The Interaction Designer

[ornoth_cycling]

Safe Cycling, Smart Cycling, Confident Cycling, Fundamental Cycling Skills: whatever you call it, educating riders on how to safely share the roads with other users is an important responsibility of advocacy organizations around the world.

I’ve never been through a formal bike safety course, but I’ve done plenty of reading, supplemented by plenty of self-education through tens of thousands of miles in the saddle.

In that time, I’ve gained one recurring insight which I haven’t seen anyone else specifically mention: the value of minimizing the number of interactions you have with motor vehicles.

We all know that out of every hundred drivers you encounter, a certain percentage of drivers are either distracted, impaired, or aggressive enough to constitute a meaningful danger to one’s safety. For sake of argument—and this is only a swag—let’s say that only 5 percent of drivers operate unsafely.

It’s a mathematical fact that our chances of being hit increase linearly with the number of drivers we encounter. At our 5 percent level, if we pass (or are passed by) 100 cars during a ride, we will have around 5 potentially unsafe encounters. But if we pass 400 cars, then we have to survive about 20 risky instances. On any ride, the more cars you pass, the more opportunities you have to be run over, QED.

But the converse is also true: if you only come across 20 cars, then maybe 1 of those drivers will be a danger to you. The fewer interactions you have with drivers, the fewer bad drivers you encounter.

That’s true no matter what the real rate of dangerous drivers is. Whether it’s much lower (1 in 500) or much higher (1 in 3), you’re *always* safer by reducing the number of interactions you have with cars. So that should be a goal for every cyclist.

“That’s nice, Ornoth, but how am I supposed to do that? I don’t control how many cars are on the roads…”

Riders aren’t idiots. Even complete newbies intuitively do a couple things that minimize problematic interactions with cars:

• Avoid major arterial roads and highways with high-volume traffic. Ride on side and back streets that have less traffic.
• Avoid narrow roads with no shoulders. This doesn’t really reduce the number of encounters you have, but it does produce less frustration and anxiety, and gives everyone a greater margin of error.

Beyond the obvious, here are some practical strategies I often use:

• It sometimes makes sense, when you are about to start a narrow segment of road, to pull aside to allow any vehicles following behind you to pass. That way drivers aren’t frustrated and following you closely, looking for (potentially unsafe) opportunities to pass. You’ve defused a potentially dangerous interaction, plus you get the ethical satisfaction (and perhaps we all gain some political benefit) from your having been unexpectedly nice to someone.
• Avoid going up long hills that will slow your pace. The slower you go, the more time you’ll take, and more vehicles will come up behind you wanting to pass (which make the previous points about narrow roads even more important on climbs). All else being equal, if you have a choice between a hilly and a flat route, you’ll have fewer interactions with motor vehicles on the latter.
• When practical, avoid having to make left turns. Turning left requires moving across at least one parallel lane of traffic (the one you’re in, plus any to its left), then possibly crossing one or more perpendicular lanes (the cross-street). This isn’t a problem for right turns, because you’re not crossing lanes of traffic. Another alternative that can be safer is to make a two-stage left.
• Don’t leapfrog traffic! It’s tempting to pass cars when they’re stopped at a traffic light, and buses at a bus stop. But most of the time those vehicles will want to pass you once they’ve started moving again. It’s a lot safer to insert yourself into the line of cars and wait for them to proceed, unless you’re damned sure you can sprint fast enough to stay ahead of the cars you pass!
• Do your best to ride at the same speed as traffic. While this isn’t possible on high-speed roads, it is the optimal way to ride in urban traffic. In my experience, drivers will be less irate at a cyclist who maintains a comparable speed than one poking along at a walking pace.

I want to triple-emphasize that last point, because for my money, it is one of the most beneficial safety rules you can observe as a rider. By riding at the same speed as ambient traffic, you dramatically reduce (perhaps even to zero!) the number of vehicles that attempt to get past you. And as I said above: the fewer interactions you have with drivers, the fewer bad drivers you encounter, and the safer you will be on the road.

You could summarize all that in two golden rules: be considerate of other road users, and try to reduce the number of interactions you have with them. If you ride according to these principles, you will be exposed to fewer bad drivers, endure fewer opportunities for crashes, and reduce the frustration level of the dangerous drivers that you do encounter.