Five days, four rides, and some random thoughts

For the fourth time in five days, I rode to work this morning. I've ridden the Vanguard to work three times this week, the Raleigh once, and driven once. While I'd prefer to not drive, riding four days a week beats heck out of driving four days a week.

I was talking to my mother about my teaching experience of last Sunday, and it occurred to me that I was teaching some folks who had years--decades, even--of cycling experience, yet who did not know some basic tenets of intersection safety that every road user should know. I was surprised a bit to think about how much there is to do if we as bicycle educators are to overcome these hurdles. However, part of it is the dearth of proper driving education in general and part of it is the lack of retraining or periodic testing of knowledge of road use law. There are probably other factors, as well.

Trying to do my part, I've thought about it a bit and have added an item or two to my personal checklist for teaching intersection safety and lane choice criteria.

If I can find a diagram somewhere, or figure out how to create one that I can link here, I'll come back and edit this to include it. I'll attempt to describe my primary beef, though: When turning left onto a one-way street, many folks want to almost go straight until they reach the rightmost lane of the destination street, THEN turn left. The proper way (taught in driver education programs, as well as bike ed classes) is to turn left into the lane corresponding with the lane where you were, i.e. if you were in the right of two left-turn lanes, you would be in the second lane from the left side of the new street. THEN you begin the process of scan/merge, scan/merge, etc. to reach the rightmost lane. This allows for folks who disobey the traffic control device to have room to pass you (un)safely, and gives other road users following you into and through the intersection time to respond to you more safely. It also give YOU time to deal with other road users and their actions more safely, as a general rule. As always, be prepared to do other things as situations dictate.

I'll also use this as another excuse to link to Bicyclesafe.com, Michael Bluejay's site discussing ways to avoid doing a helmet test. I've mentioned before that I agree with almost all of Bluejay's points, although I would have put some of them in different order to imply more stress by primacy. He has some differences of opinion with Effective Cycling "dogma," too, which are fairly interesting. I guess I take EC with a grain of salt, figuring that real-world experience had already shown me that some things trump the mantra of, "Bicyclists fare best when we act and are treated as drivers of vehicles," as I don't seem to respond as vehemently as some who have emailed him. I wonder sometimes if it isn't so much ado over small details, and if the energy would not be better directed toward riding our bikes. Maybe the debating is the entertainment.