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FROM THE SUMMIT No Safety Tips Here
As part of the current interest in safety, Karen asked me if I wanted to write an article with some tips. But as I tried to think of useful info out of Effective Cycling—things that could be reduced to a few words—I realized that I think tips aren’t what I wanted to discuss. Tips help beginners deal with new situations when they have no idea what to do. The DVD in this month’s meeting program includes some excellent tips, summed up in a few words, that can be very helpful for communicating what to do in the situations that confront new cyclists. But are tips of direct use to you and me? Most of us have something much more valuable than tips: experience! While beginners are overwhelmed trying to make sense of everything going on, experience means that we have learned what is important to notice about traffic and what can be ignored. That’s why the incidence of cycling accidents goes down drastically with experience. But is there a downside? Can experience actually create safety problems? I’d like to discuss a couple of ways I think it does. The first is that experience makes us safer because we develop habits. Usually good habits, but sometimes bad. And we’re not going to change riding habits, good or bad, just because of some catchy words. In point of fact, if following a tip puts you in conflict with the basic principles derived from experience, that is dangerous because you will ride confused and unsure. If you are going to change the way you ride with traffic, it should be because that change makes sense to you at a basic level and changes the way you see a situation. I’d like to open up a discussion at that basic level. This will take several-to-many long-winded articles—I hope you find them of use.
A significant part of teaching bicycling traffic skills is trying to overcome what John Forester refers to as the Cyclist-Inferiority Superstition: “the feeling that cars belong on the roadway and that bicycles do not, that cars are deadly dangerous and that the cyclist must stay far out of the way of cars.” The second way I feel experience can create a safety hazard is that we spend so much effort overcoming the inferiority superstition that it’s easy to go too far and start to feel superior to traffic: that drivers should defer to cyclists, or that bicycles can do whatever they want on the road. I think we all understand how cycling superiority creates political enemies. Just look at what’s going on with Woodside and Portola Valley, or to mountain biking in general. And it probably makes sense that cycling superiority can initiate road rage. But I suggest that cycling with an attitude of superiority can also directly cause dangerous situations. If you ride like you deserve some special right-of-way because of your status as a cyclist, or if you use your mobility advantage in a way that falls outside the basic principles of traffic flow, you have to also figure out how those principles can be bent without breaking. If you can’t do that in the time it takes for a situation to develop, you have increased your risk. And what’s more, other vehicle operators, be they car drivers, pedestrians, or other cyclists, also have habits developed from their experience. We can all tell a new or otherwise unconfident driver on the road almost immediately—those who can’t fall back on habits and have to try to think and do it all in real time. When you bicycle with an attitude of either inferiority or superiority, you have to hope that all other people in the flow of traffic can adapt outside of their basic understanding based on their experiences. And that’s the good, experienced drivers I’m talking about! If anyone else fails to adapt to the situation you create, you are at increased risk. (And if they do successfully adapt, you may still have initiated road rage or created a political enemy.) The answer is to try your best to fit into traffic. To understand at a basic level how traffic works, to learn the basic principles other vehicle operators may not even consciously know they are using, and to use them to your (and actually, everybody’s) advantage. I can talk more in the upcoming months about what these principles are, and some on how they are implemented; but if you don’t fully buy in to this thought, there’s no chance it will change your habits. Hey, I guess I can reduce this thought to a few words:
Maybe it sounds like tip, but it’s not. Take care, Eric |