| L-plates for Cyclists? |
[08 Jul 2006|06:26pm] |
In a discussion over on Phil's blog regarding the recent suggestion by the Motorcycle Riders Association of Australia that motorcyclists be allowed to share bike lanes, I made the comment that "Bicycle lanes are L plates for road/commuter cyclists".
It struck me, you see, that more experienced cyclists forget what it was like for them starting out. It's very easy to be dismissive of the whole bike lane concept, safe in the knowledge that your cycling skills are adequate to the task of riding with traffic. It's very easy to overlook the fact that these cycling skills upon which you rely were honed over an extended period of time. And yet you can see the proof of this every time you spot a fresh new commuter wobbling timidly down the edge of the road, weaving in and out of parked cars, flinching every time a vehicle roars past.
Over Christmas of 2004, I took the audacious step of buying a bike for the purposes of riding to work. At that point, I hadn't owned one for almost fifteen years. I'd been a fairly frequent rider back in high school: I used to take our German Shepherd for walks alongside my mountain bike, and tool around the back streets of my home suburb after watching the cycling events at the Commonwealth or Olympic games, pretending I was Australia's next great two-wheeled hope. And then my brother borrowed my bike to ride up to the oval, and while he came home later that afternoon, my bike never did. Alas.
The next time I rode a bike was five years ago, while holidaying in Tasmania with friends. We decided to take the Mt Wellington Descent Mountain Bike Tour. My partners in crime were all confident cyclists, and while I hadn't been on a bike in ten years, I thought "yeah, no problem; isn't it just like riding a bike?". But while I was still cautiously circling the car park on the Mt Wellington summit, trying to relearn the feeling of how a bike handles, they took off down the mountainside at what seemed to me like 50 kph, leaving me stranded alone.
I felt I had no choice but to follow, but remember: this is a descent. The first burst of speed I was experiencing on a bike in almost a decade was through sheer downhill momentum, faster than pedalling. I couldn't tell if the gears were working; I couldn't tell if the brakes were working. I was flying downhill, trying to catch sight of my friends, and I was both absolutely terrified and absolutely furious. When the rest of the group finally realised they were missing one member, and stopped to look for me, it was several kilometres down the road. I caught up with them, threw my bike down, threw my helmet at them and screamed at them for abandoning me. How dare they assume that everyone had the same level of bike skills they did, to casually make that screaming descent down a winding road?
While the abandonment issues probably aren't an experience most neophyte cycle commuters will share, the feeling of being out of one's depth is very common. Regaining skills you remember you used to have, and learning new ones you never realised you might need, takes time. The learning curve from those first shaky steps to confidently occupying one's space on the road is a big one.
More experienced cyclists might be quite comfortable taking the lane, filtering between traffic at the lights, spinning up hills; the bike-only space of the bicycle lane isn't so critical when you are capable of making and holding your own space on the road. But if you don't have those skills, you don't have the ability to buy the space you need in order to develop them - something of a Catch-22. The concept of bike lanes and shared lanes, perhaps more so than their reality, are therefore important in giving the cyclist some breathing room.
Space to breathe and space to learn give something you just can't buy: the incentive to keep riding.
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