Photo Credit: Brett Rothmeyer

In May, Tennessee’s tourism department launched a statewide program to promote bicycle tourism aptly named Bike Tennessee. Consisting of 52 curated road cycling routes, the initiative is poised to help residents and visitors experience the state’s landscapes and rural towns safely and sustainably by bike.

Professional cycling guide Shannon Burke of Chattanooga-based Velo View Bike Tours spent two years on his bike mapping 1,739 miles of mostly rural, low-traffic routes that traverse some of the state’s most scenic and historic landscapes, including 14 state parks. The maps are now available to download on the cycling app Ride with GPS.

“Tennessee has all the right ingredients to be one of the premier cycling destinations in the country — low-traffic backroads, welcoming communities, and stunning scenery,” Burke says.

But with 93% of the state categorized as rural, Tennessee faces unique challenges in growing its bicycling community, attracting tourists, and boosting its outdoor recreation economy, which already generates $11.9 billion for the state, according to the Outdoor Industry Association. 

The routes are just the start. Developing awareness and infrastructure in Tennessee’s rural communities to support local and visiting cyclists will ensure the longevity of the initiative.

Photo Credit: Brett Rothmeyer

In April, ahead of the program’s launch, I spent a morning biking 23 miles on country roads with Burke, two other journalists, and Sonshine Loveless, another local tour guide with Outshine Adventures. We met at the Cookie Jar Cafe, situated on a 150-year-old dairy farm in the small rural city of Dunlap.

Together we rode up and down gradual hills and past churches and farms, avoiding potholes and catching views of the Cumberland Plateau’s ridges. At one junction, we stopped for water and to pet an affectionate donkey at the fence. Only a handful of vehicles, most of them trucks, passed us at slow speeds during our two hours on the road. A few drivers even waved.

“You’ve got ridges, you’ve got donkeys, you’ve got all you need,” says Burke, who moved to Chattanooga from Austin for the city’s great road biking opportunities before the pandemic. 

He’s partly serious, partly joking. Points of interest and resources along each route are noted in the ride descriptions on Ride with GPS. During his time biking across the state, Burke also identified opportunities for rural areas to make investments to better welcome cyclists, including protected bike lanes, safety facilities, and street signage as well as restaurants, restrooms, lodging options, events, and bike shops that offer rentals.

Because of the limited rental supply in most of the small rural towns, Burke recommends clients bring their own bikes when he leads tours. “The problem with going to a rural area is you score on the low traffic and great scenery, but you’re also by definition away from urban amenities,” he says. 

Once we finished our loop and returned to the Cookie Jar Cafe, we were famished and ready for a home-cooked meal. On the menu, there were southern classics like fried dill pickle spears, corn nuggets, turnip greens, hushpuppies, cornbread, and deviled eggs. What they’re really known for though, Burke says, are their pies — coconut cream is his favorite. 

We ordered a slice and it didn't disappoint. If every rural community had its own Cookie Jar Cafe, plus a few other amenities, Tennessee would have no problem getting cyclists to visit.

In 2021, the Tennessee legislature passed $2.1 million in recurring funding, allowing the Department of Tourist Development to help develop at-risk communities as desirable destinations. The bike routes program was born from that initiative, led by Jenni Veal, the state’s rural destination development manager. She and Burke worked together a few years ago to develop a mini version of the initiative in Southeast Tennessee, where she was the regional tourism director.

Today, Veal is facilitating conversations between multiple state agencies who want to be involved in the statewide campaign, such as the Department of Transportation’s bike and pedestrian planning and the Department of Health’s bike share efforts. 

Photo Credit: Brett Rothmeyer

For the last year, Veal and a colleague traveled to rural communities across the state to help its leaders understand the bike program’s goals, from the economic benefits to the safety considerations. Most importantly, they had the opportunity to ride bikes provided by Loveless.

“We wanted to get people on bikes who maybe haven’t been on them in a while,” Veal says. If the people promoting cycling don’t ride bikes, “They don’t understand what their community might feel like on a bike and what their needs are.” The partner pedal instilled some empathy for riders, and some community leaders even bought their own bikes after the event.

Progress will be slow because that’s the realistic pace of community development, Veal says. A bike shop with a mechanic or a road resurfacing effort may not transpire in every rural town. But they’re still celebrating each win, like the installation of two bike racks in Brownsville, a city near Memphis of about 10,000 people where Ford is building an electric vehicle plant. 

As momentum picks up, Burke already has his next assignments: mapping routes for gravel riding and mountain biking. As the organizer of three gravel and mountain events across the state — Tennessee Gravel, Reliance, and Telico — all of which bring in out-of-state visitors as well as locals, he knows there’s more opportunities the state can unlock with other kinds of riding.

Success of the program is going to require more than advertisements and the Bike Tennessee website. In order to be truly successful and sustainable, real investments by the state and local municipalities are necessary to compel cyclists to visit.

“If you get them to come to the state and see that it’s really beautiful here, then they have an interest in coming back,” Burke says.