social distancing went into play, I was quite content to do 97% of my biking on the paved MUTs here. But as mentioned above, the MUTs are now just waaaay too crowded.
Riding on the MUTs, pre-pandemic, was basically fine -- you had a fairly constant baseline amount of navigation/obstacles to deal with, mostly presented by other MUT users and their varying levels of understanding how to share a trail (including which side of a directionally-divided MUT to walk on -- I definitely see a clear spike in people who walk on the wrong side of a line-divided MUT, into the oncoming MUT traffic.) But with the huge jump in MUT use, it just isn't worth the hassle to navigate in and around and between so many extra trail users flooding in at once.
But the now-nearly-emptied-of-cars roads... wow! Often smoother than the older tree-root buckled MUT surfaces I'd ride daily, and devoid of pedestrians -- I find the roads a delight to use in this presumably temporary era of super-light car traffic, and will miss them when regular car congestion returns. (And I'll wish the entire MUT network around me was paved 16 feet wide with fresh asphalt!!) I've mapped out a few road-based routes to get my normal exercise time in each day, picking routes that skew towards residential areas (still not a fan of riding on major thoroughfares) and those that don't have drastic hills to tackle -- I don't think twice about slowing down while climbing a MUT's hill -- but I'm more wary of doing it on a vehicle road (especially on the pedal-bike) even when the road may be lightly populated with cars.
It has been a neat experience to see neighborhoods, interesting old and new houses, different shops (to hopefully visit one day in the future) --- all of which I otherwise wouldn't see because I don't normally drive my car through that area, and the MUT doesn't go through either.
