query_posts, oderby meta_value & print “future” posts

I would suggest storing the date-times as either:

• Timestamp (to sort/compare by meta_value_num)
• ‘yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm (e.g. 2012-04-11 19:37) to sort/compare by meta_value

Then the following will work (assuming you’re using timestamp):

$now = current_time('timestamp');
$args = array(
    'post_type' => 'rides',
    'posts_per_page' => 3,
    'meta_query' => array(
        array(
            'key' => 'date',
            'value' => $now,
            'compare' => '>'
        )
    )
 );
//This breaks pagination!
query_posts($args)

See Codex on WP_Query.

For bonus points: don’t use query_posts! (See this). It’s inefficient and requires some extra work to get pagination etc to work.

I suggest you see this (very) related post which shows you how to use the pre_get_posts hook instead. That post also includes how to sort by your custom ‘date’ field.