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The commuting mindset is the most conservative, risk averse, and safe of the mindsets I use to approach riding. There's a couple of other ones (spirited street, track, offroad, and supermoto all come to mind), but this one is the broadest and the most useful and accessible to other riders, so I'm starting here. But before we get into the details, I think it's important to discuss some of the foundational components of safe riding. The baseline for looking at hazards in MSF that stuck with me was "Search, Evaluate, Execute" (SEE) as the approach to how you look at common situations to identify and react to hazards. There's also the concept of maintaining a "space cushion" that showed up in the CA drivers handbook. These things are both good foundational skills - look for upcoming hazards, decide on a plan of action, and then perform that plan of action, and make sure you have space for emergency maneuvers. These techniques are designed to give you time to identify an incoming situation, and rely on your vision and evaluation skills of the current state of things to decide on a plan of action. This covers the foundational mental component of safe riding - identify hazards as they are presented to you, and avoid them. Most riders will start to evolve on this organically, where they look at things that have the potential to be hazards and react to them preemptively. If you haven't started doing this yet, it's a great starting point for safe riding (or driving, or bicycling). It's also worth noting that any emotional reaction from someone else doing something is likely an outcome of not adequately predicting and internalizing that thing. I don't get angry when people merge into me anymore because I've already accepted that possibility and done my best to counter it actually impacting me in any way. In general, if you find yourself having strong emotional reactions to other drivers on the road, it's a good time to reflect on why you're actually reacting to that thing - is it because you failed to adequately predict the behavior? There's also the component of using the controls to avoid road hazards or misbehaving cars. Many people spend a lot of time (as they should!) honing their skillsets for those reaction moments, be it hard application of the brakes, judicious use of the throttle, or a quick swerve to get around an obstacle. People also seek out things like dirt riding, trials, supermoto, etc, to build skillsets when the bike starts to move past the limits of traction so they can handle those situations more confidently. All of these things are very good ideas, and I have spent significant amounts of working on those skills. However, for my daily commute, I consider needing any of these skills to be a failure in approaching the commuting environment appropriately. As an analogy, I wear full gear nearly always on my commute, but I haven't needed it in the last few years to protect me from a crash, and I consider having to use my riding skills during my commute similar to having to use my gear in a crash - any significant usage of the performance of my motorcycle is exposing me to risk of screwing it up, losing traction, and crashing. As the old saw goes: Superior riders use superior judgment to avoid situations that require superior skill. When I first started thinking like this, I considered any time I had to use my "track skills" on the street to be a situation I needed to reflect on and evaluate. Now, I consider any time that someone else forces me to use the brake, throttle, or change the trajectory of my bike a failure. There are a few unavoidable situations that pop up every couple of months, generally around no look lane changes during lane sharing, but now they generally happen at low enough speeds that even having to execute the swerve after a long, tiring day at work is not a big deal. With all of that foundation laid out, the commute mindset breaks down to a very simple thing: How do I get to work each day using as little of my riding skill as possible? The mental side of the game is wide open - use and stretch those mental muscles! But the needed riding skills to get to work should be no more than gentle countersteering, throttle, and brake application, and the associated shifting. The staples I use to prevent having to do more than that are as follows: Lane position Making sure that the bike is pointed in a direction of clear road as much as possible (either towards the split, towards the shoulder, or towards a blank spot in traffic) Trying to consistently break free of groups of cars and exist in the space between groups of cars on the freeway In the split, moving slow enough that I don't have to perform massive swerves to stop avoid unexpected lane changes I'll lay out a few situations here to hopefully illustrate: If I'm riding in traffic, I will attempt to position myself so that lane changes, sudden applications of the brakes or gas by the cars around me won't cause an accident, even if I do nothing. If I'm getting ready to change lanes, and there is a car two lanes over, I will accelerate or brake slightly so that if that car changes lanes at the same time, we won't end up colliding. If I'm in traffic, and traffic is slowing, I will gently point the bike towards the split as soon as I'm reasonably sure I will be sharing. That way if the car in front of me slams on the brakes, I'm still likely to make it into the split without an aggressive swerve needed to avoid hitting them. If they start to change lanes when I enter the split, I'm already in position to move with them into the next lane over and split the 2/3 lanes instead of the 1/2 lanes. If I'm in the carpool lane and traffic is moving at 50mph, and the next lane over is completely stopped, my reaction is to ride on the fog line, very nearly on the shoulder. This way, if a car pulls out from the stopped traffic into the car pool lane, it requires no movement and no skill from me to avoid the accident in the vast majority of cases. If they are pulling on to the shoulder, I have additional space and time to consider my options and swerve gently on to the shoulder with them or swerve behind their vehicle, depending on the situation. Swerving gently on to the shoulder with the car requires minimal skill to perform as it's only a movement of a few feet to the side, whereas swerving behind them will likely require significant skill to execute and put me on a bad path into stopped traffic. Generally, looking at every situation as "how can I position myself so I need the the minimum amount of effort and skill to navigate this situation" is going to pretty clearly give you the lowest risk option, and you should train yourself to always go for that option as far in advance of the situation actually developing as possible. Don't let your speedy commute ambitions outweigh your talent! The caveat: It's possible to switch mindsets multiple times in a single ride. Maintaining the commute mindset for the majority of my ride helps me establish a reasonably safe baseline, but I definitely will swap to the spirited riding mindset when I get a good run at a clear interchange!
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Oct 22, 2016 06:37
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 21:10 |
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If the cars can't see you behind another car cause you're on the left side, increase following distance. And run your high beam. I ride on the left side of the road in the HOV because the amount of commute miles I stack up every week mean eventually someone's gonna pull out fast in front of me no matter what my lane position is, and I'm not interested in gambling if I'm gonna pull off the swerve at that point. Maybe doesn't meet everyone's risk calculus, but on a long enough timeline someone's gonna pull out in front of you even if you're riding a police bike with the sirens and lights on.
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Nov 18, 2016 06:30
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