If you start up Federal Street from Allegheny Center and don't even change lanes, you end up at the north end of PA98, at PA5, in Avonia, about eight miles west of Erie. I drove this just a couple weeks ago, but have never biked it. There must be trails or bikeable roads parallel to the lake shore, but I have no knowledge of them. PA5 looks OK, just a lot of suburban traffic. US20 is parallel with heavier traffic about a half mile south of that, and of course the big traffic is on parallel I-90, so most of what's on PA5 is just suburban comings and goings.
Closer to home, I'm not sure all the wiggles and narrowness of Thompson Run Rd is any improvement over just staying on Babcock the whole way up. When you get to the T intersection of Babcock and Three Degree, Babcock becomes four lanes with no shoulder, similar to Liberty Ave in the Strip, so you may as well take the lane for that mile, then left onto McKnight which is also Babcock for a quarter mile but at least there's a wide shoulder until it's purely Babcock again. (I live less than a mile from here so know this spot intimately.)
If you don't mind wiggly backroads, Babcock itself can get you a long ways north, to 10 miles north of Butler. Up there, with a couple of lane changes, it becomes Meridian Road. PA8 is a superhighway for part of that trip, but Old 8, labelled for a while as PA308, can get you quite a ways farther up.
Again, I've never biked any of this, but have explored a lot of these alternate pathways by car and motorcycle in my dozens of trips back and forth to Buffalo.
2021-08-04 20:39:53